The value of transaction on Nigeria’s CBDC, the eNaira platform has hit a whopping $8bn since it was launched in October 2021 by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
The eNaira was introduced by the apex bank to enable direct remittance payments between Nigerians within and outside of the country, and also intended to reduce so-called “leakages” from state budgets due to in-built traceability that uses blockchain technology.
Speaking on Wednesday in Abuja at the CBN’s in-house executive seminar, CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele, said the eNaira has been globally acclaimed as a success story.
Emefiele who was represented by Aishah Ahmad, CBN deputy governor in charge of financial system stability, said since its launch, a total of N8 billion, consisting over 700,000 transactions has passed through the eNaira platform.
“As part of the CBN’s effort to further integrate and broaden the usage of the eNaira, it was assigned an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code, enabling payments by simply dialing ‘*997#’ on a mobile phone.
Emefiele added that as part of the CBN’s digitisation drive, the apex bank had taken transformational steps in entrenching a culture of “big data” and data analytics as tools for effective policy making.
“To this end, the CBN Data Architecture Project (CeDAP), code-named “Project OXYGEN” was commissioned, with the objectives of providing a repository of a variety of data from different sources,” he said.
The CBN governor said considerable gains have been achieved in boosting financial inclusion in Nigeria.
“While cash-based transactions have declined significantly in the last decade, it is still the dominant means of payment, amidst a large informal sector,” Emefiele said.
Also speaking at the event, Kingsley Obiora, Deputy Governor, economic policy, CBN, said the eNaira platform has so far recorded 927,000 downloads, and 317,560 activated consumer wallets with 33 banks fully integrated and live on the platform.
