It is quite difficult to have the same level of banking as the Global North (or "the West").
Even for me, the Mercy Ships Finance Director, to just to log into the local African bank's website will often take 3-5 tries. Or I may try in the morning and then have to wait until the afternoon because of error messages. The site is up; it loads. Mind you, I use a password manager so I'm not mistyping. When I log off, I'll often get an error just trying to safely log out of the system!
A colleague from a different Africa nation was completely locked out of his bank. He contacted customer support to no avail. Thankfully, he knew someone in IT so he reached out to that person. I think (hope?) he now has access to his personal money now!
What about wiring money? Between North America and Europe it is pretty quick at just 2-3 days, or even less. In Africa? Could be a week. Often with fees.
Last year, we had nine crew members who had to pay exorbitant fees to simply wire the equivalent of $1,000 to their home. Sometimes it would be $60 or all the way to $170. And this is usually without explanation. While we eventually resolved it by setting up US dollar accounts in their home country, it took many months to get to that point, lots of fees, and the constant reminder that it is not equal. This was just one country. Multiply that by dozens of countries and trying to work through those regulations and what is and isn't possible...it's not just the weekly time investment, but the inequality simply because I'm from the USA and another person is from somewhere else.
I'm accustomed to "free banking" in America where the bank makes money on the float (the cash I have in my account) but here you pay a monthly fee for that privilege of having a bank account. If you have a commercial account, you may even have to pay taxes on owning an account and some of your transfers!
This is often the reality of banking. I knew it was hard to live here, but I didn't understand the micro-frustrations of daily living. So when we have grand ideas of micro-finance loans, creating jobs, or whatever it may be to build up economies within sub-Saharan Africa, those are worthy ideas and we should pursue them. However, we must also remember there is a huge amount of infrastructure required to get to that point. It's like that kitchen project: we just want to replace this one thing to make it prettier, but then when we peel off some paint, we discover dry rot. From there, we find other problems. Before we realize it, we've ripped off half the wall, are redoing plumbing or electrical, and upgrading a few other things — all because of that small, nice-to-have project that we started with. However, here the stakes are different. They're often harder for us to see, or imagine, or to rally enthusiasm around to fix the ten things before we can get to the one that initially lit our passion.
Oh, and that's if you're lucky enough to have a bank account.