**4. Three case studies in Sub-Saharan Africa**

The three countries differ in several ways. Growth has been uneven across them, while inflation has broadly remained low in Kenya but very elevated in Nigeria and South Sudan since 2012. Given its past conflict, South Sudan's inflation has been among the highest before the pandemic relative to SSA averages. The countries also differ in poverty rates, access to finance, public health, and more. These countries are, therefore, different in terms of resources, political dispensations, and policies, with these differences expected as seen in **Table 3**.

Previous studies underscore the centrality of financial inclusion to foster economic growth, with implication to reduce poverty, and enhance equality (see [7, 23–27]). While access to finance remains a major constraint to firms [28–29], access to mobile technology has helped in recent years and picked up steeply during the pandemic. This reality has led many researchers over the years to examine the determinants of financial inclusion in Africa. It continues with the advent of the pandemic, which fostered digitalization relative to the previous years [30, 31].


### **Table 2.** *The platform to assess the three countries.*


**Table 3.**

*Select indicators for Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, and SSA average, 2012–2021.*

### *Exploiting Technology during the Pandemic: Early Lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112122*

The pandemic accelerated the use of digital technology. In Sierra Leone, for example, value of transactions grew by 73.8 percent in September 2021 to Le 9.6 trillion from Le 5.5 trillion in 2019 (**Figure 1**). The volume of transactions also rose from 1.4 m to 2.2 m during the same period [32]. Transactions conducted through digital accounts increased by 32 percent to 14.3 m in December 2020 [33]. The value of digital transactions in December 2020 reached Le 1.7b, an increase of 69 percent from December 2019.

The increased use of mobile technology comes with downside risks, including associated fraud and abuse of confidential data. This led to a loss of trust in big data for public entities, bankruptcies of mobile money operators, insufficient user protection, and over-indebtedness [34–37].

The next subsection illustrates the increasing use of technology in the three case studies to provide services during the pandemic.

### **4.1 Kenya's use of technology to provide services during the pandemic**

### *4.1.1 Access to finance and digital payments*

Payment systems have evolved over millennia from barter to gold or silver to cash payment to mobile money (MM) to other forms of money, including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), crypto assets, stableCoins, and suchlike (see [38]). Distinct reasons have been cited for using CDBCs, which include the need to reduce cash. Traditionally, payment systems in Kenya have focused either on largest-value transactions or retailed or low-value transactions, with the latter including card payments, mobile money, account clearing house (ACH), and real-time gross settlements (RTGS). That said, CBDCs carry some risks, including financial exclusion, technology risks, privacy breaches, and competition with deposit banks.

Kenya launched in 2007 the m-PESA is mobile money in Kenya, which increased digital money and cemented the position of Kenya in the continent as a global leader in the industry. As Mugume and Bulime [7] show, recent estimates indicate that Africa accounts for half of the global 1.2 billion mobile money accounts [31, 35, 36, 39]. The digital platforms boosted the circulation of mobile phone inflows, again driving appreciable growth in the mobile money industry. In Kenya, one study found that the adoption of mobile money by businesses reduced the incidence of theft, boosted
