Written By | Torch Media Africa
West Africa's smallest mainland country is quietly assembling the identity, payments and connectivity infrastructure behind a decade-long digital economy plan
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SCIENCE & TECH
The Gambia rarely features in continental conversations about Africa's technology boom, overshadowed by neighbors like Senegal and by West Africa's larger fintech hubs in Lagos and Accra. But over the course of 2026 the country of roughly 2.8 million people has quietly reached several milestones that, taken together, describe a small state methodically building the layers of digital infrastructure — identity, payments and connectivity — that larger economies assembled years earlier. A new sovereign national identity system launched in June, mobile money now reaches more registered accounts than the country has people, and after fourteen years of relying on a single undersea cable, The Gambia has begun the technical and regulatory work needed to bring in a second.
A Sovereign Digital Identity, Built at Home
On June 30, 2026, President Adama Barrow launched The Gambia's new National Identity Management System (NIMS), becoming the first citizen to be issued the resulting GAM ID card. The system replaces a previous identification regime that officials and industry observers describe as fragmented, poorly trusted and beset by contractual problems. The new architecture is designed around instant issuance: rather than the delayed, paper-heavy process that characterized the old system, a citizen's ID becomes usable immediately upon biometric enrollment, in line with the World Bank's guidance on user-centric, inclusive digital identity design.
The project is being delivered by Margins ID Systems Applications (MIDSA), a subsidiary of Ghana-based Margins ID Group, under a Build-Operate-Transfer arrangement that followed roughly five years of negotiation with the Gambian government before MIDSA was formally awarded the contract in January 2026. A pilot ran from July 6–29 among selected institutions, with nationwide enrollment beginning August 4. Margins ID Group chief executive Moses Baiden Jr. has emphasized the sovereignty dimension of the project: a newly built data center hosts the NIMS database on Gambian soil, a design choice the company frames as essential to the country's broader digital-economy ambitions. Both President Barrow and Prof. Abdou Karim Diallo, director-general of the Gambia Information and Communication Technology Agency (GICTA), have described the ID card as a foundational layer meant to modernize public-service delivery and build trust in digital transactions generally — the identity backbone that other digital services, from banking to e-government, can eventually be built on top of.
The launch follows years of groundwork. In November 2023 the government, working with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy (MOCDE), validated a National Digital Transformation Strategy and a companion Digital ID Strategy, setting out an approach emphasizing inclusivity, innovation and interoperability rather than the siloed, single-purpose identity systems many countries are now trying to move away from. MIDSA's Baiden made the case for that interoperability at the 2026 ID4Africa annual general meeting, arguing that Africa's next generation of identity systems needs to talk to other government and private-sector platforms rather than operate as closed databases.
Mobile Money Outpaces the Population
If digital identity is the foundation The Gambia is still pouring, mobile money is the layer already largely built. According to Central Bank of The Gambia (CBG) data cited by fintech industry press in 2026, the country had 4.5 million registered mobile money accounts against a population of roughly 2.8 million — meaning many Gambians hold accounts with more than one provider — with 2.4 million of those accounts active. Financial inclusion more broadly has surged: the formal financial inclusion rate reached 82% in 2025, up dramatically from just 19% in 2019, one of the sharpest such gains recorded anywhere on the continent over that period, according to the FinScope 2025 survey referenced in July 2026 reporting by Financial Afrik.
The market is led by operator-affiliated services — QMoney, run by mobile operator QCell, and AfriMoney, run by Africell — alongside a widening set of independent fintech entrants including Wave, Nafa and APS Wallet. Financial Afrik's July 2026 coverage specifically credited Wave, the Senegal-founded mobile money unicorn that has expanded across several Francophone and Anglophone West African markets, with accelerating financial inclusion gains documented in the FinScope report, with Gambian authorities publicly citing the company as one of the key drivers of the recent evolution in access. The broader fintech ecosystem around these payment rails remains small but growing: The Fintech Times estimated in 2026 that between 10 and 20 fintech firms were operating in the country, concentrated mainly in payments, remittances and basic financial services rather than more complex lending or insurance products — a reflection of a market still in its early stages relative to regional peers like Ghana or Nigeria, but expanding quickly from a low base.
That growth matters disproportionately in an economy still built on agriculture, tourism and remittances, with GDP estimated at around $2.8 billion. Remittances in particular give mobile money a natural use case: money sent home by the Gambian diaspora needs a fast, low-cost way to reach recipients in a country where traditional bank branch networks remain thin outside Greater Banjul, and mobile wallets have increasingly filled that gap.
A Single Cable, Fourteen Years Old, Reaching Its Limits
The Gambia's international bandwidth has depended almost entirely on one piece of infrastructure: the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable, which has landed at Banjul and been operated locally by Gambia Submarine Cable (GSC) since 2012. For a country entirely reliant on a single subsea gateway, any cable fault — a ship's anchor, a subsea landslide, deliberate sabotage elsewhere along the cable's route — carries the risk of a near-total loss of international connectivity, a vulnerability that has become increasingly untenable as government services, banking and mobile money all migrate online.
In December 2025, stakeholders convened in Banjul under the Digital Transformation for Africa/Western Africa Regional Digital Integration Program (WARDIP), run through the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, to validate the feasibility study for a second submarine cable. According to The Standard newspaper's coverage of the workshop, the study — led by consulting firm Tactis — assessed possible landing sites and beach manholes, weighing technical, financial, environmental and community factors, and outlined risks and mitigation measures required to comply with both national law and the World Bank's Environmental and Social Framework. Project coordinator Serign Omar Lowe noted explicitly that the existing ACE cable, in service since 2012, 'is reaching its limits,' and that the new cable is intended to expand bandwidth, improve reliability and reinforce the national digital backbone.
Notably, the initiative has grown well beyond a single-country project. What began as a bilateral effort between The Gambia and Guinea has broadened into a five-country regional undertaking, with three additional countries expressing interest in joining, reflecting a wider push across West Africa to build redundant, shared subsea infrastructure rather than each country bearing the cost of a dedicated cable alone. Officials at the workshop said a limited-market procurement approach was under consideration to select the eventual contractor, with an emphasis on transparency. Sering Modou Bah, director of telecommunications and post at the Ministry, described the validation workshop as a pivotal moment in the country's digital transformation, telling participants that improved connectivity was expected to benefit not just the ICT sector directly but agriculture, health and education as knock-on beneficiaries of more reliable, affordable bandwidth.
The Underlying Connectivity Gap
The urgency behind the second-cable push is visible in The Gambia's current connectivity statistics. According to DataReportal's Digital 2026 report, internet penetration stood at 45.9% of the population at the start of the year, with roughly 1.30 million internet users out of a population of about 2.8 million — meaning a majority of Gambians remain offline even as mobile money and digital identity systems race ahead. Mobile connections, by contrast, are already saturated on paper: 3.19 million active cellular connections were recorded in late 2025, equivalent to about 112% of the population (reflecting multiple SIM ownership), though that figure was down slightly from 3.48 million in 2024. Social media use remains comparatively limited, with about 493,000 user identities recorded in October 2025, or roughly 17.4% of the population. The gap between near-universal mobile phone ownership and still-partial internet penetration is precisely the bottleneck that a more resilient, higher-capacity international gateway is intended to help close, by bringing down the cost and improving the reliability of the data services operators can offer over that existing mobile network.
A Decade-Long Framework Behind the Individual Projects
None of these initiatives — the ID system, the mobile money boom, the cable expansion — are standalone efforts; each sits inside The Gambia's Digital Economy Master Plan 2024–2034, developed by the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, which lays out a decade-long program spanning infrastructure, public-sector transformation, digital skills and innovation and entrepreneurship. That plan builds on the National Digital Transformation Strategy validated with UNECA's support in 2023, and is nested within the country's broader National Development Plan, which prioritizes ICT infrastructure, financial inclusion and public-sector digitization as cross-cutting goals rather than isolated technology projects. The framing officials consistently return to — sovereignty, interoperability and inclusion — echoes the language now common across African digital public infrastructure programs, from Rwanda's IremboGov to Togo's national identity rollout, suggesting The Gambia is positioning itself within a broader continental template even as it works from a considerably smaller base of existing infrastructure and public financing than most of its regional peers.
Taken together, the identity launch, the mobile money and fintech growth, and the second-cable feasibility work point to a country trying to build digital foundations broadly and roughly simultaneously, rather than in the sequential fashion — connectivity first, then payments, then identity — that characterized many larger African digital economies a decade ago. Whether that parallel approach accelerates The Gambia's digital transformation or simply spreads scarce implementation capacity across too many fronts at once is likely to become clearer as the national ID rollout completes enrollment, the second-cable procurement moves from feasibility study to contract award, and the country's still-nascent fintech sector tests whether 82% financial inclusion translates into deeper credit, savings and insurance products beyond basic payments.
