The MTN-Mastercard thingy; A Win for cameroonians, but 'meh' for Builders?

For a long time, many of us in Cameroon have prayed for a day like this. The recent launch of the MTN prepaid Mastercard directly in the app feels like a dream come true. It’s a massive win for anyone who has ever had to beg a friend abroad to pay for a Netflix subscription, a Coursera certificate, or a Facebook ad. You can now load your MoMo, generate a card, and participate in the global economy instantly. For consumers, this is pure freedom.

However, from a builder’s perspective the developers and entrepreneurs trying to create local solutions - this highlights a massive gap. In Cameroon, we still lack the basic infrastructure that lets a developer actually leverage this card system. While it has become easy to spend money, it remains incredibly difficult to build a business that can receive it. We lack the pipes that make a digital economy work.

In countries like Nigeria or South Africa, companies like Paystack and Flutterwave (ironically, even companies with roots here in Cameroon) changed everything. They didn’t just exist; they enabled thousands of other startups to succeed by providing simple, reliable APIs. This is the Stripe model: you grow by helping others grow. In Cameroon, simply getting access to a stable Mobile Money API has been a years-long battle. Now that we have Mastercards in our pockets, we still don’t have a plug‑and‑play interface that lets a local developer accept these cards in their own app without jumping through a thousand hoops.

Because of this lack of local infrastructure, many of us are forced to look elsewhere. Founders are increasingly turning to Stripe Atlas to incorporate companies in Delaware just so they can use Stripe’s world‑class payment tools. It’s a smart way to go global, but it’s also a sign of local failure. We shouldn’t have to pretend we are an American company just to process a payment from someone standing right next to us in Douala.

We must acknowledge that MTN isn’t the first to try this. Players like PaySika and others showed us the light early on (and if you ask me, they should have branched out into providing this infrastructure since they already have the backing of Ecobank - if I’m not wrong), proving there was a hungry market for digital cards. But they eventually hit the “Cameroonian wall” of technical and regulatory hurdles. For the builders using these platforms, the experience has been painful. There is nothing more frustrating than having money on a card but being unable to pay for a product because of technical issues. To make matters worse, being charged a 500 CFA fee to unlock a card after a failed transaction - especially when the failure is due to a network or deposit issue - feels like the user is being penalized for the platform’s own instability.

The launch of the MTN Mastercard is a great step for everyone. I love it, but the real game‑changer will be the day a Cameroonian developer can plug into an API and start a business in minutes. We have the talent, and we finally have the cards; now we just need the infrastructure to connect them.

First published on: https://ngano.online/a/393726651223490560