The entire subscription economy is built on one quiet assumption: once a customer hands over a card, you can charge it again next month without asking. Card-on-file is the engine. Now take that assumption to markets where the dominant way to pay isn't a card at all, and you find the real reason subscription businesses struggle with mobile money.
Mobile money is push by default. The customer initiates every single payment, usually by approving a prompt on their phone. That's a wonderful property for one-off purchases and a terrible one for subscriptions, because a renewal that depends on a human tapping "approve" every month isn't a renewal. It's a monthly re-sale to someone who has already bought.
So the question that matters, network by network, is this: does the network let a customer grant standing permission, and once granted, who pulls the trigger each cycle? In practice you find three models.
The first is the customer-side standing order, what a South African would call a stop order. The customer instructs the network to pay a merchant a set amount on a schedule. M-Pesa has a product in exactly this shape. It's genuine recurring, but notice who owns it: the customer sets it up, and the amount is fixed at creation. Fixed-amount mandates are fine for fixed-price plans and painful for anything variable, usage-based or priced against a moving exchange rate.
The second is the merchant-initiated pre-approval. The customer approves a mandate once, and the merchant charges against it each cycle, within the bounds the mandate allows. MTN MoMo has a construct in this family. This is the closest mobile money gets to card-on-file, and where it's available and properly supported, subscriptions genuinely work.
The third isn't really recurring at all: a fresh payment prompt every cycle, dressed up in recurring clothes by whoever is selling it to you. Every renewal is another interruption on the customer's phone, and every interruption is a chance to churn. If a provider claims recurring support, this is the first thing to check, because a lot of what's marketed as recurring is model three wearing a suit.
Coverage across networks is uneven, the details differ by market, and anything you plan to build a business on deserves written confirmation from the network itself rather than a diagram in an aggregator's pitch deck. That's not cynicism, it's just how infrastructure diligence works. We hold ourselves to the same standard.
Two design consequences follow if you're a subscription business looking at these markets. Price in local currency at stable price points wherever the mandate model fixes amounts, because FX-linked pricing and fixed mandates don't mix. And rethink dunning entirely: there's no card to retry, so recovery is about wallet balance and timing, which makes payday-aware retries and respectful reminders over the channels people actually read worth more than any retry algorithm from the card world.
None of this is a reason to avoid mobile money. It's most of the continent's spending power, and recurring on it is absolutely achievable. It just isn't one integration and one behaviour. It's per-network engineering, and that's precisely why so few have done it properly.