PayPal expands to Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe

If you lived in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast or Zimbabwe, until today, you had no access to PayPal. You could not open an account at all, and apparently in Zimbabwe, for some time, even if you had PayPal already, using your account from the country would get you blocked from PayPal temporarily.

Not anymore, PayPal is expanding to these countries officially starting today. A report by Reuters quoted PayPal head of the EMEA region as saying that the service has been going through reinvention to include these new countries.

In addition to the 4 African, PayPal is opening up its services to 4 European countries – Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco and Montenegro – and Paraguay in South America.

PayPal is generally blocked in countries where the services feels there is high risk of money laundering, and sometimes it’s linked to US sanctions against those countries. As was the case in Zimbabwe.

PayPal users in these new markets will be able to pay for stuff online using the service, but will not be able to do peer to peer transactions as well as sign up as merchants. This means they can for example, buy stuff off eBay but will not be able to receive PayPal payments themselves.

The addition of the 4 brings to 50 the number of countries on the continent where PayPal is available.  PayPal is already available in Zambia.