The Government of Rwanda set out many ambitious targets all aimed at significantly increasing the quality of life of the citizenry. These ambitions are underpinned by key enablers including having an ICT-enabled service sector. This is why the government, with different stakeholders, put in place all policy and regulatory frameworks to ease the transition to a cashless economy and significant steps have been made in this regard. This led to the emergency of platforms like Mobile Money and Airtel Money for telecommunication companies while banks stepped up and introduced a number of products that would enable their customers to transact without having to use cash. However, when the country, just like the rest of the world, experienced the Coronavirus pandemic at the beginning of 2020, cashless payments became even more important. It was a main avenue to curtail the use of cash which was seen as a major carrier for the highly contagious virus. Under the prevailing circumstance therefore, using cashless means to transact has become one of the life-saving fronts. So we have sort of killed two birds with one stone as the adage goes; during the pandemic, uptake of cashless payments – which are naturally very convenient when compared to the traditional means – has significantly increased. However, there have been periodical breakdown in some of these services, including this weekend, where MTN Mobile Money services were down, especially on Sunday, which paralysed transactions on a busy day as the lockdown was lifted in the City of Kigali and in some eight upcountry districts. Many Rwandans were unable to pay for goods and services for the bigger part of the day. MTN Rwanda later acknowledged the interruption, but sadly could not point to what could have happened, saying that they were still investigating which makes it even more worrying. One would think that by now, telcos have made the requisite investments to ensure flawless transactions, especially since we are already 18 months into the pandemic which is, therefore, enough time to have built a solid platform to accommodate the increasing uptake of their Mobile Money services. The sector regulator, Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority should keep the telcos and financial institutions on their toes because like said above, if people continue experiencing such interruptions, they will simply go back to using cash, reversing the gains made towards a cashless economy with devastating effects.
