🇪🇹 Payments in Ethiopia

Ethiopia is the last great closed market in Africa, and it is opening. For decades a fixed exchange rate, mandatory FX surrender and a ban on foreign banks made cross-border commerce structurally hard. That changed in 2024: the National Bank of Ethiopia floated the birr, scrapped surrender requirements and committed not to block qualifying repatriation, unlocking an IMF program — and parliament opened the banking sector to foreign entrants for the first time in roughly fifty years. A market of more than 130 million people is becoming reachable.

Domestically, payment is mobile-money-led. Telebirr (Ethio Telecom) passed 50 million users within a few years of launch; M-Pesa, run by Safaricom Ethiopia as the first foreign telecom licensee, is scaling on a deliberately telco-agnostic model; and CBE Birr, from the dominant Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, anchors the bank side, with EthSwitch providing the national instant-payment backbone. Cards barely register — issuance is in the low millions against that population, and a domestic credit card only appeared in 2024.

So the honest picture for a global merchant: international card acquiring is live today, but the mass market pays by wallet, and the hard parts — birr settlement and FX repatriation, EthSwitch connectivity, and NBE licensing — cannot be solved with an API call from abroad. They require central-bank-licensed local partners on the ground. That is exactly the position we are building from, so you can be early in a market most processors still cannot touch.