Ghana becomes the hub as a new payments rail knits West Africa together

At the Labadi Beach Hotel in Accra, bankers and officials gathered to switch on something unglamorous and important: Sao Payment Global, a licensed payments company founded in São Tomé and Príncipe, has made Ghana its fifth live market and its hub for English-speaking West Africa. Its pitch is a single connected rail on which money moves between countries, institutions and people, under licence and at low cost — the kind of plumbing that decides whether a trader in Accra can be paid by a customer in Freetown without the money taking an expensive holiday abroad first.

SDG 8 · Decent work and economic growth — Mechanism: market force