Hello everyone,
I am a young African/Liberian social-entrepreneur, programmer, and technology enthusiast. I currently live and work in the U.S as a Cybersecurity Systems Analyst. Like me and other young Liberians, we have ideas to create solutions and solve pressing problems for real people and businesses. Some of our ides rely on technologies and infrastructures that are already out there instead of reinventing the wheels.
We are currently working on a FinTech idea that will help revolutionize digital payment in Liberia. For this solution, we were hoping to use PayPal API and integrate with their system to give Millions of Liberians access to the international market. However, to our surprised, we found out that PayPal is not in Liberia. Liberia is not listed on the list of country. This means millions of people living in Liberia cannot create a PayPal account. So whatever integration we have in mind will not work as well. Knowing PayPal to be a global company, this was shocking to us. We tried reaching out to PayPal customer service, but you probably know how that goes. We did not get any helpful answer.
So here we are. Asking this helpful community. Do you know how we can get PayPal in Liberia? What needs to be done? Any input/feedback will be helpful. You see, like most countries, Liberia has had her own share of craziness and corruption. But Liberia today is not the same Liberia 10 or 20 years ago. We have a lot of young Liberians that are smart and trying to grow and innovate the tech space. But this is not easily achievable if global companies like PayPal are turning their backs and making things difficult. This makes innovation difficult in a country that is striving, and it increases that technology disparity all the global companies like to talk about.
And yes, it's possible that the lack of PayPal in Liberia could be due to some government restrictions. We reached out to some government officials, and the feedback so far is that they are not aware of any restriction. We will continue asking, but that's why any details from PayPal will help. If there's a specific requirement, we are willing to work with that specific government entity to get this resolved.
If you have made it this far reading, thank you! We appreciate your feedback.
