Look around at any metro coach, university canteen, or waiting room. The world is not just looking down at their phones; they are plugged into a parallel reality. From Call of Duty to Candy Crush, games have evolved from mere distractions into the primary ways in which we think, connect, and see ourselves. But while we have spent ages debating the economics of this digital gaming empire, we have largely ignored its unique potential to bring positive social change.
With industry projections of over 500 million gamers in India today and an estimated 700 million by 2030, the sheer scale of this industry is staggering. Globally, it is eclipsing the music and film industries combined. But scale without intent can also be damaging. Research finds a positive correlation between addiction to gaming, especially war games, and increased aggression among adolescent males. Women gamers report online harassment and abuse. Many games rely on stereotypical gender representation that reinforces real-world bias. Without a responsible lens, games can replicate inequality rather than challenge it.
We are currently at a crossroads. The recently Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, focuses primarily on regulating real-money games. However, it also offers a constructive pathway for social innovation, including the promotion of games for education and social change. We can continue to let games mirror our societal inequalities or use the Act to do something far more ambitious ― change adverse social norms!
Here is the superpower that games have over every other medium: agency. Films let you just watch, while games force you to participate and act. When a player faces a moral dilemma in a game, they do not just witness a story; they choose a path and live with the consequences, albeit in virtual reality, but a reality nonetheless. This can be key to build genuine empathy and skills.
Evidence in action: Titles like Never Alone or That Dragon, Cancer prove that interactive storytelling can cultivate emotional depth in ways movies never could.
Real-world impact: Consider Go Nisha Go, which equipped adolescent girls with the confidence to navigate complex sexual and reproductive health decisions.
These are not just games; they are training grounds for real-world resilience. Research shows that well-designed games sharpen problem-solving, decision-making, and critical systems thinking. The economic argument is just as loud as the social one. When games model equality and inclusion, they are not just being nice. They are fostering a more equitable workforce. Agency practiced in digital spaces can translate into confidence, participation, and leadership in the real economy.
Development practitioners have long used games as tools to nudge and shift norms and attitudes. The challenge now is bringing that intent to the digital gaming arena.
To the developers: Prioritize inclusive, gender-intentional design that builds sensitivity and empathy.
To the policymakers: Use the National Online Gaming Commission to incentivize social innovation in gaming, moving the discussion away from policing consumption.
To civil society: Shift from being critics to collaborators to developers. Partner with them to make constructive content.
Treating games as tools for social change requires intention, not reinvention. India has the talent, the policy momentum, and a massive, plugged-in audience to lead this transition.
As fast payment systems expand across Africa, they are reshaping transaction flows. Yet, instant payments also raise new questions about governance, interoperability, and financial inclusion. This white paper compares Nigeria’s established NIBSS Instant Payment system with Ethiopia’s newly launched EthioPay-IPS to show how differing design choices affect the reach and resilience of instant payment systems. In it, the authors review core program design, governance and risk management, market integration, and cross-border connectivity, and draw on transaction trends and institutional trajectories to explain why pricing, distribution, use cases, and stakeholder coordination determine how these payment systems scale.
Rwanda’s digital money efforts have reached 85.3% of Rwandans, or 7 million people. The difficult question is whether it works for them, and the case of two Rwandans makes that clear. The first is a salaried civil servant in Kigali who pays her electricity bill, her children’s school fees, and her health insurance entirely through her phone. She never visits a single counter. The second is a young woman who sells vegetables at a weekly market in the Southern Province. She has heard of mobile money and even lives within walking distance of an agent. Yet, she does not own a mobile phone, lacks a regular income, and has never made a digital transaction in her life.
Both women are Rwandan adults. Yet, only one of them is counted among the 85.3% of Rwandan adults who are now digitally financially included, based on the AFR FinScope 2024 Digital Financial Services Thematic Report. This figure places Rwanda among the highest-included countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a remarkable leap from just 46% in 2016. However, behind it lies a more complex story about who digital financial services truly reach and how they do so.
Rwanda’s digital financial inclusion story is one of mobile money. The AFR FinScope 2024 report shows that the vast majority of adults now have access to mobile money services, while banks serve just 1.5% of adults. These mobile money platforms, not bank branches, brought most Rwandans into the financial system. The mobile money services are delivered through basic phones and SIM cards, primarily through providers, such as MTN Rwanda and Airtel Rwanda.
People are drawn to mobile money platforms above all by the need to pay businesses, especially for medical expenses, utilities, and airtime, which top the list. Rwanda’s national digital payment platform is eKash. It enables instant, interoperable transfers across banks and mobile money networks, which makes these everyday transactions seamless.
Government and regulatory action have amplified this momentum. The National Bank of Rwanda’s Payment System Strategy and Law No. 061/2021 mandated interoperability across providers. The Twagiye Kashiresi digital literacy campaign boosted merchant payment volumes, while the COVID-19 period served as an accelerant. Estimates indicate that 9% of Rwandan adults became first-time mobile money users during this period, with an additional 13% who increased their usage.
Yet, access is not the same as use, and use differs from transformation. Rwanda has built a remarkable platform, but the data shows that most people use it primarily for bill payments. The fuller potential of this platform includes digital wage receipts, safe savings, and loan repayment without a branch visit, which remain out of reach for most.
Only 15.4% of adults receive their income digitally. Most of those who do save formally keep their money in a mobile money account, yet informal channels still command a significant share of savings. For many people, especially those with low and unpredictable incomes, savings groups offer a more flexible, accessible, and trusted way to manage money. Village savings and loan associations (VSLAs) are groups that allow small, frequent contributions and quick access to funds when needed, and only 14% of borrowers repay loans digitally.
Rwandans use digital accounts for transactions, but not yet as tools for financial management. This is the access-usage gap, and it matters because the transformative potential of digital finance lies not in the payment itself, but in what the payment can unlock.
The 1.2 million adults who remain entirely excluded have a clear profile. Rural residents comprise 84.7% of this group, and women account for 61.2%. Half of the excluded are young, and 80% have not progressed beyond primary school. Casual workers and street vendors account for nearly half of this group at 44.9%, and most earn irregular incomes with no steady relationship with any financial institution.
The primary barrier is simple and concrete, as 68% of non-mobile money users cite a lack of cell phone ownership as the main reason for not using mobile money. It is not the complexity of service, high fees, or distrust of the system. The network infrastructure around many of these people already exists, with 69.6% of excluded adults living within reach of a reliable Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) signal. The infrastructure is largely in place, but most excluded adults do not own a device.
Beyond devices, attitude plays a role. Many excluded adults prefer to deal with people rather than machines and prefer cash payments. These attitudes are not irrational preferences, as they reflect trust, habit, and the social fabric of informal financial life, but they are also addressable. 65.3% of excluded adults live within 1 km of a mobile money agent, which means the last mile is shorter and more solvable than it seems.
Exclusion also has a gender dimension, as two out of every three excluded adults are women. The gender gap in digital financial inclusion is present across all age groups and widens with age, which reflects deeper structural constraints. Lower phone ownership, less control over household income, and reduced exposure to formal financial services all play a role.
Kenya’s M-Pesa is the most-cited comparator for Rwanda. M-Pesa turned a payment tool into an economic lifeline in Kenya, with more than 34 million subscribers and 300,000 agent outlets. It enabled microloans, salary disbursement, and integration into government services. The lesson is that coverage and ecosystem depth determine how widely people use a platform.
India’s Aadhaar-enabled ecosystem offers a second model for Rwanda. India simplified the account-opening process and enabled direct benefit transfers at scale by linking biometric identity to financial access. Rwanda’s existing national ID infrastructure and eKash platform are natural foundations for a similar approach, particularly for the Umurenge SACCOs and cooperatives that remain only partially connected to the national payment switch.
On the technology frontier, AI credit models can use mobile money transaction history to extend small loans to users without formal credit records. Rwanda’s planned CBDC pilots from 2026 offer an entry point to bring excluded populations into the digital system for the first time through transparent government-to-person payments. These tools shift the system from access to utility.
Rwanda’s digital financial inclusion journey has reached an inflection point. The groundwork is largely in place, with the mobile money built, agent networks expanded, and the near-universal access achieved in urban areas. The country should be proud of this next step that goes beyond technology to reach a point where digital financial services become genuinely useful and trusted. These services should reach the vegetable seller in the Southern Province, the rural woman without a phone, and the young casual worker who has never had a reason to go digital.
Affordable devices, liquid networks of well-trained agents in the most underserved zones, and products designed for irregular incomes rather than salaried employees alone must drive the next step. It means fee transparency, local-language interfaces, and patient community-level work to build digital confidence where cash remains the default.
The AFR FinScope 2024 report provides Rwanda’s policymakers, providers, and development partners with a precise map of where the gaps are and who carries them. Rwanda has solved access, and the next step will not be measured by the number of accounts opened, but by the lives changed.
The Resilience and Survivability Survey II explores this question through a longitudinal study that tracks the same businesses over time to better understand what drives their resilience, recovery, and long-term growth.
The survey builds on the 2023 baseline study to examine the impact of the Mastercard Foundation MSE Recovery Fund on financial access, business continuity, profitability, employment, and enterprise resilience among Uganda’s MSEs. It particularly emphasizes businesses led by women, youth, refugees, and PWDs.
The findings offer vital insights into the realities that businesses continue to face, from access to finance and informality to digital adoption, flexible financing, and business development support. It also highlights the strategies that have been helping enterprises survive and grow.
The study was developed under the Mastercard Foundation MSE Recovery Fund. The fund is implemented by Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Uganda in collaboration with MSC (MicroSave Consulting), Asigma, and gnuGrid.
Part 1 of this series discussed how Bangladesh’s digital payments ecosystem works well at the retail counter but breaks along supply-chain payment routes. Digital money enters shops through QR-based transactions and interoperable transfers, yet it rarely travels further upstream to wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers. It affects the growth of MSMEs in Bangladesh and the way it happens across emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) .
In cash-based supply chains, the confirmation of transactions is instant. Digital payments have not yet matched that certainty. Until they do, businesses will continue to reach for cash, and the supply chain will depend on informal, unrecorded transactions.
Digitizing B2B payments, therefore, changes more than payment methods. It changes how liquidity circulates, how credit is assessed, and how supply chains are managed. If upstream payments remain cash-based, four structural consequences follow.
1. Liquidity remains tied to physical movement rather than digital circulation
Retail distribution operates on daily working-capital cycles. Today, liquidity moves quickly within local cash-based routes, but that speed depends on physical handling, transport, and deposit. This limits how efficiently funds move across actors, locations, and financial institutions.
The risk is that cash is slow. As a result, payment speeds continue to depend on physical proximity rather than on real-time confirmation across the supply chain. Inventory release remains tied to where cash is located, not where digital liquidity could circulate instantly.
2. Supply-chain credit cannot scale without transaction visibility
If B2B payments remain cash-based, millions of businesses stay invisible to lenders. A retailer may purchase goods from the same distributor every week for years. Yet, without digital transaction histories, that relationship remains outside formal credit systems. Without verified purchase records, lenders cannot reliably assess how much a business earns, their repayment discipline, or inventory cycles.
As a result, lenders continue to exclude retailers and distributors from structured working-capital financing despite their active participation in the retail economy. Digital supply chain payments would make these commercial relationships visible and help develop inventory-linked lending and distributor-anchored credit models.
3. Inventory intelligence remains fragmented across supply chains
Cash-based transactions make reconciliation slow. Distributors and sales representatives report incidents inconsistently across networks. Manufacturers lack visibility into distributor-level offtake. Distributors manage fragmented ledgers across routes and outlets, while policymakers lack reliable insights into transaction flows across retail networks.
Without digital settlement trails, supply chains cannot generate the transaction intelligence required to forecast demand, manage inventory efficiently, or support evidence-based policy decisions to formalize the retail sector.
4. Cash-handling risk remains embedded in distribution operations
Across distribution routes, sales representatives and distributors handle large volumes of cash daily. Each step, including collection, transport, counting, deposit, and reconciliation, introduces operational risks and cost.
The lack of better digital payment solutions for upstream supply chains ultimately constrains the growth of MSMEs in Bangladesh. When digital money cannot flow from retailers to distributors to manufacturers, working capital stays trapped, formal credit remains out of reach, and millions of small businesses operate below their potential. Digital transformation must extend beyond the shop counter to drive inclusive economic growth.
The persistence of cash in upstream retail payments is not primarily a question of merchant awareness or consumer adoption. Bangladesh already has widespread QR infrastructure, strong mobile financial services usage, and expanding interoperability across providers.
Regulators and payment providers designed the existing pathways for person-to-business transactions, not for distributor-led inventory payment settlement across layered supply chains. Distribution networks depend on route-level confirmation, thin-margin settlement economics, and same-day liquidity cycles. Without payment systems that reflect these operational realities, digital tools cannot replace cash for inventory purchases.
Experience from other markets show that upstream digitization succeeds only when payment architecture is redesigned around supply-chain economics rather than consumer payment behavior. Bangladesh alone does not face breaks in supply chains. Across emerging markets, consumer payments digitized quickly while B2B flows remained cash-dependent due to liquidity timing, reconciliation gaps, misaligned merchant discount rate (MDR) structures, and sales-representative-driven workflows.
These markets overcame these constraints through ordering, delivery, and settlement systems rather than treating payments as a separate layer.
So, what will it take to digitize B2B payments in Bangladesh? Global experience shows that B2B digitization succeeds only when payment architecture reflects the realities of supply chains. For Bangladesh, five design principles emerge clearly.
Instant settlement as the foundation, not a feature: Distributor liquidity cycles operate daily. If settlement is delayed or uncertain, inventory release slows immediately. B2B payments require guaranteed real-time settlement aligned with inventory movement rather than end-of-day confirmation cycles.
MDR and pricing rules aligned with distributor margins: Consumer-grade MDR levels do not match wholesale distribution economics. As seen in Brazil’s Pix model, zero or near-zero MDR enabled B2B payments to scale rapidly across thin-margin supply chains. Pricing frameworks for B2B transactions must reflect the operating margins of distributors, which MSC’s research shows are often only 1–2%. This can be achieved through tiered pricing structures, capped transaction fees, or near-zero cost transfers for high-value supply chain payments.
Reconciliation must be embedded within distribution workflows: B2B payments function reliably only when ordering, delivery, and settlement confirmation are synchronized. Payment confirmation must be visible to retailers, sales representatives, distributors, and manufacturers simultaneously. Dispute-resolution mechanisms must link directly to digital invoices and the delivery of receipts.
Digital funds must remain usable across supply-chain tiers, not trapped within merchant collection channels: When a retailer pays a distributor digitally, the distributor must be able to reuse those same funds immediately for upstream purchases from manufacturers or suppliers. Today, most digital collection tools do not support seamless onward circulation across supply-chain relationships. Without this ability to reuse incoming digital liquidity across tiers, payment systems cannot support continuous digital settlement along distribution routes.
Incentives must support upstream liquidity circulation: Supply chains depend on the predictable availability of liquidity. If distributors cannot reuse incoming digital funds immediately for upstream purchases, they revert to cash. Settlement certainty must be combined with liquidity-assurance mechanisms that support continuous digital circulation across supply-chain tiers.
Bangladesh has successfully digitized how consumers pay in shops, but not the movement that keeps supply chains running. Upstream flows remain cash-driven because existing payment pathways were never designed for high-value, time-sensitive distribution networks. The next step, therefore, is to enable digital liquidity to move across the supply chain with the same certainty as cash. Bangladesh does not need more digital touchpoints. It needs digital money that can move with the same reliability as the goods it pays for.
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