Trusting and its Tribulations by Vigdis Broch-Due Margit Ystanes

Author:Vigdis Broch-Due, Margit Ystanes [Vigdis Broch-Due, Margit Ystanes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789208405
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2020-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

‘N’iko na Safaricom’: Kenya’s Digital Community

Safaricom launched its M-Pesa service in 2007. It recruited three hundred of its existing airtime agents to register new customers and perform e-money cash-in and cash-out transactions and payment transfers. By offering cash deposit and withdrawal services, agents earned fees, and were, in essence, intermediaries between Kenya’s cash market and Safaricom’s electronic currency, a position that brought new economic status and customers for a miscellany of merchandise they might sell. Contrary to popular perception, M-Pesa agents are not Safaricom employees, and must apply for a license to enter the market. As independent business persons they re-sell pre-purchased Safaricom e-money, which Safaricom backs up by a pool of assets. They also keep an activity log on top of transaction records that Safaricom monitors. Many own shops or stores beside bus stages and markets. They cultivate relationships with customers, and keep a highly visible lime-green Safaricom sign to designate their agent status.

In looking back at Safaricom’s advertisements and marketing strategies, one can discern the company’s need to build trust among customers, harnessing the message of obligation and contract to cultivate a ‘community’ of subscribers among a group of people for whom the concept of e-money was otherwise a risky proposition. Through the use of radio, billboard and print advertisement schemes, Safaricom rallied citizens around the slogan ‘send money home’, a catchphrase that closely mirrored the rhetoric of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and made the acts of account registration such as producing national ID less suspicious and burdensome. It supplied a vision of Kenya as a nation of migrants and remitters, and simultaneously proclaimed itself as integral in this project of household- and nation-building. Once M-Pesa users ‘top up’ their accounts, they can send or receive money instantly and receive a text message to confirm a money transfer or receipt. To some, the e-money system will always be a point of suspicion. Power outages cause delays, long lines for M-Pesa agents are often difficult to avoid, and Safaricom’s fee structures, as we were told repeatedly, are too high for many people of modest means. But Safaricom has made repeated attempts to campaign on the ground in local communities to protect its image. Projects, funded by its charity arm, the Safaricom Foundation, support company rhetoric and images of goodwill and assure Kenyans that Safaricom, a state-sponsored enterprise, exists for the benefit of citizens. Under its previous CEO Michael Joseph, the foundation administered a plethora of grants to build schools and initiate programs focusing on livestock management, water treatment, schools and so forth. It routinely sponsored charity projects with the Kenya Red Cross Society, an organization with uniquely popular appeal among Kenyans. In 2008, for example, after the country’s election crisis, which left several hundreds of thousands of people displaced, the company donated KSHs 15 million towards emergency relief and utilized an M-Pesa account to collect donations (Vodafone Group 2008).

It is something of an irony that Safaricom succeeded in using the image and sentiment of nationhood to appeal to consumers in a country that is otherwise fractured by political corruption and ethnic violence.

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