Plans for Ghana Card digital wallet rollout in the offing

Ghana has disclosed its intensions of activating the digital payments function on the country’s national digital ID (Ghana Card).

Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Yayra Korku Deku, discussed this plan in a recent interview with local media Joy News.

According to Deku, the digital wallet will enable holders of the Ghana Card to easily make or receive payments using the Ghana Card as an authentication tool.

The ID authority boss explained that the initiative is part of their income generating efforts, and many financial institutions have expressed their readiness to be part of it.

Deku said he hopes the move would “generate a huge sum of money for us.” In May, the NIA and the ID authorities of a few other countries shared their digital ID revenue generation experiences at the 2025 ID4Africa AGM in Addis Ababa.

The NIA official told Joy News that the digital wallet is one of three features of the Ghana Card, the other two being the digital ID and the biometric passport, both of which have already gone live.

“The e-Passport has already been activated. The next one we want to implement is the e-wallet. Once we activate the e-wallet, it will mean that you can put money on your Ghana Card and use it to make transactions and you can pay for anything you need,” Deku said.

“We are hoping that this will generate huge sums of money for us. If you think about it, the other banks are already taking huge sums of money. But with this initiative, we are hoping to lower the costs so that everyone can benefit. In fact, we have already received proposals from banks that want to host it,” he added.

He noted however that the idea is not for any single bank to host the wallet, but for it to be a “uniform platform” where “once we build it, all the banks can come on board.”

Deku also talked about the recently announced tokenization infrastructure project for which the NIA and Trust Stamp recently signed an MoU, saying that they will offer support to all entities that want to be part of it.

The plan to activate the digital wallet on the Ghana Card was highlighted in February when the NIA Executive Secretary said they intend to make it a multipurpose digital ID by setting off all its features.

A number of African countries including Benin and Djibouti have also unveiled plans of introducing digital wallets in order to drive digital inclusion.

Article Topics

Africa  |  digital ID  |  digital payments  |  digital wallets  |  financial inclusion  |  Ghana  |  Ghana Card  |  Margins ID Group  |  National Identification Authority (NIA)