[toolz]

If you wanted to understand how crypto can help, you should've asked a question - not declared something about crypto that was both incorrect and tangential to the point being made.

close to 50% of sub-sharan africa owns a cell-phone and internet quality is of little consequence to crypto as any short frame of connection can facilitate much of what was being described in your parents context (which is infrequent "savings account" type transactions)

crypto doesn't have to be the only system of currency and probably shouldn't be until things like cell phones are ubiquitous - this isn't a criticism against crypto it's simply a lack of infrastructure needed to aid crypto in solving every currency need.

Paper money suits people without internet much better than crypto for daily trading - that doesn't mean there is no place for crypto in securing peoples savings. If you want to start saving wealth, you'll probably not want to do that in a society where everyone has cash on hand (which promotes theft) but instead you'll want to make infrequent visits to someone with internet and purchase a cheap device to facilitate savings account types of transactions that you know you can secure easily even in the event your cheap device fails. This property is one of many properties that is extremely valuable for money. Something fiat achieves with large expensive bank infrastructure that even though the concept has existed for at least thousands of years, yet is too expensive to serve people in many many places as this article outlines.

[zinekeller]

The problem is that mobile banks have existed in Africa long before mobile cryptocurrency transactions have been possible. Is the problem is indeed with the banks specifically and not because they literally don't have anything to save? Because I don't think it's solvable with cryptocurrencies in this situation, mainly beacuse banks there have lowered the deposit requirements to the point that you can open an account easily. Surely if they can't do it despite these efforts, is there even a chance that cryptocurrency, specifically in those conditions, can survive?

[toolz]

if you want to save and don't have a bank within a reasonable traveling distance - what are your alternatives? Almost everywhere in africa will have at least spotty internet within walking distance - the same can't be said of access to a bank. Now if you have identification maybe you can open an internet bank account (although I suspect that's very difficult for countries/areas that are under-served) or you could buy crypto from any vendor and know that it's secure the second you send it to your wallet.

It's also likely to be expensive to send paper money to your internet bank account as you'll be purchasing wire services or similar, whereas crypto vendors could be nothing more than a contact you have buys crypto and sells in exchange for paper currency.

I don't know enough about these peoples situations to know what will end up serving them best, but I do know having options will always be to their benefit and at the very least crypto will be competition on competing forms of currency.