Who owns the offline internet? Mobile money is rewriting the answer
As data stays expensive, a generation is building services that work without it — and mobile money is the rails.
Tunde Okafor·Monday, 7 September 2026·6 min read
The offline stack
The assumption that everyone is always online never held in much of the world. What is new is the infrastructure being built for the gap: USSD menus, SMS rails, and stores that double as access points.
Mobile money turned the phone into a bank. The same rails are turning it into a library, a marketplace and a notice board — no data plan required.