After 10 years of progression in the mobile money service, Vodafone finally marks the 10th anniversary of M-Pesa as the world’s leading service. It has been revealed that a record 614 million M-pesa transactions were processed last year, December 2016.
Vodafone has tremendously grown that it now offers M-pesa in 10 countries: India, Albania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Romania and Tanzania. By the end of December 2016, M-pesa had served almost 29.5 million active customers through a network of more than 287,400 agents.
The service was designed to enable customers to transact 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 can visit an M-Pesa agent to top up their M-Pesa account and can use their mobile phone to pay for bills, shop or send money to other users.
M-Pesa has also helped reduce the potential risks of street robbery, burglary and petty corruption within cash-based economies where people are limited.
So far, only a small proportion of the population benefit from access to conventional financial services. M-Pesa has been a great initiative that has empowered tens of millions of people in the poorest communities in the world to start and gown businesses and gain greater financial resilience.