The surprising place where cash is going extinct...

Half a dozen men crowd round one of the many small colourful wooden shacks off a main street in Hargeisa, Somaliland, shouting and arguing over the quality of khat – a mild narcotic that has been likened to both coffee and cocaine – that they’ve just been hastily handed by the vendor.

Customers quickly come and go, grabbing bundles of the green leafy, legal plant that they deem good enough before punching digits into phones and disappearing as quickly as they came.

“We need to do everything quickly, and paying with cash here is slow,” Omar, one of the khat sellers says as he chews on the green leafy plant himself. “It keeps people calm if they can get their khat quickly.”

No cash is transferred, and there’s not a credit card in sight. But customers haven’t got their daily khat fix for free; they’ve paid using their mobiles, transferring money on the sandy Somali street in seconds with little more than a mobile phone and a few numbers.

There are not many things tiny Somaliland can claim to be a world leader in, but cashless payments might be one. Full story...

Related posts:

1. War on cash the ‘biggest threat’ to our liberty...
2. A sinister war on our right to hold cash...
3. Cashless transactions a thing of past in Andra Pradesh...
4. Australia seeks to remove $100 note from circulation...
5. The countries where cash is on the verge of extinction...
6. They are after your cash (and if this happens they will get it)
7. More people keeping cash outside banks...
8. Why we should fear a cashless world...
9. But who is the governments’ strongest ally in their War on Cash?