Demand Isn't
the Problem

Credit card penetration is as low as roughly 10% in Egypt. Cash and cash-on-delivery still dominate everyday commerce across the region, and several currencies aren't freely convertible, which makes cross-border card billing and remittance-style payouts harder than they look from outside. Mobile penetration, meanwhile, is high. It is above 100% in Mauritania, and supports roughly 8.5 million SIMs across Libya's two-operator duopoly alone. Nearly every potential customer has an active billing relationship with a mobile operator and pays into it every month. So the gap isn't between the product and the customer. It sits between the product's checkout screen and a payment method the customer actually has.

The second structural fact is scarcity of competition. Virtually no global consumer app holds a local billing, carrier or distribution relationship in any of these six markets. The companies that do operate here regionally are payments aggregators serving MENA broadly, and they mostly treat North Africa as a coverage row rather than a specialisation. The two least-developed markets on the list do not appear in the main industry index at all. That is unusual. It is far more common for a market to be underserved because it is genuinely unattractive. Here the demand is demonstrable, the payment rails exist, and the relationships simply haven't been built.

None of the following are Clementine's deals. They are public, independently reported precedents, cited as evidence of what the region's infrastructure already supports. Anghami built MENA's leading music app on more than 35 telecom carrier-billing partnerships. Not one lucky integration, but a deliberate region-wide distribution strategy that beat global entrants. Deezer entered the region through an operator route rather than building local payment infrastructure. Spotify, with more payments engineering resource than almost any competitor, enabled Orange Morocco carrier billing in 2023, a recent decision by a company that could have built an alternative and chose not to. Most usefully, Altibbi, a MENA telehealth platform, runs a live partnership with Libyana in Libya. That is a category well outside entertainment, in the market a sceptic would assume has no working payment infrastructure at all. If it works there, "the payments don't work in these markets" doesn't survive anywhere else on the list.

Look at what those precedents have in common. Each company built its own carrier relationships, one at a time, market by market. Anghami's 35+ partnerships are an achievement precisely because they were 35+ separate pieces of work. That is a rational thing for a company with regional headquarters to do, and an irrational thing to ask of a global app weighing six uncertain markets against every other line on its roadmap. The work is largely the same each time, which is exactly the kind of work that should be done once and reused. That's the thesis. Not a new payment technology and not a new market, but a layer that does the repeated part once, so the next global app doesn't have to repeat it.

Conditions have moved recently enough to matter. Algeria entered the MEA DCB Index for the first time in its 2023 edition, meaning carrier-billing conditions there are now good enough to be scored at all. Morocco tops that index. Spotify's Orange Morocco decision was 2023, not 2013, so this is a current default rather than a legacy workaround. The index also shows movement in the other direction: Tunisia's score fell from 3.3 to 2.9 between editions. These conditions are live, they move, and the window in the least-served markets, Libya and Mauritania, is open now precisely because so little has been built there.