CBDC in Africa, 2026: who has launched, who is piloting, and who has quietly paused

Five years after Nigeria became the first large economy in the world to launch a retail central bank digital currency, the African CBDC landscape has matured from hype into a patchwork of hard-won lessons. Across the markets in CBAN's directory, Nigeria remains the continent's only live retail CBDC, with pilots under way in Ghana, Mauritius and Rwanda, wholesale experimentation in South Africa, and formal research programmes in a dozen more jurisdictions.

Nigeria's eNaira, launched in October 2021, remains the reference case. Early adoption was slow while the wallet lived in a standalone app; the Central Bank of Nigeria has since worked to integrate the eNaira into existing banking and payment channels and to position it as public infrastructure — a settlement rail for government payments — rather than a consumer rival to commercial offerings.

Ghana's eCedi pilot has emphasised offline capability. The Bank of Ghana has publicly prioritised payments that work without connectivity, aimed at rural markets where network coverage, not smartphone ownership, is the binding constraint — an approach it has documented in its published eCedi design papers.

In Southern Africa, the South African Reserve Bank's work has centred on wholesale rather than retail applications, building on its Project Khokha experiments with tokenised interbank settlement. The Bank of Mauritius has run a Digital Rupee pilot with commercial bank participation, and the National Bank of Rwanda has published feasibility work on a national digital currency integrated with its payment infrastructure.

The quieter story is the pause. Several central banks that announced CBDC exploration during the 2021–22 wave have visibly deprioritised the work, concluding — often explicitly in published reports — that instant payment systems and mobile-money interoperability deliver most of the public-policy benefits at a fraction of the institutional risk. The deciding question for many committees is whether a CBDC solves any problem that a well-run national payment switch does not.

What would change the calculus? Three things stand out in central banks' own consultation papers: cross-border functionality under the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System; programmable government disbursements at scale; and moves by major trading partners that make CBDC rails a condition of settlement. Until then, expect Africa's CBDC map to evolve deliberately — pilot by pilot, not big bang by big bang.

CBAN maintains the country-by-country CBDC status field in every central bank profile in our directory, updated as institutions publish new findings.