EthSwitch Share Company, an initiative led by National Bank of Ethiopia, was granted US$2.33 million by the Board of Directors of the African Development Bank to modernise its payments infrastructure. The project aims at facilitating the design and use of different digital financial services (DFS) including digital distribution of payments such as social benefits, pensions and other government payments, e-commerce, transport systems, and utility bills. It further involves procurement and implementation of the required payment system. The award is supported from the special fund of the Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility (ADFI), a pan African initiative that aims to facilitate digital financial inclusion for an estimated 332M unbanked population across Africa. 'Digital payments infrastructure is a pre-requisite to effective financial inclusion. By linking the rails and the rules, the EthSwitch project is braced to change the digital payments landscape in Ethiopia and ADFI is happy to invest towards that impact,' noted ADFI Fund Coordinator Sheila Okiro.