banking

Kenya is the global hotspot for all things mobile money.  The two chief payment systems, Safaricom M-PESA and Zain Zap, not only share ten million subscribers, but moved ten percent of Kenyan gross domestic product last year.  According to Danson Muchemi, Philip Nyamwaya and Agosta Liko, the respective CEOs of JamboPay, iPay and PesaPal, those figures represent a massive market opportunity.

Danson highlights “very low banking services penetration” as the impetus behind JamboPay, the first online payment gateway in Kenya that processes credit & debit cards.  By topping up an “online purse” via credit/debit card or mobile money, JamboPay enables users to buy online goods from Kenyan merchants without exposing their information.  Unbanked users can access the service by topping up their accounts via mobile money.  Ultimately, JamboPay aims to mitigate the same market failure that gave rise to PayPal in the West: the need for secure and multi-channel access to e-commerce.

As part of the Tech4Society conference on mobile technology held in Nairobi earlier this year, a group of us (Ashoka and Lemelson Staff, as well as Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows) were privileged to visit a branch of Jamii Bora, the largest and fastest growing microfinance institution in East Africa. "Jamii Bora" literally means “Good Families” in the language of Kiswahili, and was founded by Ashoka Senior Fellow, Ingrid Munro in 1999. We wanted to get an up close look at what made this organization successful, and we were not disappointed.

As we pulled into the parking lot, we were welcomed by a crowd of people including young men in dusty t-shirts, a beautiful and statuesque woman dressed in red, older women, and a short woman in a professional grey suit with a warm smile who led the group. It took a few minutes to realize they were dancing and clapping for our arrival and we stepped off the bus gingerly, not sure how to react. We shook hands, hugged, and let ourselves be swept inside.