How Useful Can Cryptocurrencies Be To Africa?

Hello! people, this is @akomoajong. It is a great Sunday afternoon here in Cameroon, hope you are equally having a great day wherever you might be reading this post. As always, I have come up with yet another post that is related to Cryptocurrency and Blockchain adoption across Africa. You might want to visit my blog and check out more

Source: pixabay.com

The coming of Cryptocurrencies has brought a new believe and prospect in most Africans especially the youthful population. The number of African youths getting involved with Cryptocurrencies (as well as those joining steemit) is increasing on daily basis . Now, I want to make clear some points on how Crytpocurrencies can change Africa and maybe the world at large.

Reduction Of Transaction Costs.

Africans rely on banks and Mobile Money in some countries for their financial transactions. The coming of mobile money has gone a long to reduce transaction costs in countries in which the service is present but this is not enough. Africans abroad generally rely on intermediary bank services such as Western Union, Money Gram etc to send money to their friends and families in Africa. These platforms impose high transaction fees. According to information released by the World Bank in 2017, sub-sahara Africa recorded the highest transaction fee rate in the world which was $20 for every $200 average sent, that is the average transaction fee was 10% of the amount to be sent. Anyone will agree that this is too much!

Source

The usage of Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and even Steem greatly eliminates these high transaction costs and also make life very easy for Africans.

Financial Inclusion.

World Bank’s statistics shows that less than 10% of the youthful populations of most African countries own a bank account. These countries include Cameroon, Niger, Burundi etc. This can be blamed on the high cost in creating and maintaining a bank account in these countries. Also, just about 20% of those who own a Bank account in these countries have carried out more than three (3) transactions with their bank accounts as most of them prefer to send and receive money directly without using their accounts. I personally do have a bank account and a visa card but I have never carried out a transaction with them yet I do carry out financial transactions almost every week. This is probably because of the underbanking systems in our countries.

Cryptocurrencies will help eliminate these aspects as there are no fees in creating and maintaining a Cryptocurrency wallet.

Accountability And Reduction Of Corruption.

Corruption and Poverty are common nouns in most African countries. There is a major problem of mismanagement of public funds and lack of accountability with respect to how public funds are being used or managed and this has led some African countries in to devastating economic crisis.

Source: pixabay.com

With the usage of Cryptocurrencies which entails blockchain technology and especially those based on smart contracts, every African citizen and even non-citizens will be able to monitor, trace or track all financial transactions carried out with public funds. This can be the best way to provide the accountability that citizens need. For sure, this will be tough for corrupt government officials to accept lol.

One can also think of other factors like security and transaction speed but I think the above explained three factors are the most important.

As always, I do upvote meaning comments and welcome discussions. You can always hook up with me on steemit.chat and on Discord, my usernames remain @akomoajong

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Cheers!, @akomoajong