Kenya’s M-Pesa Now Has 50 Million Africans Using Its Mobile Money Platform

Safaricom’s mobile money platform M-Pesa has attained a new milestone after reaching 50 million active users in Africa. This automatically makes the mobile money platform the most popular and most used platform in the whole of Africa. M-Pesa announced the new achievement on Tuesday making it one of the biggest wins for the platform since it launched in 2007.

The Kenya based Fintech platform has achieved so much since it started in 2007. It is currently operational in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Ghana, and Egypt. It is used by over 500,000 businesses in Africa and has about 500,000 agents across the countries where it is operational.

The founders of M-Pesa launched the platform in 2007 intending to provide financial services that are realistic and meet the needs of Africans. With M-Pesa, individuals and businesses can send and receive money from anywhere in the world and make payments. It currently powers transactions across 200 countries and territories. According to Business Insider Africa, M-Pesa is the most popular and the largest fintech in the whole of Africa. M-Pesa, alongside a handful of other fintech companies in Africa, has been pushing the growth of financial inclusion in the continent.

According to Safaricom, over 500,000 businesses make transactions worth at least $7 billion using M-Pesa’s platform. Speaking on the new milestone it just set, Sitoyo Lopokoiyit – MD, M-Pesa Africa said that “14 years ago, we launched M-PESA to connect our customers to each other and to different opportunities. We are delighted to celebrate this remarkable milestone with our more than 50-million customers across the continent”. The new milestone comes less than 2 years after the launch of its M-Pesa Joint Venture aimed at accelerating the growth and expansion of M-Pesa across the continent.

Still speaking on M-Pesa’s achievement, Sitoyo Lopokoiyit added that “as an honour to this achievement, we are reiterating our commitment and deepening our focus on more innovations that will further transform the lives of our customers”.

M-Pesa is not resting after this achievement. It has also expanded its partnerships across the continent and plans on providing better and improved services to its users.