M-Pesa Goes Global: Safaricom's Mobile Money Platform Expands to Six New Markets

When M-Pesa launched in Kenya in March 2007, it was a modest experiment: a partnership between Safaricom and Vodafone to allow mobile phone users to send money to each other using SMS technology. The target market was the unbanked — the millions of Kenyans who lacked access to formal financial services but owned a basic mobile phone. No one, not even its creators, predicted that M-Pesa would become the world's most successful mobile money platform, processing transactions equivalent to more than half of Kenya's GDP and serving over 51 million customers across seven countries.

Today, M-Pesa stands at the threshold of its most ambitious expansion. In a series of announcements spanning the first half of 2026, Safaricom and its parent company Vodafone have confirmed the launch of M-Pesa in six new markets: Ghana, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania (through a relaunch under the Vodacom/Safaricom partnership). The expansion will bring the platform's addressable market to approximately 400 million people across 13 countries, cementing M-Pesa's position as the dominant mobile money network in Africa.

"This is not just a commercial opportunity — it is a financial inclusion imperative," said Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa during the launch event in Accra in March. "There are 350 million adults in Africa who lack access to formal financial services. M-Pesa can close that gap."

The Ethiopia Breakthrough

The most significant of the new launches is Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country with approximately 120 million people and one of the lowest rates of financial inclusion on the continent. Safaricom Ethiopia, which won a telecommunications operating licence in 2021 and launched commercial services in October 2022, has already attracted approximately 12 million subscribers — a remarkable figure given the competitive intensity of the Ethiopian market.

The M-Pesa launch in Ethiopia, which began with a pilot in Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa in January 2026 before expanding nationally in March, has been structured as a partnership with the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, the country's largest bank. The partnership addresses the Ethiopian government's regulatory requirement that mobile money services be operated in conjunction with licensed financial institutions.

By early April, the platform had enrolled approximately 4.5 million users in Ethiopia, processing approximately 2.8 billion Ethiopian birr (approximately $23 million) in transactions per month. Agent networks are being established rapidly, with over 45,000 M-Pesa agents operating across the country's nine regional states and two chartered cities.

"Ethiopia represents the single largest opportunity for mobile money on the African continent," said Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, Safaricom's Chief Financial Services Officer. "The demand for digital financial services is enormous, and we are building the infrastructure to meet that demand at scale."

The Ghana Entry

Ghana, while a smaller market than Ethiopia, represents a strategically important expansion for M-Pesa. The country's mobile money ecosystem, already well-developed through the MTN Mobile Money platform, offered a competitive but accessible entry point. M-Pesa's strategy in Ghana has been to differentiate through pricing and product design, offering free person-to-person transfers below 100 Ghana cedis and lower merchant payment fees than incumbent platforms.

Safaricom has partnered with AirtelTigo, which holds a significant mobile subscriber base in Ghana, as the distribution channel for M-Pesa. The partnership leverages AirtelTigo's existing agent network of approximately 80,000 agents, reducing the time and cost of building physical distribution infrastructure.

After two months of operation, M-Pesa has captured approximately 12 percent of Ghana's mobile money market by transaction volume, positioning it as a credible challenger to MTN Mobile Money's dominant 72 percent share. The platform has processed approximately 4.5 billion cedis in transactions since launch.

Technology and Scale

The technical architecture underpinning M-Pesa's expansion has undergone a fundamental transformation since the platform's early days. The original system, built on a USSD platform optimised for basic feature phones, has been complemented by a smartphone application, an API platform for third-party integration, and a cloud-based infrastructure that allows rapid deployment in new markets.

Safaricom has invested approximately $500 million in the M-Pesa technology platform over the past three years, migrating from legacy systems to a microservices-based architecture hosted on Amazon Web Services. The new platform can process up to 2,000 transactions per second — a tenfold increase from the legacy system's capacity — and supports real-time settlement across borders.

The platform's open API architecture has attracted a growing ecosystem of third-party developers. The M-Pesa API platform now hosts approximately 2,800 registered applications, ranging from savings and lending products to insurance, payroll, and e-commerce integrations. In Kenya alone, the M-Pesa API processes approximately 45 billion shillings in third-party-initiated transactions per month.

Financial Inclusion Impact

M-Pesa's impact on financial inclusion in its existing markets has been extensively documented. In Kenya, where the platform has been operating for nearly two decades, the proportion of adults with access to formal financial services has increased from approximately 27 percent in 2006 to over 83 percent in 2025, according to the Financial Sector Deepening Kenya survey. A significant portion of this increase is directly attributable to mobile money.

The platform's impact extends beyond simple payments. M-Pesa's savings product, M-Shwari (launched in partnership with the Commercial Bank of Africa in 2012), has mobilised approximately 300 billion shillings in deposits from 24 million users since inception. KCB M-Pesa, a similar partnership with Kenya Commercial Bank, has disbursed over 500 billion shillings in micro-loans to 12 million borrowers.

The expansion into new markets is expected to replicate these inclusion gains at scale. The World Bank estimates that full deployment of M-Pesa across the six new markets could bring formal financial services to an additional 80 million people by 2030.

Regulatory and Competitive Challenges

The expansion has not been without challenges. Regulatory frameworks for mobile money vary significantly across African countries, requiring Safaricom and Vodafone to navigate a patchwork of licensing requirements, capital adequacy standards, and consumer protection regulations. In some markets, incumbents have lobbied regulators to impose conditions that slow the entry of new competitors.

In Ethiopia, the government initially required a two-year waiting period before mobile money services could be launched, a condition that was eventually relaxed following negotiations. In Cameroon, M-Pesa's launch was delayed by three months as the telecommunications regulator reviewed the platform's compliance with data localisation requirements.

Competitive dynamics also vary. In Tanzania, where Vodacom already operates M-Pesa (now being rebranded under the Safaricom partnership), the platform faces competition from Airtel Money and Tigo Pesa, with a combined market share that exceeds M-Pesa's. In the DRC, the market is dominated by Orange Money and Airtel Money, and M-Pesa will need to invest heavily in agent networks and brand building to gain traction.

The Future of Mobile Money

M-Pesa's global expansion is part of a broader shift in the African financial services landscape. Mobile money, once viewed as a niche product for the unbanked, is evolving into a comprehensive financial services platform that serves both formal and informal economies. The convergence of mobile money with digital banking, insurance, investment, and credit is creating financial ecosystems that are uniquely African in their design and scale.

Safaricom's ambition, as Ndegwa has articulated it, is for M-Pesa to become "the operating system of African commerce" — the foundational layer upon which financial services, commerce, and public service delivery are built. It is a vision that, if realised, would make M-Pesa not just a Kenyan success story but a continental infrastructure — as essential to African economies as roads, electricity, and telecommunications.

For the 400 million people in M-Pesa's expanded addressable market, the promise is simple but profound: financial services that are accessible, affordable, and designed for the way they live and work. It is a promise that M-Pesa has kept in Kenya for nearly two decades. Now it must keep it across Africa.