Oh yeah, I remember – organised crime, terrorism, consumer profiling, money laundering, child pornography, etc, etc ; I guess they don’t have any of that in Kenya.
Or maybe they just don’t have the FSA:
BBC NewsCash culture
Soon you will even be able to pay for a trip by Matutu by mobile phone. To find out how I zipped across Mombasa to the offices of Safaricom, one of the two network providers in Kenya, part owned by Vodafone. It let me film the launch of a project called M-Pesa – and, read my lips, I said “launch” not “trial”.
M-Pesa does not look spectacular.
It is simply an extra line on your mobile phone menu that says: “Send Money”. You go to an office, transfer funds onto your phone account, and then send them to your friends, or family, or anybody else with a mobile. Then, they go to an office, show the code on the mobile and some ID, and collect the cash.
Even just working in Kenya it’s going to revolutionise things – because plastic money and bank accounts are not greatly in evidence in this country as more than 50% of its people are classed as living in abject poverty.
But once it goes global – and Vodafone says it will – then the $93bn of remittance money sent by migrants to developing countries each year could start flowing this way. Basically mobiles could be about to make Africa a very much more liquid economy.
The whole article is worth a read. In the light of friends who have recently visited Uganda and South Africa and reporting similar, and knowing other people who read this blog, I’d be interested in views on the comment from the article “How big a change have cellphones made to Africa?” I shout the question at Isis Nyong’o, over the throbbing bassline of a Kenyan ragga track. She tells me calmly: “It’s had about the same effect as a democratic change of leadership.”
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