ABA Editorial Board · Jan 16, 2026 · 10 min read
Nigeria's eNaira has 98.5 percent unused wallets according to IMF research. After four and a half years, total eNaira in circulation sits at approximately 0.37 percent of Nigerian currency. This was not a failure of execution. It was a failure of product design. Ghana's eCedi project is about to repeat the same mistakes unless the Bank of Ghana changes course.
Nigeria's eNaira was launched on 25 October 2021 with considerable fanfare. It was the first African central bank digital currency. It was marketed as a financial inclusion breakthrough. The Central Bank of Nigeria committed considerable political capital to making it succeed, including, in early 2023, forcing demonetization to push Nigerians toward digital payment rails. Four and a half years later, the eNaira has approximately 13 million issued wallets of which 98.5 percent have never been used according to International Monetary Fund research. Total eNaira in circulation sits at approximately 0.37 percent of Nigerian currency. The product has not succeeded by any meaningful definition of the word, and the CBN's current communication strategy of highlighting wallet counts rather than active usage is a tacit admission that the core adoption goal has not been reached. Ghana's Bank of Ghana is now weighing whether to push forward with a full retail launch of the eCedi. Our view, shared by many practitioners we have talked to across both West African fintech ecosystems, is that Ghana should pause, reconsider, and in most likely scenarios, abandon the retail launch entirely. The eNaira's failure was not bad luck. It was predictable, and Ghana is about to repeat the prediction unless it changes course.
The eNaira was pitched as a financial inclusion tool. The theory was that Nigerians who did not have bank accounts would adopt the central bank's digital currency because it was free, official, and accessible through a mobile app. This theory rested on three assumptions that were wrong on the day the product launched and remain wrong now. The first assumption was that unbanked Nigerians had no existing way to hold and transfer digital money. In fact, by 2021, mobile money services from Paga, OPay, PalmPay, and MTN MoMo were already serving tens of millions of Nigerians, and these services were more usable, more trusted, and better-distributed than the eNaira. The second assumption was that "official central bank backing" was a competitive advantage with ordinary consumers. Practitioners in Lagos have been consistent for years: most Nigerians do not want closer financial ties to the central government. They want distance from it. The third assumption was that technology adoption in Nigeria follows a top-down model where citizens embrace products because the government promotes them. Nigerian technology adoption has always followed a bottom-up model where products win on utility and trust. The eNaira had neither.
The eCedi project was announced in 2021 and has been in pilot form in Sefwi Asafo, a remote village in Ghana's Eastern Region, since September 2021. The Bank of Ghana has worked with Giesecke+Devrient to build an offline-capable CBDC based on distributed ledger technology. These are technical decisions that reflect genuine thought. The design document explicitly prioritizes offline transaction capability, which is more than the eNaira offered at launch. Kwame Oppong, head of fintech and innovation at the Bank of Ghana, has publicly argued that offline functionality is the thing that makes the eCedi genuinely useful for remote populations.
We respect the technical seriousness of the project. We also think it is aimed at the wrong target. Senior practitioners in Accra have been consistent in a view we agree with: the problem the eCedi is trying to solve, financial inclusion for underserved Ghanaians, is already being solved by MTN Mobile Money, Vodafone Cash (now Telecel Cash), and Zeepay. These services cover the vast majority of the Ghanaian population who need digital money, they run on reliable rails, and they have the deep agent networks the eCedi would need to replicate from scratch. A retail eCedi launch would not add inclusion to Ghanaians who already have it. It would compete with existing mobile money operators for customers who are already served.
Globally, the retail CBDC story is in retreat. The Bahamas' Sand Dollar, the world's first retail CBDC, has had similarly underwhelming adoption. China's e-CNY, despite massive state support and a much larger population to draw from, has seen most of its transaction volume coming from state subsidies and government-mandated use cases rather than organic consumer demand. Several European central banks have publicly backed away from retail CBDC launch timelines in favor of cross-border wholesale settlement experiments. The South African Reserve Bank has explicitly focused on wholesale CBDC through Project Khokha and Project Dunbar rather than retail, and the quality of SARB's work has made this look like the sophisticated choice. Bank Al-Maghrib in Morocco and the Central Bank of Egypt announced in July 2025 that their joint CBDC experiment would focus on cross-border settlement. Every serious central bank that has publicly revised its CBDC strategy in the last two years has moved away from retail and toward wholesale. Ghana is one of the few holdouts.
Pause the retail launch. Formally reframe the eCedi as a wholesale CBDC project with cross-border functionality as the primary use case, building on the cross-border tests already conducted with Singapore's Monetary Authority. Focus the Giesecke+Devrient partnership on interbank settlement efficiency, SADC corridor integration, and wholesale liquidity management. Drop the financial inclusion rhetoric, which has done significant damage to the credibility of the project with practitioners who can see that MTN MoMo already serves the target population better than an eCedi ever could. If the Bank of Ghana follows this path, the eCedi could become a quietly successful piece of financial infrastructure. If it insists on a full retail launch, the eCedi will become Ghana's version of the eNaira: technically ambitious, politically celebrated at launch, and commercially irrelevant within two years. The choice is the Bank of Ghana's to make. We hope it makes the right one.