‘Dear customer, M-PESA is currently experiencing delays…..’ is not the kind of SMS you want to receive when you are conducting an M-Pesa transaction, be it an urgent or a not so important one. The mad expression on people’s faces when such a message pops up likely suggests that it’s their God given right to have all their M-Pesa transactions go through within a blink of an eye, unfortunately this isn’t always the case.

Are we over reliant on M-Pesa?

There was an outage of M-Pesa services over the weekend caused by a power outage on a Vodafone server in Germany on Saturday night.  Of the 1,055 comments posted on Safaricom Kenya official facebook page, by our analysis, at least 77 per cent expressed customer dissatisfaction with the outage.

Are we that reliant on M-Pesa that a 24 hour service outage would cause such an issue?

It’s mainly because M-Pesa has deepen financial inclusion particularly for the un-banked population. As posted in thinkm-pesa.com, a month after its launch, Safaricom registered over 20,000 M-Pesa customers. The average number of new registrations per day exceeded 5,000 in August that year and reach nearly 10,000 in December. To date, more than 15 million Kenyans use M-Pesa and have transferred about 20 per cent of National GDP through the system.

If that’s not enough, as posted on thinkm-pesa.com, statistics on financial access before the launch of M-Pesa in Kenya show that the formal financial systems i.e. banks served just over a quarter (26.4%) of Kenya’s adult population. With the birth of M-Pesa, about 70 per cent of financial transactions are handled by M-Pesa.

M-Pesa evolved from being a basic money transfer plat form to a service that allows users to pay their utility bills, make purchases, payroll system and in the recent past has become a key player in international money transfer.

From our analysis of the Facebook comments in regard to the recent M-Pesa outage, those hardest hit were those trying to buy prepaid electricity tokens through their phones. Kenyans, known for their love of waiting till the last minute found themselves in a dilemma after being unable to purchase electricity tokens with only 3 units left in their meters.

Drinking joints have recognized the power of M-Pesa, a classic example being Brew Bistro, and have grown to accept M-Pesa payments from revelers. We are pretty sure a couple of revelers found themselves in a dilemma after discovering they couldn’t pay their bill using M-Pesa. One Facebook comment we stumble on was of a guy who was forced to pill potatoes, wash dishes and mop the floor since he was caught off guard, unable to settle his bill.

With the frequent car long distance car jacking’s, travelers opt to store their money in their M-Pesa accounts. Handling large amounts of cash over a weekend can be a risky affair, M-pesa has a safe avenue to store you money. In as much as this is the case, the recent M-Pesa outage saw users unable to access their money. While no amount of money was reported missing after the outage, the mere fact of being denied access to your money can be very frustrating.

 In as much as ‘lugha ya pesa ni M-Pesa’ (The language of money is M-Pesa) as the saying goes, like any other man made service, over reliance on it can have some negative consequences as those experienced by 77 per cent of users who expressed dissatisfaction with the service.