Vodafone Marks 10 Years of Mobile Money Service"M-Pesa'

By Tricitynews Reporter

Chandigarh 25^th February:- As Vodafone marks the 10th anniversary of M-Pesa, the world’s leading mobile money service, it was revealed that a record 614 million M-Pesa transactions were processed during December 2016.

Vodafone now offers M-Pesa services in 10 countries: Albania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Romania and Tanzania.  As of the end of December 2016, M-Pesa served almost 29.5 million active customers through a network of more than 287,400 agents.  During 2016, the service processed around 6 billion transactions, peaking in December 2016 at 529 transactions every second.

M-Pesa was launched by Vodafone’s Kenyan associate, Safaricom, on 6 March 2007. The service is designed to enable customers safely and securely to send, receive and store money via a basic mobile phone and, more recently in some markets, using a smartphone app. Customers visit an M-Pesa agent to top up their M-Pesa account and are then able to use their mobile phone to make purchases in shops and send money to other people who can then visit their nearest M-Pesa agent to withdraw their funds.

M-Pesa also reduces significantly the potential risks of street robbery, burglary and petty corruption within cash-based economies where only a small proportion of the population benefit from access to conventional financial services.

Vodafone Group Managing Director of M-Pesa, Michael Joseph, said: “M-Pesa is a revolution that has empowered tens of millions of people in some of the poorest communities in the world to start and grow businesses and gain greater financial resilience. All of us at Vodafone are very proud of how M-Pesa has enhanced our customers’ daily lives and helped them plan for the future with confidence.”

Andrew Dunnett, Director of the Vodafone Foundation, added that M-Pesa is a critical component of many of the Vodafone Foundation’s core health services, such as the Text to Treatment services we have launched in Lesotho and Tanzania. These services dramatically improve quality of life and in many cases, save lives – particularly in some of the remote and isolated areas that we serve.

According to a recent study conducted by MIT and published in the journal Science, M-Pesa has had a dramatic impact on the overall economy in Kenya – lifting some households above the poverty line and particularly benefiting families headed by women.  In one notable example, poverty fell 22% within a kilometre of where six M-Pesa agents opened between 2008 and 2010.   In Tanzania, financial exclusion was lowered by 50% as a result of mobile money services (source: Finscope 2013).

The M-Pesa Foundation, established in 2010, is an independent charitable trust investing in projects that improve the social and economic status of Kenyans. Funded by M-Pesa, it has supported a number of large-scale health, environmental, conservation, education and water projects - including the M-Pesa Foundation Academy, a boarding high school serving talented but disadvantaged Kenyan students with demonstrable leadership potential.