The company has a license to operate in Ethiopia. As yet there is no date to start operations there, but Oviosu hopes it will be in the first half of the year. He does not expect “full-scale civil war” to break out in Ethiopia, where the company has about 40 people on the ground. Fighting between government forces and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front “won’t impede our plans.”
Founded by Oviosu in 2009, Paga claims to be Nigeria’s leading mobile payment service. It counts Jim O’Neill, former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and venture capital investor Tim Draper among its backers. The company now has 19 million users across its businesses and has seen a “dramatic acceleration” in transactions on its platform this year, Oviosu says. He defines the company’s long-term goal as providing “a payments ecosystem for Africa.”
- The company is currently analysing African
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