Safaricom recently announced that its Ethiopia operations were growing with leaps and bounds and its M-PESA numbers nearly tripled in four months to 3.1 million with Sh18.5 billion transactions.
Safaricom Plc, Chief Executive Officer, Peter Ndegwa, Safaricom Ethiopia has made significant progress in expanding network roll-out and the great momentum M-PESA has gained since switching on M-PESA services on 15 Aug 2023.
“It is now over one year since we launched commercial operations in Ethiopia in October 2022. Commercial momentum remained positive having recorded 9.0Mn gross customer additions since launch and attained 4.3Mn 90-day active customers as at December 2023. We have covered 33% of the population and are on track to meet all license coverage obligations.”
Ndegwa added that mobile data is a key proposition in Ethiopia with usage per chargeable Mobile data subscriber now at 4.76GB as at the end of Q3. This momentum in usage levels which has now surpassed Kenya. Nationals can now bring up to $4,000 into Ethiopia without declaring the money to customs officials, up from $1,000. The amount non-Ethiopians can bring to the country with no need to disclose has more than tripled from $3,000 to $10,000.
On 10th May 2023, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) granted the payment instrument issuer license to the Safaricom M-PESA Mobile Financial Services PLC and it launched deposits, withdrawals, transfers (P2P), airtime and data package purchase, M-PESA to Bank (C2B) and Bank to M-PESA (B2C), merchant payments and international money remittances services. By 31st December 2023, the firm announced it had 3.1Mn registered customers, 26.2k M-PESA Agents and 43.1k Merchants.
M-PESA is now interoperable with 9 banks including Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Dashen Bank, Bank of Abyssinia, Awash International Bank, Co-operative Bank of Oromia, Abay Bank, Hibret Bank, Berhan Bank and Bunna Bank for M-PESA to Bank. For Bank to M-PESA services the firm is interoperable with 7 banks including Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Dashen Bank, Bank of Abyssinia, Awash International Bank, Co-operative Bank of Oromia, Abay Bank, and Bunna Bank.
Ethiopia’s Banking sector has huge opportunities for Safaricom as there are 30 banks operating in the country consisting of 8,250 branches, serving the country’s population.
According to the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) the percentage of adult population with an account at a financial institution stood at 45% in 2020. The National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS 2021–2025) aims to increase financial inclusion from 45% to 70% of all adults by 2025, in part by scaling digital payments through mobile money services. The country also aims to increase the use of digital payments from 20% of all adults in 2020 to 49% by 2025. 63Mn people in Ethiopia are over 18 years with 13.5Mn being between the age of 13-18 years.
