Club of Rome proposes pan-African public digital currency

The Club of Rome proposes the creation of a pan-African public digital currency in a new report that begins with “sensemaking of the New World Order.”

The report, “Towards an African common currency: lessons from the dollar, the euro and the digital era” by Club of Rome member and fintech TóróNet co-founder Ken Alabi began with a question and was “gathered into a sensemaking note: ‘What are we to do — sensing and sensemaking of the new world order.‘”

From there, the author laid out a what a pan-African public digital currency would look like, starting with it being a “deliberately non-replacement, publicly issued African common currency framework.”

With six design choices, the idea is to have a public digital currency that is used alongside national currencies, and it is not intended to replace physical cash, nor is it proposed to be a type of private stable coin:

1. Build-and-invite governance, not institutional capture. Initial governance rests with the entities building and operating the system. Regional bodies and the African Union are invited to participate and assume broader coordination roles as adoption proves out. A Community Advisory Council is a core, not optional, component of the governance structure.
2. Parallel use, not replacement. The common currency circulates alongside national currencies as a complementary unit for cross-border trade, savings and accounting. National monetary sovereignty — including the exchange-rate and interest-rate tools that allow member states to manage the third structural problem identified above — is preserved through a transition that may last a decade or more. The operative precedent is the European Currency Unit (ECU) phase of European integration, not the 2002 banknote switchover.
3. Milestone-based, not deadline-based, transition. Phases advance only when measurable adoption and stability indicators are met — active wallets, circulation volume, peg stability, country recognition, audit attestations. The currency remains in any given phase indefinitely if its milestones are not met. Bulgaria’s 19-year path from EU accession to eurozone entry in January 2026 is the operative example.
4. Partial, dynamically recalibrated backing — not a return to the classical gold standard. Initial backing is fully liquid; over time the mix shifts towards African currencies, gold already held and audited by African central banks, and productive-capacity assets such as renewable generation. The objective is a confidence anchor during the trust-building phase, not a permanent fixed peg. We acknowledge — and address directly in the relevant section — the volatility, fiscal-space and deflationary risks of commodity backing identified in the heterodox literature
5. Real-economy linkage through productive capacity. Demand for the currency is built not solely through reserves but through deepening intra-African trade in food, energy and processed minerals. This complements rather than substitutes the value-chain development and food/energy sovereignty agenda; the currency is most useful where there is real African production to settle. Anchoring the common unit’s value in African productive capacity and intra-African trade flows, rather than in monetary policy made elsewhere, is also the direct answer to the third structural problem identified at the start of this summary: a unit whose valuation tracks African production is one whose valuation African policymakers can influence.
6. Public digital currency, not private stablecoin. The instrument is issued and governed by public institutions — central banks, regional development banks and a publicly mandated coordination body — not by private firms extracting yield from sovereign reserves. The framing draws on the public digital money literature rather than the private payment-token model that the US GENIUS Act legitimizes.