Opinion
An African idea about to go global
Give Africans a piece of technology and watch them invent a thousand uses for it. This idea was of course exaggerated for laughs in the 1980 hit movie The Gods Must Be Crazy where a single Coca Cola bottle thrown from a plane changed the lives of Khoisans living in the Kalahari Desert, using the unexpected “gift” from the gods for different purposes in the community.
In any event, it was not surprising that the mobile phone became one of the most transformative technologies in Africa in the Twenty-First century, more so when it was used in many African countries as a mobile bank.
What’s more, belatedly, big banks and telecommunication giants in North America have taken note of the utter potential of the mobile phone as a cashless wallet. This week, for example, Canadian banks and telecommunication giant Rogers released guidelines for business and money transactions using mobile phones.
The move prompted the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper to declare in a blazing headline “Banks plot mobile payment future”. The article went on to say about the new innovation, “It marks the start of a race to replace the traditional wallet with cashless digital payments through smartphones offering different payment options chosen by the consumer.”
But what the Globe and Mail and many news media editors across Canada failed to mention was that while the mobile phone continued its ascent in the USA and Canada as a communication tool using interfaces such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and so forth, on the African continent it quickly became a cash cow. In Kenya, Safaricom launched the first money transfer capability using the mobile phone in March 2007.
Christened M-PESA (a play on the Kiswahili word pesa meaning money), the sms-based system enables individuals to deposit, send, receive small amounts of money literally in seconds across vast distances where the phone company offers services through small retailers.
The South African WIZZIT system operates on a similar premise as M-PESA. Other mobile phone money transfer systems are in Tanzania, Sudan, Ghana and, to a limited extent elsewhere on the continent.
