Safaricom Launches M-Pesa Mobile Money Service in Ethiopia

Kenyan telecom Safaricom has brought its mobile money service M-Pesa to Ethiopia.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Saturday (Aug. 26), the service went live in Africa’s second-most populous country this month, and will be promoted nationwide in September.

“By the end of September we will fully launch M-Pesa here. We have been building technology, created products, and will have M-Pesa integrated with more banks — the opportunity is massive,” Peter Ndegwa, chief executive of Safaricom, told the FT.

The report notes that Safaricom is Ethiopia’s first private telecom company, operating in a country widely seen as a key market for telecom firms, and a difficult one to access thanks to the nation’s history of government control of industries like banking.

As PYMNTS reported last year, that’s caused Ethiopia to trail other countries in Africa’s mobile money revolution.

That revolution has seen a majority of Africans embrace “technology at scale and managed to leapfrog into the future of digital payments,” Praveksha Maharaj, director of partnerships MEA at Entersekt told PYMNTS in an interview last month, using Safaricom as an example.

Since launching M-Pesa in 2007, that report said, Safaricom has accelerated financial inclusion in the region, with more than 40 million active customers and upwards of 500,000 merchants accepting M-Pesa as a currency to pay for goods and services just in Kenya.

As for Ethiopia, it was only in 2021 that the country got its first nationwide mobile money service in Telebirr, provided by the state-owned telecom company Ethio Telecom. In August 2022, Ethiopian FinTech Kacha Digital Financial Services became the first private company in the nation to win a mobile money license from the National Bank of Ethiopia.

“There is pent-up demand for a local mobile money service in the country, as evidenced by more than 1 million people registering a Telebirr account within a week of its launch,” PYMNTS wrote. “Ethiopia’s late arrival on the mobile money scene results from the restrictive nature of its telecom market, which, up until late 2022, locked private enterprises out of building and operating mobile networks.”

The FT report says a group led by Safaricom, which itself is part-owned by the U.K.’s Vodafone, paid $850 million two years ago for a telecom license and another $150 million in May for a mobile money license to do business in Ethiopia.

“This is a cash country, credit card penetration is not high here, there are a lot of rural markets that still need to be connected, so mobile money has all the ingredients of success,” Ndegwa said. “Ethiopia is the last frontier.”