Is PayPal now unblocking Ghana?
Rexford Nkansah, the in-house tech reporter and geek for #TheAfrianDream says on the afternoon of May 26, 2015 in Ghana, he stumbled upon facts that points to the possibility that Ghana may have been removed from the PayPal blacklist. Everyone in the world today know about PayPal (if you don’t know, you can ask an alien the next time you see it) writes Rexford and we present to you the full accounts of his discoveries:
For many years, you and I will agree PayPal, although officially operate in many other African countries, has blacklisted Ghana specifically for many reason I am not interested in iterating here. If you’re a keen user of Debit/Credit Cards for online transactions, you likely have met the bummer, where you wished you had a PayPal account and connected it to your bank account via your Debit/Credit card. Well, now, it appears you can, at least for one bank. I doubted this possibility some months but today, well, I have a different and a more positive mindset.
There’s an age old Akan proverb in Ghana that goes: “Akura, ɔse m’aka, nanso menweɛ” – Ghanaian proverb (Ask the friends in your Ghanaian circle for its meaning).
How did I acquired my PayPal?
Yes, I have a PayPal account. Whats the long and short of that story? I got it when I was in South Africa. I even had my bank account at NedBank connected to it. Although I did not use PayPal very frequently then, I decided to keep the account for a day like this.
Ever since I returned to Ghana (that was late 2014), I’ve been trying to get my PayPal account connected to my Debit/Credit card I got from Fidelity Bank in Ghana. Many tries, no success. At some point, PayPal explicitly told me in an error message on their site when I tried adding the card that, ‘Ghana-issued credi/debit cards are not allowed.’
If you know me well, you’ll imagine right how I looked at that moment: A burning head with lots of smoke!
So PayPal now enlists Ghana?
I don’t know whether this is for all cards or all banks or all persons in Ghana, but what I can say is, unless PayPal has a press release or something of that sort saying they now support Ghana that I did not hear about. What I however know for a fact is that my card now works well with PayPal here in Ghana.
See the image/photo accompanying this story confirming the above.
As I said ealier, there might exist news about PayPal now accepting Ghana-issued bank cards, but well, I have neither heard of, nor even dreamed that would have been possible.
How did I get to find out?
I enrolled on Freelancer.com this afternoon, then had to connect a means of Payment. I have PayPal, so I figured I’d add it by logging into my PayPal, then the next step was to associate the PayPal with a debit/credit card. I reluctantly entered my details (almost didn’t want to, because I had to go fetch my card from a far far away place knowing I will never need it anytime soon for such an action) thinking oh well, why not give this a shot.
It took a while (which was unusual as PayPal would immediately ‘error’ me that my card isn’t allowed), then lo and behold, this time round, it went through and PayPal even deducted an amount from the account, just to verify the account exist and is active, which is a standard procedure, (normally, the deducted amount is refunded one or two days afterwards. Elsewhere: It takes Google Wallet less than an hour to do such verification, deduction-refunding, I mean).
In conclusion
I have not heard any word of this debit/credit card acceptance from PayPal regarding Ghana, so keep these in mind.
— I don’t know if it will work for you, even if you have a PayPal account, considering the fact that My PayPal account is over 1 year old, if that even makes any case or difference
— My card is a VISA, other cards like MasterCard or Discovery might not work
— My card was issued by Fidelity Bank in Ghana. I can’t guarantee that your bank, if other than Fidelity, might work or otherwise
— My card is a Gold VISA Card. It is NOT the VISA Elektron. So even if your card is a VISA that is usable in Ghana, you might want to find out if PayPay will accept it by taking a leap of faith like I just did.
There exist a page for Ghana on PayPal, but as to whether it means anything, I don’t know, because up till date, I still see the /za/ (South Africa) address when I log into my account and I’m still finding out how that plays into the grand scheme of events here.
So, have you tried connecting your debit/credit card to PayPal recently? Did it work? Could you even create an account from Ghana normally? (without using Proxies or whatever) Let us here at #TheAfricanDream know by sharing your stories and comments below and we will pass them on to our in-house tech geek-reporter; Rexford Nkansah.
