Where Is the African KYC? Lacina Koné’s Question, Two and a Half Years Later

Disclosure: I run a company that is betting on the answer to the question below. Read my conclusions with that in mind.

Most African business days start the same way. You wake up, reach for your phone and open WhatsApp. The first platform you use every morning was not built on this continent, does not answer to its institutions, and knows more about how Africans trade than any African government does.

In early 2024, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Smart Africa’s Director General Lacina Koné explained why in an interview with Tech African News. Africa, he said, is the only continent without a digital platform of its own. Then he asked the question that has stayed with me since: where is the African KYC?

I came back to that interview this month. It reads differently now. Some of what he called for has started to happen, and some of it has not moved at all. This is an honest attempt to separate the two.

What Koné actually argued

Koné’s argument was not about apps. It was about foundations.

Every global platform, he pointed out, begins by establishing who you are. Meta takes your photo and runs two-factor checks. Airbnb and Amazon verify you before you transact. That identity layer is the foundation, and every service is built on top of it. Africa has plenty of apps but no shared foundation, so investors arriving on the continent still identify customers with a Gmail or Yahoo address. As long as that stays true, he warned, Africa will be “digitally colonized.”

His remedy was precise. Not a single continental ID, which would collide with 54 sovereign interests, but interoperable digital IDs: a service provider in one country able to trust an identity authenticated in another. He compared it to the way American states harmonised policy and regulation. Africa may differ politically, he said, but digitally it can be integrated. The technology was not the obstacle. Political will and skills were.

Two other points from that interview deserve more attention than they got. First, he warned against treating AI as a revolution that must touch everything: AI should be a co-pilot inside the sectors that need it, not a goal in itself. Second, he insisted that every Smart Africa initiative carries a capacity-building module, because a continent cannot transform what it does not understand.

What has changed: the foundation is being poured

Measured by the identity layer Koné described, 2024 to 2026 has been the most productive period Africa has had. The foundation is real now, and it is being built mostly by states and development banks.

National digital IDs are scaling

Ethiopia’s Fayda went from a pilot to roughly 50 million registered people, and in August 2026 was spun out into a state-owned company, FaydaVerse, with bank accounts required to link to it by December 2026. Rwanda is moving every citizen onto a biometric Single Digital ID, with the old cards no longer valid after June 2027, and its identity agency says plainly that the new system simplifies KYC for service providers.

The continent wrote interoperability into law

In February 2025 the African Union adopted eight annexes to the AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade. One of them, the Annex on Digital Identities, creates an AfCFTA Digital Identity: a verifiable credential intended to support the mobility of business people and e-KYC across borders. That is close to word for word what Koné asked for.

Smart Africa is testing the plumbing

Its trust alliance, SATA, exists precisely to enable cross-border use of digital identities and data. Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Tunisia and Zimbabwe signed as founding members, and in December 2025 Smart Africa announced a pilot of its data exchange, SADX, in Benin, Ghana and Rwanda.

Business identity is no longer a blank page

Afreximbank’s MANSA platform, a KYC repository for African companies, reported more than 38,000 verified enterprises by May 2026, now with an African Entity Identifier linked to the global LEI system. Private providers such as Smile ID and Youverify sell identity checks across most African markets to anyone with an API key.

So the honest answer to “where is the African KYC?” in October 2026 is this: it is under construction, in many places at once, and further along than most people realise.

What has not changed: identity without a reason to use it

And yet the morning still starts on WhatsApp. A foundation is not a building, and four things have barely moved.

The law is adopted but not in force. Adopting the Digital Trade Protocol is not the same as applying it. It only takes effect once 22 states ratify it, and when the AfCFTA Digital Trade Forum closed in Lagos in July 2026, its first call to action was still to accelerate ratification and domestication.

Pilots are not markets. SADX is a three-country pilot. SATA is a framework with a handful of signatories out of 54 states. Koné himself named political will as the obstacle, and political will moves at the speed of ministerial calendars.

Repositories do not fill themselves. When MANSA launched, trade finance commentators warned it could become “yet another empty channel” unless companies had reasons to keep uploading data. Thirty-eight thousand verified enterprises since its 2021 launch is genuine progress. It is also a reminder of the size of the gap, when Africa’s formal and informal businesses number in the tens of millions. Identity infrastructure grows when people need it for something they already want to do.

The use layer is missing. This is the part of Koné’s argument I think is still under-discussed. Facebook was not built because KYC existed. KYC was built because Facebook had a billion people with a reason to log in. Africa is now building the identity layer first and hoping the platforms follow. They will not follow automatically.

A Gabonese supplier does not wake up wanting a verifiable credential. She wakes up wanting a contract, a partner, a buyer.

She also wants to be able to read a tender published in Kigali or Lusaka in a language she was not taught at school. That is the real gap between Koné’s vision and today’s reality: not identity alone, but identity attached to a reason to cross a border.

Where VeriAfrica fits, and where it does not yet

I founded VeriAfrica in Kigali in 2026 on exactly that gap, so I owe readers a straight account of what it is and what it is not.

What it is today. A multilingual opportunity platform in public beta. AI agents gather tenders, grants, funding calls and partnership requests from across the continent, translate them into the six official languages of the African Union, and match them to companies. People verify; AI finds and translates. That division of labour is, I think, close to what Koné meant by AI as a co-pilot.

What it is not, yet. It is not the African KYC. It does not issue identities and should not try to. Today it has a beta, its first institutional subscriber and a handful of registered companies, not a network. Its verification is still largely manual, its coverage still grows country by country, and its servers do not yet sit on African soil, a sovereignty point Koné would rightly raise.

What it is trying to become. The use layer described above: the place where a verified Gabonese supplier and a verified Rwandan contractor find the same opportunity, read it in their own languages, confirm that each other is real, form a consortium and bid together. That means plugging into the identity rails that governments and Smart Africa are building (national IDs, the AfCFTA Digital Identity, MANSA’s entity identifier) rather than competing with them, and giving businesses a reason to use those rails every week.

Whether VeriAfrica succeeds is an open question that only traction will answer. But I am convinced the shape of the answer is right. Africa’s platform will not be a copy of LinkedIn or WhatsApp. It will be a trust layer built on African identity, organised around African opportunity, and spoken in African languages.

What it will take

Koné ended his argument with political will and skills. Two and a half years on, I would add a third ingredient: reasons.

Governments are delivering the identity. Smart Africa and the AfCFTA Secretariat are delivering the rules that let it travel. What the continent still needs are African builders who give 1.4 billion people a reason to use that identity across a border, every week, for something that earns them money. Without that, the African KYC risks becoming the best-engineered empty room on the continent.

Three practical steps would close the distance faster:

1. Open the rails to startups early. SATA and SADX pilots should include private platforms that bring real cross-border users, not only government services.
2. Recognise African platforms in practice, not only in text. The Digital Trade Protocol already defines what counts as an African digital platform. Procurement agencies, chambers of commerce and development finance institutions can start preferring them now, before full ratification.
3. Put language inside the definition of interoperability. An identity that can be verified in Kigali, attached to a tender that cannot be read in Libreville, is not an integrated market. Multilingual access should sit beside ID, payments and data in every continental framework.

The question “where is the African KYC?” is finally getting an answer. The next question is harder and more urgent: where is the African reason to use it?