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It is no exaggeration to say that Kenya's economy depends on M-Pesa. According to the Central Bank of Kenya, the value of all transactions between June 2013 and June 2014 represented 39 percent of the country's GDP. M-Pesa moves more than one billion Swiss francs per year, and in fiscal year 2014 it earned the parent company 268 million francs, an increase of 21.6 percent over the previous year.

It all started eight years ago – because of the family members who stayed home. As in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, most of Kenya's population are farmers who live on the land. Young people in search of an education and jobs are drawn to the cities. If those earning money in the city wanted to support their parents financially, they long had to rely on uncertain and risky methods. They could send cash with a neighbor or a bus driver who happened to be driving through their village. Or they could send a postal money order, but that could take weeks, often failed to arrive, and in any case was possible only if the recipient had a post office box. This was about as unlikely as having a bank account.At the time, in 2007, several million Kenyans owned a cell phone with a Safaricom number. Then this phone number essentially became a virtual bank account number. Starting in March of that year, Safaricom customers could upload money to their cell phone and send it to other Safaricom customers. It arrived within minutes, and the recipient was informed with a text message. The money could be forwarded or received as cash from an M-Pesa agent.Two weeks after introducing the service, Safaricom had nearly 20,000 active M-Pesa users. After seven months, there were one million. Today,  20 million customers in Kenya are registered. More than 83,000 agents in cities and rural areas assist customers in uploading, sending and receiving money. Rural Kenyans with no banking options leaped from the agricultural age straight into the digital tomorrow.And transferring money from one cell phone to another was only the start. Today, users can pay their electricity and water bills, get cash from an ATM, buy airline tickets, add phone time, buy concert tickets, pay the taxi driver or butcher and take out a small loan, perhaps to purchase a solar panel that brings electricity to their home for the first time. 

This is mainly because of its sensational claim that ‘access to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty.’

According to this article, M-Pesa was not just making profits, but the evidence seemed to show it was also making an astonishing ‘bottom-up’ development and poverty reduction contribution. This poverty reduction claim, often cited in full in media articles, quickly became the centrepiece of the evidence used by many in the international development community to justify its increasingly strong support for, and investment in, the fin-tech model.

he core issue of individual over-indebtedness, which in Kenya is now approaching crisis levels and which has a clear and direct link to the operation of M-Pesa, was not even mentioned as a possible downside of the fin-tech development model. For such an important and well-financed project, the methodology was also weak, diverging from many of the standard ‘best practices’ in the impact evaluation field.

This is an independent charitable trust established to invest in interventions that improve the social and economic status of Kenyans. Since 2010, the Foundation has invested in large scale health, environmental conservation, education and integrated water projects. The M-PESA Foundation integrates the use of mobile technology in its investments while focusing on areas of greatest need and impact.

Any move to disrupt M-Pesa would have a dramatic effect on the Kenyan economy. Joshua Oigara, head of the Kenyan bank KCB Group which is a partner of Safaricom for M-Pesa, estimates that about a quarter of Kenya’s gross domestic product is processed over the platform. M-Pesa is already used to pay salaries, book bus tickets and settle invoices in most of its markets. In Kenya it has expanded into more advanced financial services including small loans, supply chain finance, insurance and a growing number of in-store and ecommerce services.