Dispatches from the diaspora

GLASGOW, DELAWARE

The phone call from her sister back in Kenya came through a few minutes after she had clocked in at the beginning of her 3pm-to-11pm shift at Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware. Her mother had been involved in a road accident in Langas, Eldoret, and had been rushed to a local hospital. Janet Tanui, therefore, needed to immediately send money for an urgent operation on her mother.

“I just clicked on an application that’s linked to M-Pesa on my phone and in less than two minutes, I had transferred money from my Bank of America account to my sister’s M-Pesa account in Eldoret,” said Ms Tanui during a recent interview, adding that those few minutes she took to carry out the transaction saved her mother’s life. “I don’t know what I’d have done without this technology, to be honest. There was no other way to transfer money that fast from the US to Kenya.”

Washington Osiro, a Kenyan writer based in San Francisco, California, says he’s been able to accomplish many projects back in Kenya without necessarily having to travel back and forth partly because of the convenience of M-Pesa.

“As long as you have a good manager or trusted person in Kenya, you can complete projects such as home construction without having to incur a lot of travel expenses. That’s what I’ve been doing in the last four years,” he says.

You can transfer money...while lying in bed or having breakfast.

Kenya’s tech giant, Safaricom, is proving to be an important part of life for Kenyans in the diaspora, with M-Pesa at the centre of it. Recent reports indicate that Safaricom now controls 50 per cent of the money sent home by Kenyans in the diaspora through its M-Pesa Global platform. Kenyans living and working abroad wired home Sh284 billion through M-Pesa Global between April 1, 2019 and March 31, 2020, according to the Safaricom Sustainability Business Report 2020.

Safaricom unveiled M-Pesa Global in late 2018 to enable M-Pesa subscribers to send or receive cash from overseas using services such as Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria, WorldRemit, Wave, and Remitly, among others. According to the report, the number of M-Pesa Global subscribers has grown fourfold to 744,000 from 180,000 last year, while the total number of M-Pesa users increased by 10 per cent to 24.9 million.

David Ogega of Atlanta, Georgia, says Kenyans abroad have been big beneficiaries of Safaricom’s M-Pesa because now one doesn’t need to go to a bank or money transfer agency to send money home as was the case a few years ago. “Nowadays, you can transfer money to your relatives, friends or business partners while lying in bed or having breakfast,” he said.

Through M-Pesa Global, subscribers are able to send or receive cash from 167 countries. The platform has also been integrated with PayPal to allow users to move cash across the platforms and support e-commerce payments. The report further indicates that M-Pesa created a social value of Sh234.1 billion during the period under review.

The money transfer platform has had a huge impact on the remittances to Kenya while also facilitating the ease with which “money changes hands” on the domestic front. According to Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) figures, remittances from Kenyans in the diaspora now surpass tourism and agricultural exports (coffee, tea, and horticulture) as the country’s leading source of foreign exchange.