Written By | Torch Media Africa
Real-time payments, rural 4G expansion and an India-inspired digital ID push are emerging in one of East Africa's poorest and least digitized economies
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Burundi rarely appears in surveys of Africa's tech landscape, and for good reason: it remains, by several measures, one of the poorest countries in the world, with extreme poverty affecting an estimated 76 percent of the population living on less than $1.90 a day in 2025, according to World Bank data, alongside chronic fuel shortages and a foreign-exchange crunch that pushed inflation to roughly 45 percent in April 2025 before it eased sharply to 8.6 percent by April 2026. Yet beneath that macroeconomic strain, 2026 has brought a cluster of concrete digital infrastructure milestones — a new instant payments platform, a rural connectivity buildout, SIM registration reform, and an early exploration of India's digital public infrastructure model — that together mark a genuine, if fragile, inflection point for the country's financial and telecommunications sectors.
From Zero to a Mobile Money Market
Mobile money did not exist in Burundi in any meaningful sense as recently as 2012. By 2024, mobile money penetration had reached 44.04 percent of the population, with active subscriptions climbing to 2.3 million in 2023 — a 140 percent increase in just four years. Operators such as Lumitel's Lumicash and Econet-linked wallets have become the default way many Burundians move money, particularly given the country's shallow formal banking sector and its longstanding cash economy. The Burundian press agency ABP reported in February 2026 that mobile money has become a genuine lever of financial inclusion, though it flagged cybersecurity as an emerging weak point as transaction volumes scale faster than fraud-prevention systems can keep pace.
BurundiPay: A National Instant Payments Rail
The most significant infrastructure development of 2026 so far is the April launch of BurundiPay, a national real-time payments platform backed by the World Bank. BurundiPay is designed to allow instant, 24/7 payments across banks and mobile money wallets — interoperability that has historically been missing in Burundi's fragmented payments landscape, where a customer of one mobile money operator often could not seamlessly pay a customer of another, or move funds easily between a wallet and a bank account. Crucially, the platform is built to work not just on smartphones but via USSD codes on basic feature phones, a design choice aimed squarely at rural and lower-income users who make up the bulk of the population and who are least likely to own smartphones or have reliable data connectivity. The move mirrors similar real-time payment switches rolled out elsewhere on the continent in recent years and reflects a broader push by the World Bank and regional partners to reduce cash dependency and cut the cost of moving money domestically.
Regulatory Tightening: SIM Registration
Alongside the payments push, Burundian authorities have moved to tighten oversight of the mobile ecosystem that underpins it. A ministerial order issued in January 2026 set out new rules governing SIM card registration and use, and the government subsequently set June 25, 2026 as the compliance deadline for subscribers to register or re-register their SIM cards. Officials framed the measure as necessary to curb fraud and strengthen consumer protection in a market where mobile money has become central to everyday transactions — but it also reflects a broader continental trend of governments linking mobile identity more tightly to national identity systems, often as a precursor to digital ID and tax-compliance efforts.
Rural Connectivity: The PAFEN Buildout
Much of Burundi's population still lacks reliable mobile broadband. As of 2025, 2G coverage reached roughly 97 percent of the country, but 3G coverage was only around 50 percent and 4G coverage just 34 percent — a stark connectivity gap that limits who can actually use services like BurundiPay on a smartphone rather than via USSD. Two initiatives launched in 2026 target that gap directly. First, Burundi's state telecom operator Onatel secured $5.9 million to expand 4G coverage in rural areas as part of the Projet d'Appui aux Fondations de l'Economie Numérique (PAFEN), a World Bank-financed program with a total budget of $92 million aimed at building the foundations of Burundi's digital economy. Second, and more specifically, Lumitel signed a $10 million-plus public-private partnership contract on March 2, 2026 at the Ministry of Finance, Budget and Digital Economy — combining $4.37 million from the World Bank with more than $5.62 million of Lumitel's own investment — to extend high-speed internet to 86 hills across 14 provinces over roughly 14 months, a rollout the companies say will benefit more than 400,000 citizens. Lumitel is handling the full technical scope, from designing and deploying 2G and 4G equipment to long-term network operation and maintenance, and the project builds on the roughly 3,300 kilometers of fiber the operator has already laid to its own towers as part of the wider Burundi Backbone System.
International Bandwidth: Cable Dependency
Burundi's connection to the wider internet still runs through a narrow set of physical links. The country reaches international bandwidth via the EASSy submarine cable system and, since 2019, a ten-year agreement with Tanzania's TTCL for redundant capacity via the SEACOM cable. Total international capacity sits at around 7.1 gigabits per second, of which only about 2.3 gigabits per second — roughly 32 percent — is currently in use, suggesting headroom exists but that the bottleneck lies more in domestic distribution (the rural 4G and fiber gaps PAFEN and Lumitel are now addressing) than in raw international bandwidth.
Looking to India for Digital Identity
Perhaps the most forward-looking development came on June 22, 2026, when Isidora Ntakiyiruta, an adviser to Burundi's Ministry of Finance, Budget and Economic Planning, held talks in Bujumbura with Upender Singh Rawat, India's representative to Burundi, to explore deeper cooperation on digital transformation. The discussions centered on whether Burundi could adapt elements of India Stack — the digital public infrastructure model that underpins India's Aadhaar biometric identity system and its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) — to fast-track its own national identity and payments systems. For a country still building basic 4G coverage, adopting even elements of a system as sophisticated as India Stack would be an ambitious leap, but it signals that Burundian policymakers are looking past incremental fixes toward a more comprehensive digital public infrastructure strategy.
Where Burundi Sits Within the EAC
That ambition is set against a regional backdrop in which Burundi lags most of its East African Community peers. A comparative assessment reported by the Burundi Times found that Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda have relatively developed digital payment solutions and e-government systems, while Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and South Sudan are still laying the foundations for digital payments and e-government — with Burundi's data protection framework specifically characterized as "nascent," compared with Kenya's and Rwanda's "advanced and operational" systems. That gap has itself become a policy issue for the bloc: officials and data-protection experts from EAC member states met in Dar es Salaam in mid-2026 to validate a proposed regional framework harmonizing rules on cross-border data flows, a step regional leaders describe as essential to building a genuine East African Single Digital Market spanning mobile money, e-commerce, telemedicine and digital government services.
A Fragile but Real Foundation
None of this transforms Burundi into a fintech hub overnight, and the macroeconomic backdrop — fuel shortages, a wide gap between official and parallel foreign-exchange rates, and a January 2026 Macroeconomic Stabilization Plan focused on fiscal consolidation and FX reform — is a reminder of how constrained the operating environment remains. The IMF concluded its 2026 Article IV consultation with Burundi in June, and the World Bank is preparing a new Country Partnership Framework for 2026-2031 aligned with the government's long-term Vision 2040-2060. But the combination of a national instant-payments rail, a targeted rural connectivity build-out, tightened SIM oversight, and an explicit look toward India's digital public infrastructure model suggests Burundi's digital transformation, however early-stage, has moved from aspiration to a series of concrete, dated, and financed projects — the necessary groundwork for any country hoping to close a decades-wide digital gap with its regional neighbors.
