The narrative around financial inclusion in Africa has long centered on access. Mobile money penetration has soared. Bank accounts have multiplied. Digital wallets are ubiquitous across the continent.
And yet, for millions of small-scale fishers, farmers, and informal traders, the relationship with formal finance remains thin — transactions, not transformation. People have accounts. They do not have financial lives.
The question worth asking is not "do people have access?" It is "can they actually use what exists in ways that fit their lives?"
The Depth Problem
Mobile money has tens of millions of users across East Africa. Mobile money agents outnumber bank branches in Kenya by a significant margin. By any measure of access, the infrastructure exists.
But depth of use tells a different story. For most users, mobile money serves one primary function: person-to-person transfers. Savings via mobile wallets remain low. Credit uptake on digital platforms is modest. Insurance penetration is negligible.
The products exist. The users do not engage with them — at least not beyond the basics. This is not a behavioral failure on the part of users. It is a design failure on the part of products.
Designed for the Wrong Person
Most financial products launched for "the unbanked" in Africa were designed by people who are not unbanked. They follow product logic built for urban salaried workers — monthly income cycles, predictable cash flow, formal employment records, literacy in the language of the interface.
A small-scale fisher in Kwale County operates on a fundamentally different economic rhythm. Income arrives in irregular bursts tied to catch volume, weather, and market access. Expenses cluster around fuel, ice, and gear maintenance. Earnings may be shared across a crew before anything reaches a wallet. The concept of a "monthly salary" is entirely foreign to the transaction.
When a financial product assumes a monthly income cycle, it is not a product for that fisher. It is a product that happens to be available in the same country as that fisher.
The Usability Barriers
Beyond income rhythm, several barriers compound the usability problem for coastal fishing communities:
- Language and literacy Many coastal fishing communities are predominantly Swahili-speaking, with varying levels of literacy. Financial products with English-only interfaces, or those requiring multi-step navigation, lose users at the first screen.
- Trust deficits Formal financial institutions have a long history of excluding or exploiting rural communities. Distrust is not irrational, it is historically informed. A product from a company with no physical presence and no local relationships starts at a significant trust deficit.
- Complexity of onboarding KYC requirements, document submission, waiting periods, and account verification create dropout at every step. Each additional step is a user lost — permanently.
- Mismatch with cash flow reality A fisher who lands catch on Tuesday, receives payment on Thursday, needs to buy fuel by Saturday, and replaces gear monthly has a cash flow pattern that no standard financial product accommodates.
Embedded Finance Is the Answer
The most promising path is not building better standalone financial products. It is embedding financial functionality into the platforms and workflows that informal sector workers already use and already trust.
"Come to us when you need money. Open an account. Submit documents. Wait for approval. Use our product."
"The money arrives because of something you already did. No separate step. No new product to learn. Payment is part of the workflow."
When a fisher logs a catch on the MarineCatch platform, they are not thinking about financial services. They are thinking about getting paid for their fish. But the moment that catch is confirmed delivered and payment is triggered automatically to their M-Pesa, that is financial inclusion in practice.
Not because a new product was introduced. But because the financial function was built into a workflow they already understood and trusted.
The MarineCatch Approach
MarineCatch Africa provides embedded settlement management within seafood supply chain operations. Payment is not a separate step, it is the natural conclusion of a confirmed delivery. Every transaction is timestamped, receipted, and traceable, building the financial history that supports future access to credit and insurance without requiring a single visit to a bank branch.
What Good Design Looks Like
Products designed for real usability in African informal sector contexts share several characteristics:
Principles of Usable Financial Design
The Opportunity
Africa's informal sector is not waiting for financial inclusion to be delivered to it. It has built sophisticated, functional, community-based financial systems, rotating savings groups, informal lending networks, cooperative buying arrangements — that work precisely because they are designed around how real people actually live.
The opportunity for digital platforms is not to replace those systems. It is to extend them — adding speed, scale, traceability, and connection to larger markets, while preserving the human relationships and community trust that make informal finance work in the first place.
For MarineCatch Africa, that means building payment and settlement infrastructure that feels less like a financial product and more like a natural extension of the fishing business — because for the fishers it serves, that is exactly what it needs to be.
Access was never the problem.
It never was.