Liberia's Financial Inclusion Gap Is Closing — The Last Mile Is the Hardest

Liberia's financial inclusion metrics have improved materially over the past three years. Orange Money, MTN MoMo, and Lonestar Cell's M-Cash together serve approximately 1.4 million registered mobile money users — a penetration rate of roughly 42% of Liberian adults — up from an estimated 28% in 2022. The CBL's 2025 Financial Inclusion Survey records a bank account ownership rate of 22.3% among adults, compared to 16.7% in 2020. By any measure, access to formal or semi-formal financial services is expanding. The question is whether expanded access is translating into meaningful use.

The data on active usage is more sobering. Of Liberia's 1.4 million registered mobile money users, approximately 650,000 — fewer than half — conducted a transaction in the previous 30 days at the time of the CBL survey. Most usage is peer-to-peer transfers and airtime purchases; savings and credit products remain marginal. This reflects a global pattern in mobile money markets: registration is a low-friction act often driven by promotional incentives, but habitual financial behaviour — saving in a mobile wallet, accessing a mobile credit product, using digital payment for market purchases — requires sustained behavioural change that marketing alone cannot produce.

The last mile of financial inclusion — reaching subsistence farmers in Lofa, fishing communities in Grand Kru, and informal traders in Nimba County markets — requires infrastructure that does not yet exist at scale. Agent networks, the human intermediaries who convert mobile money into cash and vice versa, are concentrated in county capitals and district towns. Rural areas with poor mobile connectivity and no agent within five kilometres represent a structural barrier to digital financial access that network expansion and product design alone cannot overcome. The CBL's National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2025–2030, published in February, identifies rural agent network extension as its first priority — but the financing mechanism for that expansion remains unresolved.