ABA Editorial Board · Sep 9, 2026 · 9 min read
Less than 0.5 percent of Nigerians had used the eNaira by late 2023. By 2025, approximately 13 million wallets had been issued and 98.5 percent had never been used, according to IMF research. The eNaira in circulation represented approximately 0.37 percent of total Nigerian currency, unchanged between early 2024 and early 2025. Ghana is now weighing whether to proceed with a full retail eCedi launch. We argue here that the eNaira's failure was not an execution problem. It was a product problem. Ghana should take the warning seriously.
When Nigeria launched the eNaira on 25 October 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria framed it as a financial inclusion breakthrough, a remittance enabler, and a cross-border payment upgrade. Four and a half years later, the eNaira is technically operational and commercially irrelevant. Fewer than one percent of Nigerians had actively used the eNaira by late 2023. By early 2025, the IMF had found that 98.5 percent of issued eNaira wallets had never been used. The eNaira in circulation represented approximately 0.37 percent of total Nigerian currency, roughly unchanged from a year earlier. The Central Bank of Nigeria's subsequent efforts to boost adoption, including a controversial 2022 to 2023 demonetization program that produced cash shortages and public protests, did not meaningfully change the underlying picture.
Ghana is now in a position where it must decide whether to proceed with a full retail eCedi launch, delay it further, or quietly shelve the project. We argue here that the eNaira's failure was not primarily a Nigerian execution problem. It was a product problem, and the product problem applies to retail CBDCs generally. Ghana should not repeat the mistakes.
Senior figures in the Nigerian payments sector have been willing to say, in private, what most public commentary has been unwilling to say: the eNaira was a solution in search of a problem. By the time it launched in October 2021, Nigerian consumers already had access to OPay, PalmPay, Paga, traditional bank apps, mobile money, and a dense network of payment service providers. The things the eNaira was supposed to enable (financial inclusion, faster payments, easier remittances) were already being enabled by private infrastructure that was better designed, more trusted, and growing faster than any CBDC could realistically match.
This was obvious at launch to anyone who spent time with actual Nigerian consumers. It was only obscured in the official narrative because the Central Bank of Nigeria had committed publicly and institutionally to the project and had strong political incentives to describe it as a success regardless of the evidence. When then-Governor Olayemi Cardoso declared in July 2024 that the eNaira was a success because 12 percent of Nigerians had opened wallets, the statement was technically true and strategically meaningless. Opening a wallet is not the same as using it. The IMF research showing 98.5 percent of wallets unused told the real story.
Practitioners in the broader African mobile money sector have been clear-eyed about this for years. A CBDC that competes with existing private digital payment infrastructure on consumer-facing product quality will almost always lose that competition, because the private operators have stronger product incentives, faster iteration cycles, and closer customer relationships. The only way for a retail CBDC to win would be if the government used coercive policy to force adoption, which is essentially what the eNaira demonetization episode attempted, and which produced a public backlash that set the project back further.
Advocates for the eCedi argue that Ghana has learned from the eNaira's mistakes. They point to the Bank of Ghana's careful pilot in Sefwi Asafo, the emphasis on offline functionality via contactless smartcards, the partnership with Giesecke+Devrient, and the design goal of integration with existing mobile money operators like MTN Mobile Money, Vodafone Cash (now Telecel Cash), and Zeepay. These are genuine improvements over the eNaira's rushed launch.
They do not, however, address the underlying problem. The eCedi will still be a retail central bank digital currency in a country where private mobile money already works well and is trusted. Ghanaian consumers who want to move money digitally have MTN Mobile Money, which is one of the best-functioning mobile money platforms in Africa. Ghanaian consumers who want to hold value in a stable form have access to bank deposits and, increasingly, to private stablecoin infrastructure for dollar-denominated use cases. The product gap that an eCedi would fill is genuinely narrow.
Bank of Ghana officials working on the eCedi project have emphasized financial inclusion as the core rationale, but the financial inclusion gap in Ghana is driven by factors the eCedi does not address: income volatility, distance from urban centers, lack of formal identification, and limited agent network penetration in some rural areas. A new digital currency issued by the central bank does not, by itself, solve any of these problems. The inclusion framing does rhetorical work at policy level without corresponding operational work at product level.
There is a version of CBDC that is worth doing, and we want to be clear about it before we finish. South Africa's Project Khokha and Project Khokha 2 have focused on wholesale CBDC applications for interbank settlement and, through Project Dunbar, for cross-border settlement between central banks. These are narrow, technically demanding, institutionally valuable applications. They do not compete with consumer payment infrastructure. They augment the plumbing between central banks and commercial banks in ways that can genuinely improve settlement efficiency.
Similarly, the July 2025 announcement by Bank Al-Maghrib Governor Abdellatif Jouahri of a Morocco-Egypt cross-border CBDC experiment with World Bank support is a sensible framing. Cross-border settlement between two African central banks is a real problem with a clear commercial case. A CBDC aimed specifically at that use case, rather than at retail consumer adoption, has a plausible path to operational success.
If Ghana wants to continue investing in CBDC infrastructure, our view is that it should follow the South African and Moroccan examples rather than the Nigerian one. Redirect the eCedi project toward wholesale settlement and cross-border use cases where the central bank actually has a comparative advantage, and leave the retail consumer payment layer to MTN Mobile Money, Zeepay, the commercial banks, and whatever new entrants emerge. This is a more modest framing than the original eCedi pitch. It is also a framing that has some chance of producing real commercial value rather than another cautionary tale.
Our broader concern is that the eNaira's failure has not been fully absorbed by African central banks and development institutions that are still enthusiastic about retail CBDCs. The political attractions of launching a national digital currency are significant: technological modernity, policy ambition, international conference speaking opportunities, and the sense of being on the frontier of monetary innovation. The commercial reality of actually getting citizens to use the thing is much less attractive, and it is where most of these projects will founder.
African regulators would be better served by strengthening the regulatory frameworks around private digital currencies, mobile money interoperability, and cross-border payment infrastructure than by launching retail CBDCs. These are less glamorous tools but more effective ones. The eNaira's four years of data are a gift. They tell us what does not work. The honest response is to stop doing the thing that does not work. Ghana has the chance to set that example.