Brief Project Description
The "Design Your Future Integrated Innovation Pipeline Programme" (DYF IPP) at USIU-Africa is an experimental and educational hub that supports open payment technologies by integrating the Interledger Protocol (ILP) and Rafiki into the Innovation and Incubation Center Pipeline and by collaborating with Financial Inclusion. The project addresses the "fragmented financial landscape" in East Africa, moving beyond theoretical banking toward decentralized, interoperable networks that utilize packetized value transfer to reduce costs and settlement times for regional trade.
Project Update
The project is currently active and on track following the completion of different phases based on the activities we are running in the program. We have successfully enrolled 57 high-potential students from diverse African nations. A significant milestone was the commencement of technical and Financial inclusion sessions in phase 1. In phase 2, we focused on students building their projects, resulting in 6 main projects based on the ILP. We will move to the 3rd phase, where the projects will proceed into the market to understand the market value chain.
Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
With the Diverse community of students at USIU-Africa from different parts and regions of Africa, for example, we have students from Bukinafaso and Ethiopia, specifically from Tigray, who have faced challenges with financial inclusion and are using the Interledger Protocol to address them. Here are their brief stories
Story from Merhawit Tesfay Kassa from Tigray, Ethiopia
In times of hardship, we often discover the true measure of those around us. Recently, in Shire, friends in Canada made a generous donation to help families who have lost so much. But because our banking system is currently out of reach, getting that help to those in need required finding a path through a "liquidity trap."
Unfortunately, not everyone sees a crisis as a call to service. A portion of the funds 8% was lost to an intermediary who chose to take a "tax" on this relief. It was a heavy moment for those of us witnessing it, standing before families who are already carrying so much weight.
Yet, this story is defined just as much by those who refused to let greed take root.
In the midst of the struggle, we found a different spirit. Business owners in Axum and Shire, including Muqur Damobile, Berhaley Construction Materials, Kuda Cafe, Frew (Walia Beer Distributor), and Temesgen in Shire, stepped forward to offer support with total integrity. They moved the funds we needed, taking nothing for themselves, acting simply as neighbors helping neighbors.
We are learning from this. We are finding ways to build a direct, secure, and protected aid bridge. Our goal is simple: to ensure that the kindness of donors arrives exactly where it is intended, into the hands of those who are fighting to survive.
Story from Fadila Vannessa Issifou from Ougadougou, Bukinafao
Every month, something as simple as receiving money from my family becomes a stressful process I have to repeat again and again. They send me more than $500 for my living expenses, and every semester they send over $2,000 for my tuition. But getting that money into my hands is never simple. Because of my age and the type of bank account I’m allowed to have, there are strict limits on how much I can withdraw, only about 400,000 West African CFA at a time. That means even paying my tuition becomes a struggle because the payment has to be split and handled in multiple steps. Banks are expensive anyway, with high fees, and they still don’t solve the real problem: I can’t receive the money directly on M-Pesa because of the currency difference. So every time my family sends money, I go through the same exhausting routine using Western Union or Ria, going to an agent, collecting the cash, depositing it into M-Pesa, and only then being able to pay what I need. It’s slow, expensive, and frustrating, and I have to relive it every single month and every semester. When I learned about the Interledger Protocol, it honestly felt like a glimpse of relief. The idea that different payment systems could actually connect and move money directly between them without all these limits, middle steps, and fees made me realize how unnecessarily hard this process has been. If systems like M-Pesa were connected through Interledger, receiving money from my family could finally be simple, immediate, and fair. For someone like me, that wouldn’t just be convenient, it would remove a burden I’ve been carrying every month.
Progress on Objectives, Key Activities
Examine current open and Interportable payment system solutions, including their strengths and weaknesses.
Under this objective, we covered our activity focused on Financial Foundations and regulatory compliance. This helped students explore existing payment systems in Kenya and some parts of Africa. These payment systems include Mobile payments such as M-Pesa, Banks such as NCBA, and blockchain ledgers such as Binance.
Learn about open payment innovations across the front end and back end, including digital wallets, mobile payments, tokenization, and emerging payment infrastructure.
During our activity, where we were looking at Finacial Foundations and regulatory compliance we had a subtopic CBK Guidelines and Fast Payment Systems (FPS) Compliance we touched on learning about frontend and backend open payments innovations, including digital wallets, mobile payments, tokenization, and emerging payment infrastructure, such as the licencing the use of the Stablecoins by the Central Bank of Kenya.
Assemble multidisciplinary teams to develop selected Ideas into viable prototypes based on Open Payments Standards and Interledger Protocol.
Six teams were created during our Innovation Activities, which happen every Tuesday Night from 7 pm to 9 pm EAT. To give a brief on some of the projects created so far.
Muungano:
Problem: Cross-border payments within Africa remain slow, expensive, and unreliable due to dependence on USD-intermediated correspondent banking systems. This infrastructure often fails in low-liquidity currency corridors, leaving millions of intra-African migrant workers facing high remittance costs, long settlement times, and limited financial resources when transfers stall
Solution: Muungano Payroll infrastructure.
Muungano is an Interledger Protocol (ILP)-native payroll infrastructure that enables employers to disburse salaries, convert currencies, and route cross-border payments to workers’ designated accounts in seconds, without relying on the traditional USD-based correspondent banking.
Trip
Problem: More than 8 million people in Tigray remain trapped in a liquidity crisis where bank accounts are effectively locked by a physical cash bottleneck and a 92% poverty rate. This structural collapse, driven by post-conflict stagnation and a predatory black market, will lead to total economic irreversible paralysis if the circulation of value is not restored immediately.
The Solution: The TRIP Engine
The Tigray Regional Interledger Platform (TRIP) restores the economy by using an FX arbitrage layer to incentivize the Central Bank to increase the money supply. By routing digital value through local "connector nodes" via internet-free USSD technology, we bypass infrastructure fragility to ensure money circulates instantly, legally, and sustainably.
Koshi
Problem: Africa’s 200+ payment systems do not talk to each other, forcing intra-African traders to pay up to 8% in fees and wait 2-3 days to move money across borders, the highest cost and slowest settlement time in the world.
Solution: Koshi is a payment routing infrastructure built on the Interledger Protocol that connects Africa’s fragmented payment systems, allowing intra-African traders to send cross-border payments in under 30 seconds directly from WhatsApp, with no new app or account required. Because Koshi does not ask anyone to change what they already use, it simply makes everything work together.
Jantasphere
Problem: Kenya receives nearly 3 million short-stay foreign visitors each year -including about 2.4 million international tourists, 30,000–40,000 international students, and over 500,000 business travelers and regional traders. In 2024 alone, international tourism generated roughly USD 3.5 billion, with visitors spending an average of USD 1,400–1,500 per trip. Yet a major portion of everyday local spending, transport, beauty services, errands, repairs, photography, guides, and other small services remains difficult to access because visitors must convert cash, pay high foreign exchange fees, or register local mobile money accounts such as M-Pesa. At the same time, thousands of skilled youth and students providing these services remain digitally invisible, disconnected from structured demand and global payment systems.
Solution: JantaSphere Global Pay addresses this gap by combining an AI-powered hyperlocal service marketplace with Interledger Protocol (ILP) to enable seamless cross-border payments. Using intelligent matching and geospatial clustering, JantaSphere connects visitors to verified nearby service providers within minutes. At the same time, ILP allows tourists, international students, and traders to pay instantly in their own currency without needing local SIM cards or cash conversions. Local providers receive payments through familiar channels such as mobile money, enabling faster, safer, and more affordable transactions. By connecting global visitors with Africa’s informal service economy, JantaSphere transforms fragmented local services into a trusted digital marketplace that unlocks income opportunities, improves access to services, and strengthens inclusive urban economies.
Nexus Give
Problem: Billions of people worldwide remain excluded from global digital commerce because they lack internationally accepted payment methods such as credit cards or PayPal.This fragmentation between local financial systems and international payment networks prevents individuals from purchasing goods online, accessing digital services, or participating in global economic platforms.
Solution: NexusPay addresses this challenge by building a payment interoperability platform that connects local fintech systems to global digital platforms using the Interledger Protocol (ILP). Through a plugin-based payment gateway and platform integration tools, NexusPay enables digital services such as e-commerce stores, freelance marketplaces, and global SaaS platforms to accept payments from users who rely on local payment methods.
Lumina
Problem: Traditional payment rails such as Stripe/PayPal are built for large, infrequent purchases and carry high fixed fees, typically $0.30 + 2.9%. This economic limitation forces digital providers to adopt a "Subscription-Only" model, which poses challenges such as Access Inequality, Subscription Fatigue, and High Churn.
Solution: Lumina-ILP acts as a middleware gateway that enables Money at the Speed of Data. Unlike traditional gateways, it supports sub-cent transactions as low as $0.0001 with negligible overhead and instant settlement.
Communications and Marketing
We launched the NextGen Higher Education USIU-Africa Grant at a colorful event on 22nd October 2025, which was published on platforms including LinkedIn, Instagram, and University World News Presser.
We featured in the University World News presser in November 2025, where our faculty shared insights on developing an "entrepreneurial mindset" through ILP. Additionally, the project has been featured in the university's "Campus This Week" publication.
https://www.usiu.ac.ke/4156/press-release-usiu-africa-launches-groundbreaking-fintech-program-in-partnership-interledger-foundation/
We also branded T-shirts and hoodies and partnered in the USIU-Africa Innovation Challenge, a hackathon that focuses on clearly bringing out the brand of our partnership.
We have also posted about the partnership on our individual socials, highlighting how it has gone so far.
What’s Next?
For the remainder of the grant period through September 2026, we will focus on finalizing our objectives:
- Discover how technological innovation is reshaping traditional payment systems.
- 72 Hour hackathon 12th -14th March 2026 and innovation challenge finals on 26th June 2026
- Support the innovators to complete the market value chain analysis and build 6 Prototypes in the next 4 months
- A workshop to be held on 26th June 2026 to explore the role of open payment systems in implementing the National Payment Systems Strategy
- Provide participants with real-world entrepreneurial experience from ideation to
- execution in offering digital financial services to MSMEs.
- Foster a culture of innovation and collaboration in financial inclusion across departments, teams, projects, and internal and external USIU Africa communities. 8. Support the development of digital financial innovations and platforms.
- Promote the adoption of open payment systems by MSMEs and Chamas for social impact
- Mentor students from Business and IT interested in careers to support the deployment of the Fast Payment System (FPS) in Kenya
Community Support
As we move into the startup acceleration phase, we would appreciate connections to the broader Interledger community to support mentorship for our student entrepreneurs. Technical guidance on optimizing Rafiki for high-throughput processing in a "hub-and-spoke" innovation model would also be highly beneficial for our technical lead and students.
Additional Comments
We would like to have some of the community members building using the protocol to come share with our students on how they have managed to build sustainable models using the protocol.
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