Podcast

Breaking Banks: Mobile Money in Kenya

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MPESA, named after the Swahili word for money, is Kenya’s mobile money system developed by Safaricom. It has transformed how people work, save, and pay for groceries, bills, rents, and everything else. Kenya reports that use of MPESA has helped to lift 186,000 families out of poverty. That is nearly 2% of the entire population. And it has allowed wealth to grow across the board, helping to develop a stronger middle class.

MPESA
An employee uses a Nokia 1200 mobile phone inside an M-Pesa store in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, April 14, 2013. In the six years since Kenya's M-Pesa brought banking-by-phone to Africa, the service has grown from a novelty to a bona fide payment network. Photographer: Trevor Snapp/Bloomberg
Trevor Snapp/Bloomberg

This episode tells the story of MPESA, and how it came to partner with banks, particularly KCB, to give all people access to banking services, to easy movement of their money, helping them to save and build wealth.