The Mojaloop: Expanding financial inclusion

Rwanda’s digital payment breakthrough

In the video above, Sharon Umunyana, a technical project manager for the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA), talks about how and why she and her team have been working on one of the first national deployments of Mojaloop.

Established in 2017 to champion Rwanda’s digital transformation and lead the construction of the country’s DPI, RISA was looking for a digital merchant payment system that could reach the many unbanked populations outside Kigali, the capital city, and also be owned and operated nationally, thus decreasing Rwanda’s reliance on foreign payment vendors. Mojaloop met both of those key requirements with an off-the-shelf package that let Umunyana and her team skip over much of the complex work that would be needed to build such a system from scratch.

Without Mojaloop, Umunyana says, it would have taken them two years or more just to build a payment switch—a software solution that helps move payment transactions between different banks and digital payment providers. The creators of Mojaloop “thought about current scenarios in the world and even predicted some of the functionalities that would be needed in the future and then provided that for any country, anyone who wants to implement their own switch,” she says. “You can use it as is, or you can choose to customize it to your liking. It’s been easy to work with because they’ve already developed everything for us. We’ve just customized it for the local context of users and digital financial service providers.”

“It’s [Mojaloop] been easy to work with because they’ve already developed everything for us. We’ve just customized it for the local context of users and digital financial service providers.”

Umunyana is quick to point out that Mojaloop is easy to customize because of its open-source code, which confers many advantages. “Number one, it’s cost-effective,” she says. “Open-source software is generally free to use, which can significantly reduce the cost compared to proprietary software. Two: It provides enormous flexibility for customization. Since the source code is available, it can be modified to meet specific needs. Three, Mojaloop has a community of support that is continuously enhancing the software, and they can help you manage change and innovation on the platform. Four, transparency: The open nature of the code allows every user to inspect and verify its security. And lastly, I would say it helps to avoid vendor lock-in, and reducing the risk of dependency on vendors is why we’re doing this.”

That said, Umunyana notes that perhaps her biggest challenge is overcoming skepticism of open-source technology due to data privacy concerns—she has to explain to people that Mojaloop “can be customized to not expose any data. In addition, as required by Rwandan law, all data used by Mojaloop is hosted in-country instead of on foreign servers.

Umunyana estimates that the Rwandan deployment of Mojaloop is 85% complete and the system will go live before the end of 2024, several months earlier than anticipated. “With Mojaloop, we’ll be owning our own switch—a national payment switch,” she says. “Everyone will be included, regardless of economic status.”