Watchers of Africa will have heard of Kibera in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, once reputed to be the biggest slum in the continent before the claim was debunked. Residents of a neighbourhood called Soweto West, located within the informal settlement, use Bitcoin in their day-to-day transactions – ranging from paying mama mboga (vegetable vendor) at her stall to sending money to relatives and settling fare with the boda boda guy for his motorcycle taxi services.
It is a modest initiative by all counts, but it may hint at the viability of cryptocurrencies as a functional currency and perhaps even Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
In 2022, Afribit Africa, a non-profit, introduced Bitcoin to bring financial services to the impoverished and unbanked in the community. It started by getting local garbage collectors to accept the currency while also raising awareness as other members of the community caught on.
Afribit terms the initiative a Bitcoin circular economy, where the Soweto residents earn, save, and spend Bitcoin for everyday goods and services.
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‘I’ve accepted Bitcoin and many people in my area Kibera also use Bitcoin as a mode of payment for any commodity they need,’ an enthused shopkeeper told BBC.
Her customers pay using Satoshi, or Sat for short, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. 100 million Sats make one Bitcoin. As of the time of writing, the value of one Sat was roughly equivalent to 0.0007 USD.
The residents save their Bitcoins in a crypto-wallet called Blink, an open-source app for smartphone users. The shopkeeper or stall vendor uses their own version of the app to generate a QR code invoice, which the customer then scans to complete a payment.
For those with feature phones, access to crypto-wallets is provided through a dedicated USSD platform. Meanwhile, residents without a phone are issued with a Bold Card, an opensource Bitcoin debit card. The users can save and pay with the card at a point-of-sale (PoS) terminal.
All transactions are free of charge, including sending money to M-Pesa accounts. Users can also buy Bitcoin using M-Pesa.
A universal concern about Bitcoin is price volatility. At the time of writing in mid-February 2026, it was hovering at 67,000 USD, down from around 87,000 USD at the end of December 2025. This fluctuation, however, does not seem to faze the Kibera residents, who remain confident that it will rebound, as its history suggests. They have a point. The virtual asset reached an all-time high of over 125,000 USD only in October 2025.
To hedge against the volatility, however, Bitcoin holders can convert their Sats into StableSats, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Users can later convert these back to Bitcoin to benefit from its price appreciation.
Meanwhile, Kenya’s Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) Act, signed into law in October 2025, provides regulatory clarity to ensure a safer and more transparent virtual asset ecosystem. It seeks to protect users' interests by guaranteeing that their assets are safeguarded in the event of the VASP's fraud, insolvency or operational failure.
With about 2,600 community members already onboarded, the initiative serves as proof-of-concept for Afribit’s ambition to ‘create self-sustaining Bitcoin circular economies in African communities, starting with Kibera.’
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It’s other ambition to one day replace M-Pesa may, however, be a tall order. The nearly 20-year-old M-Pesa platform has grown to become a full-fledged financial services provider of payments, savings, insurance, micro-loans. As of this year, one can even buy and trade stocks at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) directly through the platform.
Indeed, M-Pesa is difficult to jettison. Even the Kenyan government had to concede, delaying its plans to deploy the country’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). With M-Pesa already an entrenched and effective real-time payment system, uprooting it would have serious economic consequences. This is compounded by concerns regarding potential bank runs should depositors move funds to CBDC, among other risks.
This, however, is the Kenyan experience. Rwanda, despite its strong mobile money platform MTN MoMo, began piloting its own CBDC in early 2026 as it seeks to transition into a cashless economy. This closed-loop, proof-of-concept phase is testing offline payments, user experience, and technical feasibility with banks and fintechs. This should also yield lessons for other African nations.
Currently, Nigeria is the only African country to have a CBDC, the eNaira, as legal tender, launched in October 2021. 137 countries around the world are exploring CBDCs, with 72 of them in advanced stages of development, pilot, or launch, according to the Atlantic Council.
As for cryptocurrencies, despite their volatility, they may hold promise as functional currencies as the Kibera initiative suggest. There’s also El Salvador and the Central African Republic, which continue to use Bitcoin as legal tender. They, too, have their lessons to impart.
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Written by Gitura Mwaura