Kenya’s largest telecom company, Safaricom, will implement a fee-waiver on East Africa’s leading mobile-money product, M-Pesa, to reduce the physical exchange of currency in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The company announced that all person-to-person (P2P) transactions under 1,000 Kenyan Schillings (≈ $10) would be free starting Tuesday for the next 90 days.
The move came after Safaricom met with the country’s Central Bank and per a directive from Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta “to explore ways of deepening mobile-money usage to reduce the risk of spreading the virus through physical handling of cash,” according to a release provided to TechCrunch from Safaricom.
To encourage the use of digital payments over cash, the East African telecom will also allow SMEs to increase their daily M-Pesa transaction limits from 70,000 Kenyan Schillings to 150,000 (≈ $700 to $1,500).
The decision by the Central Bank of Kenya to remove barriers to mobile money transactions is a step in the right direction considering the ease with which germs spread through paper notes and coins.
However, a statement from the Bank of Ghana is in sharp contrast to the one from their Kenyan counterparts as no mention is made of mobile payments.
The Bank of Ghana simply issued directives to banks, savings and loans, and microfinance companies without recourse to the need to reduce the person to person contract completely.
Ghana’s attempt to build a cashless economy received a huge boost when the government in December 2019 launched a Universal QR code payment system. Vice president Bawumia who launched the system, said with the QR code which leverages existing technologies, traders and businesses will be able to receive payments without a point of sale device. We are yet to see a full operationalization of the system especially now that it’s crucial that payments are done with digital tools to stem the spread of a deadly virus.
