According to information from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its recently released working paper titled ‘Nigeria’s eNaira, One Year After’, it was reported that 98.5 percent of eNaira wallets have not been used even once.

The Bretton Woods institution took stock of the first year of the first central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Africa, which was formally launched by President Muhammadu Buhari at the state house in Abuja on October 25, 2021.

As reported by the IMF, it was recorded that the CBDC project has not yet moved beyond the initial wave of limited adoption, despite the laudable undisrupted operation for the first full year.

The fund reported the take-up of the e-Naira by merchants and households to be slow. And due to the levels of wallet downloads and transactions, the public adoption was described as “disappointingly low.”

According to the paper, retail wallet downloads surged initially before tapering off. More specially, in only 25 days, the number of downloaded wallets was at 500,000 units—but after then, it took another 63 days to reach 600,000 units and another 143 days to hit 700,000 units.”

The total number of retail eNaira wallets as of end-November 2021, amounted to about 860,000 — which is a figure equivalent to just 0.8 percent of active Nigerian bank accounts.

In end-June, “Merchant wallet download reached about 100,000, which is about one-eleventh of the number of merchants with Point-of-Sales (POS) terminals.”

IMF reported on transactions, that most wallets appear to remain inactive except for an occasional limited window of weeks that is characterized by a surge of activities.

The average number of eNaira transactions weekly as reported by the institution were carried out by only 1.5 percent of downloaded wallets.

“Since its inception, the average number of eNaira transactions per week amounts to about 14,000 — which is only a meagre 1.5 percent of the number of wallets out there. This implies that 98.5 percent of wallets have not been used even once, for any given week.”

“The e-Naira transactions average 923 million naira per week—0.0018 percent of the average amount of M3 during this period. Per transaction, the average value has been 60,000 naira.”

And according to the IMF, it would require a coordinated policy drive to break the initial low adoption spell.

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