EPISODE OVERVIEW
Moniepoint serves over 1.9 million businesses across Nigeria, most of them informal. It has built one of the country’s most extensive agent and merchant networks and expanded into credit. By any measure, it is a formidable inclusion engine.
But scale and inclusion are not the same thing. And in this conversation, Edidiong “Didi” Uwemakpan, VP Corporate Affairs at Moniepoint Group, does not pretend otherwise.
With a background in behavioural economics and over a decade building consumer behaviour strategies for underserved African communities, Didi brings unusual candour to the supply-side of inclusion. She engages directly with the hard questions: Who are fintech products really designed for? What responsibility does a platform at Moniepoint’s scale carry toward users who cannot navigate it independently? And when cash remains faster and more reliable than digital payments for most merchants, what does that say about where the industry actually is?
But this episode goes beyond diagnosis. Speaking from inside one of Africa’s largest fintech operations, Didi surfaces practical, policy-relevant insights on what must accompany DFS expansion, from digital literacy investments and inclusive interface design, to infrastructure strengthening and consumer protection frameworks that actually protect. The conversation interrogates a tension that providers rarely name out loud: that rapid digital adoption, without the enabling conditions to support it, risks producing access that is shallow, dependent, and ultimately exclusionary in a new form. This is the provider’s reckoning with its own frontier, and a call for the ecosystem to move together.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Edidiong “Didi” Uwemakpan Vice President, Corporate Affairs · Moniepoint Group
Didi leads communications, brand, and public relations at Moniepoint Group, one of Africa’s fastest-growing fintech companies. She has spent over a decade shaping consumer behaviour and brand strategy across renewables, telecoms, FMCG, and technology, including stints with Budweiser, KFC, Bharti Airtel, and Rensource Energy. Her interest in behavioural economics and her experience executing marketing programmes for underserved communities give her a perspective that goes well beyond corporate communications: she thinks carefully about how financial products reach, and sometimes miss, the people who need them most.
