Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa has outlined an ambitious roadmap for Africa’s digital future, saying the company has already built many of the tools needed to create a connected regional digital economy.
Speaking at the Connected Africa Summit (C.A.S) Ndegwa pointed to Safaricom’s growth over the past 25 years, its expansion into Ethiopia, and the scale of its mobile money platform M-pesa as evidence of the company’s readiness to drive broader digital transformation across the region.
“We have learned a lot. So, we started our business 25 years ago, and today we are more than a 3-billion-dollar business. We’ve just gone into Ethiopia, and we already have close to 15 million customers in just four years.” He said.
M-PESA Scale and Digital Capacity
Ndegwa also highlighted the scale of M-pesa, noting its growing importance as a core financial infrastructure across the region.
He revealed that the mobile money platform has grown into one of the region’s most important financial services tools, handling massive daily activity while continuing to expand its technological capacity.
In addition, he said the company has upgraded its systems to significantly boost capacity and reliability.
“M-PESA actually transacts about 800 million dollars a day, more than 500 million transactions. We’ve just installed a new platform that’ll do 10,000 transactions per second.” Ndegwa said.
The top executive added that the scale of M-PESA demonstrates that the ingredients for a functioning digital market are already in place.
Read More: Why Africa’s Digital Future Depends on Seamless Connectivity
Building a Digital Market
Following this, the Safaricom CEO said the company believes Africa already has the core foundations needed to develop a digital marketplace.
He noted that existing platforms and use cases are already working, but emphasized the need to remove barriers that slow down adoption and innovation.
“So, what we have learned is, we actually have the ingredients for creating a digital market and M-pesa is already seven markets. So, the use cases are there, the actual platforms are there, but we need to remove the friction.” He noted.
Public Sector Digitization and Infrastructure
Safaricom also stated that it is working with government to accelerate public sector digitisation across key sectors including health, education, agriculture, and financial services.
The company noted that connectivity remains the foundation of this transformation, as it links people, services, and systems across the economy.
“We are working with the government to drive the public sector digitization in big sectors such as health, education, agriculture and also the whole financial services area. …and the reason why we are able to support is because we have the key assets that can be used to propel this. “He said.
Ndegwa said connectivity is critical as it links people and services, adding that there is a need to do more to improve access to handsets.
He noted that this is why Safaricom established a device assembly plant in Kenya, while also calling on countries to either reduce taxes on imported devices or encourage local manufacturing.
He further highlighted the importance of spectrum allocation, noting that emerging technologies such as satellite and non-terrestrial networks will play a greater role in expanding connectivity across the region.
Safaricom also called for increased investment in data centres and the establishment of clear regulatory frameworks to support both public and private cloud systems.
Driving Africa’s Digital Transformation
Looking ahead, Ndegwa said the next phase of Africa’s digital transformation will depend on stronger coordination between systems, deeper regional integration, and closer collaboration between public and private sectors.
He emphasized that these elements will be critical in unlocking seamless digital services across the continent.
“So, we are seeing the benefits of having assets like connectivity, benefits of having utilities like M-pesa which allows that to happen. Now we need to include digital IDs, we have an API which is what allow systems to work together,”
…but the most important is actually really connecting across the region and then enabling the public sector utilities like e-citizen and all those elements but the private, public, partnerships will make a very big difference.” He noted.
