Payment Systems And Mobile Money As Drivers Of Financial Inclusion: Balancing Innovation With Financial Integrity In Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone has built a modern retail payment architecture in under a decade, culminating in the Salone Payment Switch and a central bank directive requiring all banks and mobile money operators to route domestic transactions through it from 1 April 2025. Account ownership nonetheless stands at roughly 39% of adults, against a sub-Saharan African average of 58 per cent, and the country’s digital finance market is characterised by mass registration alongside minimal use. This article examines whether payment system modernisation and mobile money growth are in fact driving financial inclusion in Sierra Leone, and how the resulting integrity risks are being governed. The study synthesises administrative and survey evidence from the Bank of Sierra Leone and the United Nations Capital Development Fund Annual Provider Survey, Global Findex 2021 and 2025, GSMA industry data, GIABA mutual evaluation and follow-up findings, and International Monetary Fund Article IV documentation, and interprets that evidence through an institutional and payments-economics framework. Three findings emerge. First, Sierra Leone’s inclusion deficit is a usage deficit rather than an access deficit: approximately 2.9 million wallets carry a zero balance and around 57 per cent of registered mobile money accounts are dormant, so infrastructure investment addresses a constraint that is no longer binding. Second, the tiered know-your-customer regime immobilises roughly 70% users in the lowest tier, capping transaction limits precisely for the population that interoperability is intended to serve. Third, integrity supervision is not competing with inclusion but underwriting it: the Financial Intelligence Unit investigated 14 online financial fraud cases across 2020 and 2021, against survey evidence that 41% of consumers had been targeted by phishing. The article argues that detection capacity, not payment rails, is the binding constraint, and proposes a sequenced framework in which integrity investment is treated as the enabling condition for usage rather than as a compliance cost imposed upon it.