Africa’s $3.2 Billion Fintech Opportunity Is Sitting Inside a Refugee Camp
In 2019, a lender called MyBucks did something no bank had ever tried. It opened a full branch inside a refugee camp in Malawi. Skeptics expected a write-off. Instead, the branch was profitable within its first year.
That one detail says more about African finance than most industry reports ever do. It proves that the people banks assume can’t pay, won’t repay, and aren’t worth the paperwork are, in fact, some of the most reliable customers on the continent.
The Market Everyone Is Ignoring
A new report from Amahoro Coalition puts hard numbers behind that surprise. More than 850 commercial banks and over 1,200 fintechs are fighting for the same mainstream African customers. Meanwhile, fewer than 10 formal financial institutions have built any product for the continent’s 27 million displaced people.
That gap is worth $3.2 billion in formal financial services alone, according to the report, which draws on survey data from more than 10,000 households across Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, Niger, Mali, and Cameroon.
The numbers behind that opportunity are hard to argue with. More than half of Africa’s displaced population is already economically active. Displaced-led businesses fail at a third of the rate of host-community businesses. Refugee-focused lenders report loan repayment rates above 95 percent. This is Africa’s $3.2 billion fintech opportunity, and it has almost no competition sitting in it.
Displacement zones are usually framed as a humanitarian problem. Tito Mbathi, Strategy Custodian for Partnerships at Amahoro Coalition, wants that framing retired. “We want to talk about investment potential and how the private sector can come together to address displacement while creating economic value,” he said.
The Real-World Impact
Behind every one of those statistics is someone who wakes up each day and runs a business with no bank account backing them up. A trader in a Nigerian displacement camp who carries generations of farming knowledge but can’t access a loan. A tailor in a Kenyan settlement whose mobile money wallet is the only financial tool she has ever owned.
In eastern DRC, a juice company called Kivu Society Corporation, founded by Amahoro Fellow Amos Kwizera, was built inside an active conflict zone. It now has a distribution partnership with Coca-Cola. Fifty-six percent of farmland in displacement-affected areas across Africa sits fallow, not because it’s unusable, but because the people who could farm it have no formal access to land, credit, or supply chains.
This isn’t charity math. It’s a market that mobile money already proved works, waiting for banks and fintechs to catch up.
Nigeria’s Bigger Banking Reckoning
The same exclusion logic is now playing out at the top of Nigeria’s banking industry, just with a different vocabulary. Speaking to CNBC Africa at the Future of Banking Nigeria event, Folasade Olusanya, Co-Managing Partner at Jackson, Etti & Edu, put it bluntly: “I think certainly banking as we have known it previously, I think we should sort of forget it.”
Her reasoning centres on one number: Nigeria’s credit-to-GDP ratio sits at roughly 30 percent, low compared with several other African markets. For Olusanya, closing that gap depends on banks building for the people they have historically ignored, women, children, people with disabilities, and communities in northern Nigeria.
That’s the same population banks in displacement zones have been overlooking, just described in policy language instead of humanitarian language.
Banks vs Fintechs Is the Wrong Fight
Olusanya also flagged something banks can’t out-argue: fintechs are already processing enormous transaction volumes and collecting the customer data to match. At least one fintech has already secured a full banking licence in Nigeria. “The next couple of years are going to be interesting,” she said.
Her conclusion echoes exactly what Amahoro Coalition’s report is arguing from the other end of the continent: the winners won’t be banks or fintechs competing to serve the same 20 percent of customers. They’ll be whoever moves first into the 80 percent everyone else has been skipping.
The Race to Lead Starts Now
MyBucks proved a refugee camp branch can turn a profit in a year. Kivu Society proved a conflict-zone factory can land a Coca-Cola contract. Refugee-focused lenders are posting repayment rates most consumer banks would envy. None of that is speculation anymore, it’s a track record.
The institutions still waiting for displaced and underserved communities to become “safe” markets aren’t being cautious. They’re handing a $3.2 billion opportunity to whoever gets there first.
So here’s the real question for Africa’s banks and fintechs: if a bank branch inside a refugee camp can turn a profit in twelve months, what exactly is everyone else waiting for?
