Government Partnerships: Vodafone has entered into a partnership with the Ministry of Social Development in Lesotho to pay welfare grants using M-Pesa. Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture is now paying fertilizer subsidies using M-Pesa. In India, the National Rural Livelihoods Mission utilises M-Pesa to enable financial inclusion for women’s groups and the National Rural Health Mission is using the service to disburse pre-natal health benefits.
India: The launch of an M-Pesa smartphone app enables Indian customers to use M-Pesa to pay for goods on Ebay, for taxis with TabCab and to book train tickets on India’s national railways. Enterprises including Walmart are using M-Pesa in India to improve cash management and business efficiency.
Lesotho: Vodafone launched a service enabling customers to convert airtime to M-Pesa credit to pay for emergency treatment. Also, hundreds of community health workers across seven hospitals and 67 clinics managed by Partners in Health are now paid using M-Pesa and international children’s charity World Vision pays a portion of employee salaries using M-Pesa.
Mozambique: Global development agencies now use M-Pesa to pay employee salaries and allowances. Water, electricity and pay television companies in the country collect payments via M-Pesa. The national carrier LAM also accepts M-Pesa for air tickets.
Tanzania: Solar solution companies including Mobisol, Off-Grid Electric, M-Kopa and others use M-Pesa to help provide affordable clean energy for thousands of rural households. Qatar Airways and KLM now accept M-Pesa for air tickets from Tanzania.
Kenya: Safaricom has partnered with healthcare finance organisations PharmAccess Foundation and CarePay to introduce M-Tiba, a mobile health wallet that channels money from donors and government meant for health services directly to recipients. Customers can redeem their savings digitally with cashless access to a network of registered clinics and pharmacies. The World Food Programme is using M-Pesa to help deliver their food aid programme in Kenyan refugee camps.
Over the past 12 months, Vodafone has agreed a series of deals with partners to enable M-Pesa customers to transact with other services and across borders, including:
- Global Framework Agreements with two international money transfer hubs, TransferTo and MFS For Africa, laying the foundations for strong partnerships with other money transfer operators around the world.
- An agreement with MTN Mobile Money to enable direct money transfers between M-Pesa and MTN customers in seven countries across East Africa.
- The launch of international money transfer services in Romania, Lesotho and Albania.
- An agreement between Tanzania’s major mobile operators, including Vodacom, to enable their domestic mobile money services to be fully interoperable – the first market in Africa to do so.
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