Agents have become a critical channel for access and distribution for a range of businesses across Africa including financial service providers, agri-input providers, telecoms, clean energy and online marketplaces. Throughout the continent, agents enable cash access, serve as e-commerce delivery points, distribute airtime, act as field forces for sales and customer acquisition, and more. 

Agent networks are particularly important in Africa as they help compensate for low bank and internet penetration, particularly at the last-mile. According to the World Bank, just 30% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa uses the Internet, and there are just seven ATMs and five bank branches for every 100,000 adults. In this environment, agent networks serve as crucial links between end customers and the various actors trying to reach them. For example, in Kenya and Nigeria, payment processing giants depend on vast networks of agents; MPesa counts more than 600,000 agents, while Moniepoint reports more than 300,000 point-of-sale agents. These networks enable access to a variety of products and services in remote areas with low population density. For example, 84% of Kenyans were within 5 kilometers of a mobile money agent in 2018. 

Opportunity to improve outcomes for both agents and providers

While agent models can be critical for businesses to reach customers, they also offer huge livelihood opportunities for microentrepreneurs and individuals seeking to earn income through these last-mile sales and distribution of products and services. Agent services typically form one component of an individual’s portfolio of work, often complemented by retail sales (sodas or fast moving consumer goods) at a physical location where the agent is based, or by other digital offerings. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, GSMA reports that mobile money represents the primary income for 80% of agents, but almost all have some secondary income that represents over 25% of total income in more than half of cases. 

To improve well-being and earnings among agents, stakeholders have long recognized the need to increase revenue streams, improve liquidity management, and build complementary offerings; with regards to mobile money agents, CGAP notes: “Providers must conceive of a diversity of service offerings that rural customers will value before rural agents see a rise in CICO [cash-in-cash-out] transactions that make them more viable. Expanded service offerings bring agents more than just additional CICO revenue. They complement other lines of business by pushing foot traffic into shops, increase cross-selling of other products and services, and provide agents with a valued social role in their communities.”

Simultaneously, mobile money operators (MMO) and other providers have struggled to manage and incentivize their agents adequately. Many agents face shortages in liquidity and experience lags/outages in access, even as they provide critical functionalities in underserved communities. Providers tend to have many low-performing agents and often face high levels of churn. 

Agents also struggle to manage relationships across multiple providers. This has resulted in duplication of efforts and cost inefficiencies within those who build these networks, often called Dealers or Super Agents. Many have suggested that centralizing those functions via ‘agent-as-a-service’ or ‘agent super apps’ could improve efficiencies for the many companies relying on last-mile agent models, while enabling agents to earn more by exploiting synergies between multiple companies. 

The potential of agent models to improve livelihoods exists for both men and women. Though as few as 10% of agents in India are female, the business case for agent networks onboarding more women is strong. GSMA noted, that “Nine of the 10 operators interviewed recognised that female agents tend to attract more female customers than men.” A World Bank Study in the Democratic Republic of Congo found that, after accounting for relevant influencing factors, female customers are on average 7.5% more likely to transact with a female agent, and their transactions with female agents are 66% higher than with male agents.

Noting these opportunities, Jobtech Alliance has invested in two startups in the ‘agent-as-a-service’ space: Opareta and Avunja. These companies take different approaches to providing a shared agent system for clients, including mobile network operators and other companies, which in turn offer increased earning opportunities for agents. While their approaches differ, both offer agents the opportunity to increase their incomes by connecting with providers in improved ways.  Avunja connects agents with greater numbers of corporates and enables them to execute more functions, thereby increasing their earnings. Opareta increases earnings by cutting out costly middlemen and connecting with corporate providers more directly, thereby increasing agent margins.

Avunja

Avunja enables unemployed youth to earn a reliable income as agents for corporates who require last mile sales (eg. airtime, financial products) or customer acquisition (eg. insurance, healthcare, and banking services). Avunja services as a superapp by aggregating opportunities, and enabling users to expand their revenue streams through one solution. 

Avunja targets young people as agents, with a focus on women who are not degree holders and do not have the capital to start their own businesses. More than just providing the link to the corporate requiring agent services, it equips young people to thrive as agents; it integrates learning opportunities on transferable skills such as communication, sales, product knowledge as well as digital and financial literacy. Avunja provides a Multilingual Chatbot, providing frameworks for goal setting, planning their path to success, and handling customer queries.

These offerings not only increase agents’ transaction volumes and revenues but build confidence in the agent ecosystem among users. Agents benefit from improved business visibility and access to embedded financial products, leading to better financial management, growth in earnings, and new income opportunities. Through these links, Avunja will be instrumental in elevating the quality of existing earnings for agents within Africa’s digital finance landscape. These opportunities are particularly valuable to agents, many of whom have no access to capital. 

Opareta

Recognizing that many MNOs share the same agents, Opareta has created a solution to manage their agent networks digitally—‘Agent-infrastructure-as-a-service’. Opareta addresses inefficiencies in agent management by providing agents and MNOs with a software solution for customer registration, performance monitoring and analytics, liquidity management, and team cost optimizations. The solution is designed to catalyze the growth and maturation of Africa’s mobile money ecosystem by providing Financial Services Providers (FSP) with better solutions for managing and incentivizing agents. 

Specifically, Opareta understood that agents across Africa rarely work directly with MMOs, instead relying on agent network managers (Super Agents and Dealers) to act as an intermediary between providers and agents. Not only do these intermediaries create inefficiencies by failing to address the liquidity constraints, fraud risk, and burdensome onboarding processes that agents face, but Super Agents also absorb 10-20% of transaction fees.  Those failures translate into frequent transaction failure rates and limited innovation in the mobile money ecosystem, which means lower earnings and opportunities for agents.

Opareta replaces costly Super Agents with fail-safe software, allowing agents to manage their businesses more efficiently while absorbing more margin. Opareta’s platform plays a crucial role in enhancing the economic outcomes for existing mobile money agents. By automating and optimizing operations such as liquidity management, performance analytics, and transaction processing, Opareta directly addresses key pain points like transaction failures due to liquidity issues and operational inefficiencies. The team reports that Opareta can increase agents’ earnings by $0.30 for every $1 of transaction fees. 

We believe Opareta offers a “win-win” solution for MMOs and agents, streamlining operations, enhancing liquidity management, and providing comprehensive analytics to drive growth and efficiency in the mobile money sector.

Growth potential 

Sub-Saharan Africa’s mobile money agent network is rapidly expanding, with a current base of 4.3 million active agents and significant year-over-year growth. With a projected growth of mobile money agents to over 10 million within the next decade and agent models representing a critical sales and distribution channel for many growing sectors, Opareta and Avunja are strategically positioned to capitalize on the continent’s overwhelming shift towards digital payments.

Furthermore, the opportunities for agents to sell and intermediate services are growing. Opareta and Avunja are both working to secure major SaaS partnerships, particularly with financial service providers, to unlock the potential of fintech across Africa.