Payment Resilience in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States: Lessons for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)

What lessons emerge from payment resilience in Fragile and Conflict-affected States (FCS) and how could they be applied to CBDC? This chapter explores how FCS can strengthen the resilience of their payment ecosystems to withstand disruptions arising from conflict, natural disasters, or infrastructure failures. It introduces a framework to assess vulnerabilities across key layers of the payment ecosystem including connectivity infrastructure, payment infrastructure, intermediaries, payment solutions, and user access. Drawing on experiences from Ukraine, West Bank and Gaza, Haiti, the CEMAC region, Tuvalu, Sudan, and Yemen, the Note highlights practical strategies to strengthen payment ecosystem resilience. It also examines how CBDC and other digital innovations could mimic some of these strategies, such as by offering offline functionality, redundancy, and interoperability. While grounded in fragile settings, the lessons have broader relevance for strengthening preparedness and ensuring payment continuity in a broader set of countries.