Vodaphone Safaricom and Visa launch ‘M‑PESA GlobalPay’ virtual card that enables customers to use M‑PESA to shop at more than 100 million merchants across 200 countries for the first time
Once upon a time, communication used to be through smoke signals. Slowly but surely human evolution brought with it the gadget we now know as the telephone. His name was Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born inventor, scientist, and engineer who was credited with patenting the first practical telephone.
No one was prepared for how rapidly we would embrace this technology. Yet in little time, the same gadget would be used for purposes that were meant for cameras, desktops, radio, and television. Sooner or later the internet was available to citizens across the world regardless of the continent.
The Mpese Enables Commerce
The African continent has been a beneficiary of technology. The nation of Kenya for example has not only seen many of these benefits — Kenya has embraced it to the point of coming up with innovations like Mpesa.
Mpesa is a mobile phone-based money transfer service, payments, and micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Safaricom. Today, Vodaphone is the largest mobile network operator in Kenya.
The Mpesa has since expanded to Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, Afghanistan, and South Africa.
Apart from this, jobs have been created through the internet in the form of content creation, a goldmine that is reaping millions for not just companies, but also for citizens who have embraced and taken full advantage of it.
But like anything else, the internet has its downsides. Nevertheless, we have found ways of nipping the wrongs in a bud, by policing the predators and protecting our young.
What Shall We Do Now?
Let us all jump onto this train and get comfortable since the Internet is here to stay. Truth be told, we live in an era where digitization is sipping right into our homes and businesses.
Kenya’s mobile money transfer technology has become a major area of study all over the world. This innovation from Africa, is one of the world’s major innovations of the century, thanks to the internet and technology.
Africa has moved ahead and can use Mpesa as one of its unifying factors.
