African governments and mobile money operators like Safaricom’s M-Pesa and MTN’s MoMo need a way to shut down any AI agent that goes rogue on their payment systems, Jane Munga, a technology policy fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues in Rest of World. Sub-Saharan Africa handled $1.4T of the roughly $2T that moved through mobile money worldwide in 2025, and Munga says an outage would hit small traders who depend on each day’s sales and have little credit or welfare to fall back on. She wants African AI policy to require human overrides, audit trails, incident response and offline backups on critical systems, since most governments and firms on the continent lack the monitoring and expertise to catch an AI agent misbehaving.
