Kenya’s Safaricom has introduced a new service that is aimed at helping Corporates and Public Benefit Organisations (PBOs) to track transactions of funds once they are released to beneficiaries, in a hope to monitor how the money is spent.
Dubbed M-Pesa SurePay, the solution has been designed specifically for the organisations that use the mobile wallets to send money directly to their programs beneficiaries’ phones but do not have a way of knowing whether the money was put into good use or it just wasted away.
The funding organizations will now be able to set restrictions on where the money is spent through the new service and as a result overcome the challenge of mismanagement and misappropriation of the funds by overseeing the entire value chain from the time of disbursement to expenditures.
M-Pesa SurePay also provides services for corporations where it can be used to pay salaries to staff in remote areas where financial institutions are minimal or do not have a good coverage, with plans to also be used in distributing loans to farmers across the nation to aid in inputs purchase.
Some of the PBOs have already expressed their excitement for the new solution, saying it will be a good way to confirm that money given out is spent for the function it was intended; it will be vital for accountability purposes.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is one such organization that says by using M-Pesa SurePay to send food vouchers to beneficiaries in affected counties across the country, they will be able to ensure the money is used to buy the food and they can also monitor how much is left.
With M-Pesa having been the biggest innovations of all time (should be losing that title very soon) and being attributed for the significant growth in the mobile money sector as it reached over 21 million customers, this new solution will only take it to greater heights as organisations that didn’t use the platform before seeing the need to do so now.
The telecom has this week opened another data centre but the best of its kind in Eldoret town, in the North Rift region of Kenya as part of its efforts to improve the quality of network as well as enhance the efficiency of installation and maintenance of the network infrastructure in the region.
With a 20 million investment into the project, the data centre dubbed MCW site has been established at Kapsoya and is the newest entrant to the 11 data hubs that Safaricom has across the country.
