As a Kenyan entrepreneur who has relied on PayPal since 2019, I once enjoyed a straightforward relationship with the platform while living and working in the Cayman Islands. But since returning home, that experience has soured. What began as a convenient tool for paying for servers, software subscriptions and online services has become a source of mounting frustration; one that highlights a deeper pattern of barriers facing African users in the digital economy.
Over recent months, familiar restrictions have intensified. Services that were once available quietly disappear. Account limitations appear without clear explanation. Users are labelled “dormant”, even when actively trying to maintain their profiles. Attempts to update a phone number, verify identity or make basic changes are met with loops of verification failures that feel designed to wear you down rather than resolve issues.
Compounding the issue is the reliance many hosting providers, such as Germany-based Hetzner, place on PayPal as a primary or heavily promoted payment method for customers in parts of Africa. Many African developers and businesses choose Hetzner because it offers powerful servers, especially dedicated and cloud, at significantly lower prices than AWS, DigitalOcean, or Azure.
The result is a pincer effect: African businesses are steered towards PayPal for essential infrastructure, only to encounter an escalating series of hurdles that threaten their operations.
Across the continent, entrepreneurs are being told to innovate, build digital businesses, host applications and compete on the global stage. Yet when it comes to the basic plumbing of the internet economy – payments, verification, access to financial rails – Africa is routinely treated as an exception, a high-risk afterthought rather than a legitimate market of more than 1.4 billion people with rapidly growing tech talent and ambition.
This tension raises a broader question for African entrepreneurs and policymakers: how long should the continent continue seeking equitable treatment from global incumbents, and at what point does it make more sense to accelerate investment in homegrown alternatives?
Africa has already demonstrated remarkable ingenuity in financial technology. Mobile money platforms like M-Pesa have leapfrogged traditional banking in ways that transformed daily commerce.
History suggests that waiting for established players to reform rarely delivers swift change. Industries evolve when viable alternatives emerge that force incumbents to adapt or lose market share.
For example, there is a new platform launched called BuyMeSoda, which is looking to effectively replace Buy Me a Coffee in Kenya – because it supports M-Pesa, tailored for the Kenyan community to tip their favourite creators.
In business, the lesson is simple: capital flows where it is welcomed and treated with basic respect. Many African founders are already exploring and supporting continental alternatives precisely because of experiences like these.
Gabriel Saka is a Kenyan entrepreneur. Additional voices: Otto Abasi Williams, Michel Sadek, Bassit Abbas, Ben Norton.
In payments, where trust, regulation and network effects matter enormously, building robust African-led systems is no small undertaking. Yet it may be the only way to ensure sovereignty over critical digital infrastructure.
PayPal and Hetzner, along with others shaping Africa’s digital connectivity, owe users clearer answers.
