Africa has the world’s highest rate of female entrepreneurship and a $49 billion gap in what those entrepreneurs can borrow. A programme announced this week tries to close a sliver of it through mobile money rather than banks.
The African Development Bank and AXIAN Group said on 2 September 2026 that they had launched a digital finance programme aimed at 34,000 women-led micro, small and medium-sized businesses. It runs through AXIAN’s mobile financial services platforms, Mixx and MVola.
The programme has 2 parts. The first delivers digital financial products to 34,000 women-led businesses in Madagascar, Tanzania and Senegal. The second provides financial literacy, digital skills and entrepreneurship training to 25,000 women across those 3 countries plus Togo and Comoros.
The mechanism is thin-file lending
The detail that matters sits in one phrase in the announcement: alternative credit assessment. Conventional lending asks for collateral, audited accounts and a borrowing history, which is precisely what an informal trader does not have.
Mobile money changes what a lender can see. A wallet that has processed daily takings for 2 years is a behavioural record, and it belongs to the operator rather than to a credit bureau. That is the asset AXIAN is lending against.
It is the same logic that has pushed African fintechs toward payment rails as a route to credit, from buy-now-pay-later underwriting in Cape Town to the mobile-money checkout that has become standard for buying digital services on the continent.
Two of the 5 countries get training only
The split between the 2 components is worth reading carefully. Products go to 3 countries; training goes to 5. Togo and Comoros therefore receive financial literacy and digital skills without, on the face of the announcement, the lending that the skills are meant to unlock.
That is a defensible sequencing if the platforms are not yet live at scale in those markets, and a hollow one if they never arrive. Training people to borrow from a service they cannot reach is a familiar failure in financial inclusion programmes.
Who is behind it
The financing comes through the African Development Bank’s Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa initiative, known as AFAWA, and the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, We-Fi. The bank has been steadily writing larger cheques into African industrial and digital projects, including a EUR 100 million loan for the continent’s first battery gigafactory.
“The challenge is not entrepreneurship. It is access to finance, to digital tools and to opportunities for growth,” said Erwan Gelebart, chief executive of AXIAN Digibank and Fintech.
Melissa Basque-Roux, who coordinates AFAWA at the African Development Bank, said the partnership would expand access to tailored digital financial services and strengthen financial literacy among women-led businesses.
What the announcement does not say
No figure was given for the capital behind the lending component, nor a timeline for reaching the 34,000 businesses, nor the terms on which credit will be offered. For a programme whose central claim is better access to finance, the price of that finance is the number that will decide whether it works.
Madagascar is also the obvious test. MVola is the incumbent there, which gives the programme depth in one market and leaves the other 4 dependent on how far Mixx has actually scaled.
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