Every year, the African Development Bank puts the continent’s trade-finance gap at roughly $81 billion. That figure is often read as a shortage of capital. It is not. Capital is abundant. What is missing is a way to tell, quickly and cheaply, which small traders are good for the money.
Why banks say no
A typical West African importer runs a real, cash-generating business — but on paper looks uninvestable to a bank. No audited accounts. No fixed-asset collateral. A thin or non-existent credit file. Faced with that, a risk officer does the rational thing and declines. The AfDB and WTO estimate that around half of SME trade-finance requests in Africa are rejected.
The core mismatch
The information banks ask for (audited statements, collateral) is not the information that predicts whether a trader repays. The data that does predict it already exists — it just isn’t in the file.
The data already exists
Most Ghanaian traders move the majority of their money through mobile money. Their suppliers, buyers, volumes and seasonality are all visible in that flow. Add invoice and shipping documents from the trade itself, and you have a richer, more current picture of repayment capacity than any annual report.
- Mobile-money inflows and outflows — real cash-flow, updated daily.
- Counterparty patterns — who they buy from and sell to, and how reliably.
- Trade documents — invoices, purchase orders and shipping records tied to a specific cycle.
What closing the gap looks like
Underwrite the cash flow, not the collateral. Price to risk transparently. Settle across borders in local currency so the trade actually completes. Do that, and a large share of the “unbankable” $81 billion turns out to be perfectly bankable after all.