M-Pesa Lessons: What North Africa Can Learn From Kenya

M-Pesa is the best-known fintech story to come out of Africa: a phone-based money transfer service that, in less than two decades, became the backbone of Kenya's economy. But it also failed when exported to a market that did not need it. The M-Pesa lessons that matter for North Africa are less about technology than about regulation, cash networks and fit with local needs.

How M-Pesa started

Safaricom, the Kenyan operator partly owned by Vodafone, launched M-Pesa in March 2007. Kenya was then a largely unbanked country: according to the FinAccess survey cited by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), only 19% of the population had a bank account in 2006, while 55% had access to a mobile phone.

The service let users deposit cash with an agent, send it by text message and let the recipient withdraw it from another agent. Early growth was fast. AFI's 2010 case study records 2.5 million active customers in May 2008 and more than 8.5 million customers and 12,000 agents by November 2009.

Lesson 1: the regulator chose to engage

The decisive step was regulatory. Kenya had no specific law for mobile money. In January 2007, the Central Bank of Kenya's (CBK) legal team concluded that M-Pesa was not banking business, because customer funds were not lent out and earned no interest. In February 2007, the acting governor issued a letter of no objection with conditions on system integrity, consumer protection, anti-money laundering and record keeping.

CBK then supervised the service step by step. Safaricom had to seek approval for each new use case, such as bulk salary payments and merchant payments in 2008, and send monthly reports. Former governor Njuguna Ndung'u recalled in July 2026, as reported by Capital FM, that he initially found "a very hostile central bank", with some officials seeing the service as a money-laundering risk.

For Tunisia, the parallel is the Central Bank's regulatory sandbox and its payment institution regime. The Kenyan case shows that a regulator can allow a new model under strict conditions and tighten rules as it learns.

Lesson 2: protect the money, then build the network

Two design choices limited risk from the start:

• Trust account. Customer balances were held in a pooled trust account at a commercial bank, so the money backing electronic value was always there.
• Pre-funded agents. Agents bought their electronic float in advance and Safaricom reconciled it daily. Neither customers nor Safaricom took credit risk on agents.

The agent network was the real product. People trusted M-Pesa because they could turn digital money back into cash nearby. A wallet without convenient cash-in and cash-out points stays marginal, a lesson Wave later applied in West Africa (see how Wave disrupted mobile money pricing).

M-Pesa today

Nearly 20 years after launch, M-Pesa is Safaricom's main growth engine. According to Safaricom's results for the year to March 2026, reported by HapaKenya and The Kenya Times:

• M-Pesa revenue reached KSh 182.7 billion, up 13.4%, or 45.6% of service revenue in Kenya;
• the service had 40.99 million one-month active customers in Kenya;
• merchants accepting M-Pesa rose 71% to 3.1 million;
• M-Pesa Ethiopia reached 5.2 million 90-day active users.

Capital FM reports that M-Pesa processed KSh 41.68 trillion in the 12 months to March 2026. Kenya also has one of the highest account ownership rates in Africa: 90.1% of adults in 2024, according to World Bank Findex data compiled by Intelpoint.

Lesson 3: it does not copy and paste

Vodacom launched M-Pesa in South Africa in 2010 with a target of 10 million users in five years. By March 2015 it had about one million registered users and only about 76,000 active ones, and Vodacom announced its closure in 2016, as ITWeb reported.

Analysts quoted by ITWeb gave clear reasons. South Africa already had high bank penetration and banks served low-income customers. M-Pesa added little beyond a USSD menu. Kenya, by contrast, combined a large unbanked population, a strong domestic remittance culture, regulatory openness and a dominant operator.

What it means for Tunisia and North Africa

Tunisia sits between the two cases. Many adults remain outside the banking system, but La Poste, banks and cards already cover part of the population. Mobile money is still small. According to the Central Bank's Payments Bulletin No. 17, reported by Challenges.tn, Tunisia had 512,000 active mobile wallets and 18 licensed payment service providers in the first half of 2026. Mobile transactions totalled 5.0 million, worth 914.2 million dinars.

The market is also opening to telecom operators. In March 2026, Tunisie Telecom launched the Kashy wallet with Viamobile, a licensed payment institution, through about 30 outlets, according to Ecofin Agency.

The practical lessons for Tunisian founders and regulators:

• Start from a real need. In Kenya it was sending money home. In Tunisia, candidates include domestic transfers, bill and school payments, and diaspora remittances.
• Cash points decide adoption. Post offices, shops and telecom outlets can serve as agents if rules allow it and float is managed.
• Proportionate rules. Safeguarded funds and step-by-step approval can protect users without blocking new entrants.
• Interoperability matters. Kenya's single dominant wallet is not a model to copy. Tunisia's mobile payment landscape is more fragmented, so shared rails and common standards will matter more.