It is market day in Awae Village, a bustling locality some 55 kilometres southeast of the Cameroonian capital Yaounde.
Adrienne, a petty trader in agricultural products has just sold several bags of corn and tubers including cocoyam, yam and cassava. Instead of counting and hiding a wad of cash in her clothing as before, she reaches for her basic phone, known locally as ‘choronko’. It is her new wallet, and her customers make payments directly into it.
She says mobile money services allow her to receive payments from customers. Some do not have to travel from Yaounde to Awae as she often just receives orders and mobile money payments from them, then sends their goods through public transport to Yaounde.
Adrienne, who prefers to be identified only by one name, says that before she started using MTN Mobile Money (MTN MoMo) for business about three years ago, she collected cash payments from customers and kept the cash at home, which was risky and sometimes slowed business when she needed emergency funds.
“Now, I can withdraw anywhere I find myself, and at any time I need to pay for goods to my suppliers,” she explains.
Like Adrienne, rural women engaged in petty trading in Cameroon, commonly known as ‘buyam-sellams’, are adopting mobile money services like MTN MoMo and Orange Money (OM) for business, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). However, the transition remains slow and uneven compared to urban areas.
In Yaounde, 36-year-old Brendaline Manli, who buys and resells farm produce including huckleberry, widely known as ‘njama njama’, does not need to travel over 300 kilometres to Babanki in the North West Region, where the vegetable is cultivated.
“With the phone, I just call my suppliers and place my orders, then I send the money via MTN MoMo and my goods are sent via the agency [public transport company],” she says. “It makes transactions easier…I also accept MoMo payments from my customers.”
Unlike Brendaline, Victorine, another petty trader in Yaounde, says that while she accepts mobile money payments for all her goods, not all her suppliers do.
She told NewsWatch that for crops such as corn, beans and irish potatoes, which she buys from distant towns in the North West Region, she simply pays her suppliers via mobile money. However, when she travels to local markets in remote communities around Bafia, a town about 130 kilometres northwest of Yaounde, to buy plantains, cocoyams and cassava, some suppliers are reluctant to accept mobile money.
“They complain that agents are not readily available and that withdrawal charges are very high. For example, they say they have to pay an additional FCFA 200 to withdraw FCFA 10,000. So, they prefer cash payments to mobile money,” Victorine explained.
The government says financial inclusion is an important lever in its fight against poverty, with a special focus on rural populations, women, youth, and socially vulnerable groups (SVGs). Yaounde’s commitment to financial inclusion is contained in a five-year plan dubbed the National Strategy Document for Inclusive Finance 2023-2027, piloted by the Ministry of Finance.
Under this five-year strategy, the government is keen on boosting financial inclusion for 65% of the country’s adult population.
During its official launch in Yaounde, the Minister of Finance Louis Paul Motaze admitted that financial inclusion is a fundamental question which governments and other political institutions the world over must grapple with at varied points in time.
He also revealed that in Africa, less than 20% of households still lack access to formal financial services. This segment of the population does not use services offered by insurance companies, commercial banks, microfinance institutions and so on.
Insisting that such low level of financial inclusion is not only a hindrance to socio-economic development, the minister said it works to frustrate the effort the government is making in the fight to reduce poverty and income inequality.
Adoption amid policy gaps
Adrienne, Brendaline and Victorine are among 55.1% of Cameroonian adults who had a mobile money account in 2024, according to the World Bank’s 2025 Global Findex. It says overall account ownership among Cameroonian adults was 60.9%, with only 21% holding an account at a bank or similar institution.
This, according to experts, suggests mobile money is not merely an alternative to banking in Cameroon, but a major route into formal financial services.
Esame Mondoa, Founder and Director of ZITO Financial Group, which works to advance financial inclusion, interoperability, digital payments, and banking across the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), agrees that mobile money has transformed access for rural women traders in Cameroon.
“It has democratized access to basic financial services by bringing last-mile finance to communities that have traditionally been underserved. Today, opening an account, receiving payments, and participating in the digital economy is far easier than before. That’s a major milestone, because access is the foundation of inclusion,” Mondoa says.
Cameroon demonstrated that digital payments can reach vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 period, with beneficiaries of government emergency support preferring mobile money to cash.
According to the World Bank, a substantial majority (78 %) of the targeted 80,000 vulnerable informal sector workers – mostly women in urban areas – expressed a preference for payments directly into their mobile money accounts rather than in cash or through other methods.
While mobile money offers financial access to women traders like Adrienne, Brendaline and Victorine, Mondoa argues that access alone is not enough.
“The biggest barrier is that the ecosystem remains heavily cash-dependent. For many rural women, mobile money is mainly a channel for receiving or sending funds before immediately converting them back into cash. So much of their economic activity remains outside the formal financial system, making it difficult to build a verifiable financial history that institutions can use to understand their needs and develop the right products/services,” he explains.
Dr. Egbe-Njie Fride, an analyst at the Cameroon Economic Policy Institute (CEPI), an independent think tank of the Henri Kouam Foundation, believes Cameroon’s ongoing financial inclusion strategies set ambitious targets, but that persistent implementation gaps limit their immediate effectiveness in guaranteeing access to formal financial services for vulnerable youth and rural women.
The Yaounde-based analyst told NewsWatch that in order to reach underserved rural populations, the strategies rely on local microfinance institutions that suffer from poor governance, weak asset quality and split subregional regulatory supervision.
“Simultaneously, infrastructural deficits, high digital transaction charges and uncoordinated regulatory rollouts force a recourse to informal “tontines”, with high costs, small credit size and unregulated risks. Consequently, rural women traders cannot build credit histories required to secure commercial loans and scale market activities or enter lucrative trade markets,” Fride argued.
The analyst argues that to achieve economic empowerment, policy reforms should allow lenders to leverage telecom data and mobile money transaction volumes to build alternative credit scoring models that allow independent rural women to bypass traditional collateral requirements and access formal capital.
“Targeted tax exemptions should be implemented for certified female rural cooperatives and small-scale traders using digital wallets,” she added.
For Adrienne, Brendaline and Victorine, however, mobile money has already changed the way they buy, sell and receive payments, making transactions faster, reducing the risks associated with carrying cash and allowing them to reach customers and suppliers beyond their immediate communities.
But if there is one wish Brendaline has to further grow her business, it is for mobile money operators to reduce transaction charges. “Operators should reduce the charges because I include them when sending money to my supplier, and when you add them up, they become huge,” she says.
