Kaduna to Kigali: How Blockchain Pilots Are Reshaping Financial Trust in Africa

When Peace Ogobor first proposed integrating blockchain technology into Nigeria’s financial inclusion strategy, there was skepticism—not from the usual critics, but from within the sector itself. For many, distributed ledgers still felt like a future problem, not a present solution.

But in early 2021, a low-profile blockchain pilot in Kaduna State quietly proved the skeptics wrong.

The initiative, led by Peace in collaboration with development partners and fintech engineers, was designed to test a blockchain-based identity and transaction framework in underserved northern communities. Many of these areas lacked traditional banking infrastructure and were home to thousands who had never held a bank account.

What the project sought to solve wasn’t just access—but trust. Previous efforts to deploy mobile wallets and microloans in similar regions had struggled due to fraud concerns and verification challenges. By embedding identity hashes and transaction records on a private blockchain, Peace’s team enabled users to verify payments and credit histories without requiring formal ID or high-end digital devices.

Over a 90-day period, more than 7,500 individuals participated in the pilot. Transaction settlement times fell dramatically, and default rates dropped by 28%, largely due to the added transparency and verification capabilities built into the system.

“We weren’t just building a finance product,” Peace explained during a webinar hosted by the Africa Fintech Alliance. “We were building trust—one line of code at a time.”

The Kaduna pilot has since attracted regional attention. In Rwanda, a similar model is now being implemented in rural cooperative banking programs, supported by the Ministry of ICT and Innovation. In Ghana, the Ministry of Finance endorsed blockchain-backed solutions for identity-linked cash transfers in partnership with local startups in late 2020.

This ripple effect across West and East Africa reflects a broader trend: the continent is not only adopting digital financial tools—it is defining the frontier of how they are built and used.

Peace’s pilot, while modest in scale, provided one of the clearest blueprints yet for how blockchain can facilitate real-world financial inclusion at the base of the pyramid. Her approach emphasized user simplicity, regulatory compliance, and data privacy—core considerations often sidelined in global blockchain discourse.

Those who worked alongside her describe a mission-driven focus. “She wasn’t pitching tokens or decentralization hype,” said a fintech policy consultant familiar with the project. “She just wanted to build a tool that worked for people who had been forgotten.”

With fresh inquiries coming in from cooperatives in Niger Republic and youth credit programs in Sierra Leone, the Kaduna experiment may have only scratched the surface.

And while blockchain’s journey in Africa is still unfolding, its most meaningful progress may not come from capital cities or crypto-backed ventures—but from quiet, grassroots pilots like this one—led by innovators like Peace Ogobor, who understand that trust, once broken, must be rebuilt—block by block.