A synthesis of the latest public data on how Malawians pay, shop, and stay connected, and what it means for everyday retailers.
Malawi's National Payments System Report 2025 (Reserve Bank of Malawi) records K37.9 trillion of mobile money transaction value in 2025, up 94% from K19.5 trillion in 2024, on 2.4 billion transactions (+31.6%). Subscriptions reached 19.9 million. Globally, the GSMA's State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026 puts Sub-Saharan Africa at $1.4 trillion of mobile money value in 2025, about two thirds of the $2 trillion global total.
Yet the composition of that usage tells a different story. Airtime top ups account for 42% of transactions and cash in and cash out for 33.1%, while merchant payments, the backbone of a cashless retail economy, make up just 7.7%. Malawians increasingly hold and move money digitally, but the shop counter is still dominated by cash. For retailers, the opportunity is not waiting for customers to "get digital": it is accepting the digital money they already hold, with a checkout flow that matches how they actually pay.
Behind the 19.9 million subscriptions sits a familiar adoption gap: the central bank reports only 44.8% of registered wallets (about 8.9 million) were active in a 30 day window. Subscriptions include inactive and churned SIMs, so headline reach overstates habitual use. Globally the GSMA finds the same pattern: 2.3 billion registered accounts, but only 593 million active on a 30 day basis.
Regulators are responding. Malawi's Ministry of Finance has raised wallet holding limits from K1 million to K5 million and transaction limits from K750,000 to K1 million, moves expected to support higher value digital transactions through 2026. As customers become more active transactors, businesses that are already set up to accept mobile money at the point of sale will capture that shift first.
World Bank data puts internet use in Malawi at roughly 22% of the population (2025), and the ITU reports that 4G networks covered about 70% of the population in 2022, with meaningful gaps between urban and rural households. Mobile cellular subscriptions stand at about 70 per 100 people, so phones are widespread; reliable data connections are not.
Any retail system used in Malawi must therefore treat connectivity as intermittent. A point of sale that stops working when the network drops is unusable for most shops. Offline first design, selling on device and syncing automatically when connection returns, removes the single biggest operational risk for digital retail in the country.
Accept the money customers already hold. With K37.9 trillion flowing through mobile money wallets, supporting Airtel Money, Mpamba, cards, and cash at checkout is no longer optional for growing shops.
Plan for intermittent connectivity. Choose tools that keep selling offline and reconcile automatically, rather than systems that assume constant internet.
Digitise the back office too. The same digital habits that transformed payments are transforming inventory: shops that track stock, staff, and outlets in one system make better purchasing decisions and lose less to shrinkage and dead stock.
This report is a synthesis of publicly available data published by the Reserve Bank of Malawi, the GSMA, the World Bank, and the International Telecommunication Union, current as of October 2026. It does not use any first-party customer data from Retero. Figures are cited to their primary sources below; where sources use different definitions (e.g., "registered" vs "active" accounts), we attribute the definition to the original publisher. This page will be updated as new editions of these reports are released.
Published October 2026 by Retero. You are welcome to cite this report with attribution and a link to this page.