Beyond Mobile Money Adoption: Socioeconomic and Digital Barriers to Digital Payment Use in Ghana

Mobile money account penetration in Ghana stands at 78.5%. Yet only 27.4% of Ghanaians actively use digital channels to pay merchants. That 51-percentage-point divergence between owning an account and actually transacting with it is something conventional access metrics simply cannot explain. This study examines the socioeconomic and digital determinants of merchants' use of digital payments in Ghana, drawing on nationally representative microdata from the World Bank's Global Findex 2025 for Ghana. We estimated three nested survey-weighted logistic regression models, reporting average marginal effects (AMEs) with 500-iteration non-parametric bootstrap inference. To trace direct and skill-mediated pathways from structural endowments to payment behavior, we ran a Baron-Kenny mediation analysis using Preacher-Hayes bootstrap confidence intervals (1,000 iterations). Educational attainment dominates: tertiary-educated respondents are 38.35 percentage points more likely to use digital payments than their primary-educated peers (p < .001), and secondary education confers a 14.36 percentage point advantage (p < .001). The binding constraint, in other words, has migrated from infrastructure availability to human capital endowments, consistent with the second-level digital inequality transition (van Deursen & van Dijk, 2019). Mobile phone ownership adds +24.47 pp (p = .002), formal employment +13.28 pp (p < .001), and internet access +10.65 pp (p = .026). A gender penalty survives controls for education, income, and digital access (AME = -5.60 pp, p = .031). Once digital access and literacy enter the model, mobile money account ownership shows no independent association with merchant payment use at all, exposing the chasm between passively holding an account and actively transacting through it. The mediation analysis is where the story sharpens. Digital literacy transmits 34.8% of the education-to-payment effect (IE = 0.462, 95% BCI [0.303, 0.646]), 56.8% of the internet access effect (IE = 0.829, 95% BCI [0.499, 1.215]), and 61.0% of the smartphone ownership effect (IE = 0.833, 95% BCI [0.489, 1.244]). The critical mechanism of digital financial inclusion is capability-building, not account registration. These findings call for coordinated investment in digital skills curricula, gender-responsive data affordability programs, and spatially differentiated interventions targeting the low-income and out-of-school populations most excluded from Ghana's emerging digital payment economy.