Thematic Review of Mobile Money Research in Africa Focusing on Financial Inclusion and Platform Ecosystems (2020 to 2025)

This paper reviewed the development of the mobile money literature in the context of a shift in the focus from financial inclusion towards a more comprehensive perspective of platform ecosystems. The paper reviewed mobile money research in Africa published in the years 2020 to 2025. It reviewed the framing of mobile money in the context of the themes of access, welfare, resilience, livelihoods, interoperability, regulation, payments to merchants, and cross-border integration. A thematic literature review design was adopted, using peer-reviewed literature and select influential reports of African settings, and employed structured searching, screening, coding, and comparative synthesis to find dominant patterns and gaps in research. The review discovered that mobile money research was increasingly becoming more than a mere cash transfer service to include savings, credit, insurance, public payments, and ecosystem coordination among users, agents, merchants, banks, fintech firms, and regulators. It further revealed that mobile money helped to secure household welfare through consumption smoothing, market structure, and governance, and ecosystem studies showed the increased significance of interoperability, market structure, and governance. Nevertheless, the literature was still uneven between different regions, populations, and methods, with few evidence from underrepresented countries and vulnerable groups. The paper finds that mobile money in Africa can best be viewed not only as a tool of financial inclusion but also as a digital platform infrastructure, with significant implications for research, regulation, and inclusive development.