On a humid weekday afternoon, the pavement outside a small provisions shop is busy in the easy, familiar way of a Nigerian street. A schoolboy buys a sachet of water. Two keke riders haggle over change. And beneath a sun-faded umbrella, a woman in a neat Ankara blouse taps a POS terminal, her thumb flying across the keys like she’s playing an instrument she knows by heart.
“na ₦5,000? Oya, enter your PIN,” she says, sliding the device toward the rider. She smiles, soft but practised. You can tell she has said this a thousand times.
All around the city, this is the new heartbeat of daily money movement: women on corners, women beside shopfronts, women tucked into the shade of umbrellas and kiosks, women who have quietly become the frontline of financial access. If you look closely, you’ll notice a pattern: in many neighbourhoods, the POS economy wears a woman’s face.
Over the past few years, starting in the lockdowns and rolling through cash crunches, bank downtimes, and endless queues, women have stepped into the gap with small tables, handwritten signs, and machines that beep. What they do looks simple: cash in, cash out, transfer, airtime. But behind those quick transactions lies a world of hustle science: capital, cash sourcing, risk, patience, and a delicate kind of customer care that keeps the line moving and the neighbourhood trusting.
This is their story, told in their rhythms, with their everyday math.
“Since lockdown”: How it started
“I started during COVID,” one mother of three tells me, resting her elbows on the table between pauses in the afternoon rush. She keeps her name off the record, old habit, she says, from learning not to call attention to cash. “I was at home with the children. Schools closed. Shop closed. My husband’s work slowed. POS gave me a way to support the house.”
Her beginning was practical. She went to a nearby operator’s office, Moniepoint in her case; OPay for others, registered and paid for a device, somewhere between ₦20,000 and ₦25,000. “When you hear it, it sounds like small money,” she says, “but at that time, it was everything. I begged my sister for half. We added.”
The first day felt like a test. Would customers come? Would the machine work? Would cash flow? “I put an umbrella, put chair. I wrote ‘POS HERE’ on cardboard,” she says, laughing at the memory. “From that day, people started calling me ‘madam cash.’”
The nickname stuck. The work did too.
How the machine meets the money
If you’ve ever wondered where POS agents get their cash, the answer is: it depends—and that’s part of the art.
Some women run POS beside an existing business, provisions, fruit stands, tailoring, cosmetics, phone accessories, and use their sales float as the daily source of cash. Others build a network, sourcing cash from high-volume cash businesses nearby: traders who prefer to deposit through agents rather than queue in a bank, people who handle cash-heavy sales and need regular offloading, even transport workers settling daily takings. In return, the agent earns a small fee per transaction and keeps her float alive.
“It’s relationship,” another operator explains. “If I help you clear your cash today, tomorrow when I’m short, you will bring to me. If your shop closes early, you’ll call me. We help each other.”
Over time, these relationships become the skeleton of a steady enterprise: a distributor who drops by at noon to change ₦200,000 into transfers; a nearby food canteen that hands over the day’s cash in exchange for an account credit; a streamer of small buyers whose ₦2,000 and ₦5,000 withdrawals keep the line moving and the float balanced. The women running these stands are not just tapping buttons; they’re balancing liquidity like miniature treasurers, reading the weather of the street.
The daily dance
By mid-morning, the pattern settles: a mother pays school fees transfer; a mechanic withdraws for spare parts; a student tops up data; a trader deposits earnings to avoid carrying cash home. The woman under the umbrella keeps the queue kind.
“Sir, abeg one minute. Madam, your alert will come, check your text.” Her voice is a calm centre. She knows people’s frustrations with the banks, the network, and the unpredictability of Nigeria’s transaction rails. She knows that trust is her currency.
On good days, the machine sings. On bad days, the network is moody and the sun is a furnace. When a transaction hangs, she holds the line with reassurance. “Don’t worry, if they return it, I will call you,” she tells a worried customer. She has learned to keep a ledger, names, numbers, and amounts, because the only thing worse than a failed transaction is a customer who feels ignored. Her book is full of tidy handwriting, each line a promise to fix what technology occasionally fumbles.
Profit—steady, until it isn’t
Ask how much she makes and you’ll get a measured answer. The women I spoke to described “stable profit” as enough to cover the day, feed the family, pay a helper sometimes, and save a little when luck smiles. But recently, many add the same caveat: too many agents, fewer customers.
“Before, we were only three on this street,” the mother of three says, gesturing up and down the row of shops. “Now, count. One, two, three… seven. People scatter. Some days, you will just sit and fan yourself.”
Competition has sliced the pie into thinner wedges. Margins, already modest, feel the pinch. Where a single stand once handled most withdrawals for the area, the crowding of POS points means each woman catches fewer fish in the same stream. It’s honest work, but not always predictable. A scorching afternoon with few customers can undo a good morning. A sudden burst of bank downtime can bring a flood, and the float must be ready to ride it.
Still, many of these women hold the line. The business gave them footing when the world wobbled; it still pays for books, soup pots, and rent. And it’s theirs.
Why women? The quiet advantages
If you stand beside a POS stand long enough, you’ll see it: the way customers lean in to ask extra questions, the way children run errands safely, the way a woman operator is folded into the neighbourhood’s daily choreography.
“People trust us,” one operator says simply. “If you quarrel with me today, tomorrow you will still come. You know I’m here.”
Trust is not abstract; it’s earned in the grind. Women often bring a patient presence, consistent hours, and a familiar face to the role. The job also offers flexibility: you can run it beside another business, close to home, with breaks aligned to school pickups and family routines. Start-up costs ₦20–₦25k for the machine plus float are not trivial, but they are often more attainable than other ventures.
There’s also safety-by-visibility. A POS stand in daylight, near people, run by someone known on the street, can feel safer than hustles that require moving around with goods after dark. “I prefer to sit,” a younger operator tells me. “My mother knows where I am. My auntie passes. My friends pass. If anything happens, they will shout.”
And then there is the unglamorous strength, the emotional labour of keeping calm through network hiccups, soothing anxious customers, and managing the delicate matters of other people’s money. Much of this, in Nigeria as elsewhere, is labour women already do, in families, in churches, in markets. At the POS table, it becomes a service with a fee.
A day with Madam K: the mother of three
By early afternoon, the sun takes a hard angle and the umbrella’s shadow moves like a sundial. Madam K, the mother of three who began in the lockdown, drinks warm water from a plastic bottle and laughs at how her day is an endless loop of tiny dramas.
She tells me about the first time she reversed a failed transaction. “The boy was shaking like they have caught him,” she says, imitating his panic. “I said, ‘Calm down. If it’s our fault, I will fix it.’ When the alert entered, he danced. He bought things for me as a thank you.”
She tells me about sourcing cash. On Mondays, she relies on the provisions shop behind her stand, small sales that swell into a usable float by noon. On Fridays, she has an arrangement with a nearby trader who sells in bulk. “He will bring his bag and say, ‘Madam, do transfer.’ That one helps me for the weekend.”
She tells me about the competition. “Sometimes, I see a new umbrella. Ah! Another one. It can pain,” she admits. “But I say, ‘God, give all of us our own customers.’ The market is large.”
She tells me about what the business changed. “I can buy books without waiting; I can add to house rent; I can make my hair when I like,” she says, smiling at the simple freedoms. “Before, I used to ask. Now, I can do small small.”
When I ask about her dream, she looks past the umbrella and sees something else, a tiny shop with a glass door, a fan that actually blows, an escape from the heat, the flies, maybe a signboard with her name. “I want to add other things,” she says. “Photocopy. Printing. Maybe phone accessories. If you come, you will not only withdraw; you will buy something too.”
In her head, she is already arranging the shelves.
The cost of standing still
For all the quiet power of these businesses, the women are frank about what strains them.
Oversaturation. “Every junction, POS,” one operator shrugs. “Some people even carry machine in their bag.” With more agents chasing similar volumes, fees go down, negotiations go up, and the daily take-home becomes a mood swing.
Network and reversals. The technology works, until it doesn’t. When it fails, the agent becomes a mediator between a customer’s anxiety and a system that returns money on its own time. “We keep a book,” says an older operator, tapping her ledger. “We call, we follow up. If it’s small, sometimes I even cover from my own. Because peace is better.”
Security. Though daylight and community reduce risk, cash is cash. Some women choose spots near other shops; some keep a helper to watch while they step away; some close early if the street empties. “We read the air,” one says. “If the street feels somehow, I carry my money and go.”
Price of entry. While ₦20–₦25k for a machine plus float is manageable for many, it remains a barrier for some. Many women borrow from family or combine savings to begin. “It’s training wheels money,” one laughs. “But it’s money.”
The neighbourhood bank that isn’t a bank
The more time you spend at these stands, the more obvious it becomes: POS women are doing last-mile banking. They are not just pushing buttons; they are smoothing the frictions of a system that often asks ordinary people to wait too long, too far, too often.
That nearby stand is where you go when bank queues are impossible, when transfers need a human face, when you want to move with less cash, when data and airtime run out at the worst moment. It’s where a student testing a new debit card can practice, and an elderly customer who never understood “USSD” can be gently guided through a modern ritual: card, PIN, receipt, smile.
These women are, in their way, teachers of the financial present.
A small economy of dignity
There is dignity in this work, if you know where to look for it. It’s in the careful way a woman counts out ₦100 notes and tucks them into an envelope for a market woman who wears her day on her skin. It’s in the way a teenager returns change and hears “God bless you” like a blessing that lands. It’s in the stool a neighbour pulls out unasked, in the auntie who sends her child to buy biscuits as a quiet thank-you, in the “madam cash” nickname that holds the many lives these women thread together.
This dignity is also economic. The job can be the difference between “we will manage” and “we will breathe.” It spreads risk across a family. It makes a woman visible as an earner and a keeper of trust, two roles that reshape how a household moves.
“Before, if I talk, they will say I don’t understand money,” one woman tells me, smiling without bitterness. “Now, if I talk, they will listen small.”
What tomorrow could be
When I ask each woman what she wants next, the answers bend in similar directions: bigger float, a proper kiosk, a small printer, two staff, more services. Nobody is dreaming of leaving the street entirely; most want to thicken their place in it, to turn a table into a shop, a shop into a small centre where people can do more than withdraw money.
Some imagine partnerships: with a courier service for deliveries, with a small bank branch to handle deposits in bulk, with a school to become the trusted place for fees. It’s growth, but not the kind that loses the neighbourhood. It’s scaled proximity—the same face, only under a better fan.
The work that looks like waiting
Late afternoon settles, and the line thins to a trickle. The umbrella flaps in a restless breeze. The street is no longer rushing; it’s simmering. The women tap, count, staple, smile. People pass and greet with that deep Nigerian intimacy: “Well done.” “Una weldone o.” “Madam banker, good job.”
It is work that looks like waiting: for a transaction to confirm, for a customer to find their PIN, for a network to catch its breath. But inside that waiting is a choreography of competence, cash sourced, float balanced, disputes defused, trust maintained, family fed, dreams stretched a little further across another sun.
When she closes for the day, the mother of three will take a last look at her ledger, zip her bag, pull down the umbrella, and push her table to the shop wall. She’ll buy vegetables on the way home, think about school uniforms, and smile at the thought of a signboard with her name. Tomorrow, she’ll come back to her corner of the city’s money river and do the thing she’s become very good at: making cash flow where people live.
And if you pass by, thirsty from the heat and thinking of the long queue you avoided at the bank, she’ll look up and say, like a refrain: “₦5,000 abi? Oya, enter your PIN.”
A note on the mechanics (for the curious)
- Getting started: Most operators register at an agent office, Moniepoint, OPay, and others, paying ₦20,000–₦25,000 for the POS device after onboarding.
- Cash sourcing: Floats often come from the operator’s sales (for those who run a parallel shop) or nearby high-cash businesses that exchange their daily takings for transfers.
- Earnings: Many women describe steady, if modest, daily profit, enough to keep the lights on and build slowly, though growing competition has thinned margins in some areas.
- Challenges: Oversaturation, network issues, and occasional security concerns require patience, record-keeping, and street smarts.
- Why women dominate: Trust, consistency, proximity, and flexibility, qualities that fit the role and the realities of care work, draw many women to the frontline of this small but mighty financial system.
In a country where access can be a journey, these women bring banking to the doorstep quietly, capably, every day.
Read Also: https://techsudor.com/how-women-are-pivoting-into-tech-from-other-careers/
