Supporting ‘financial resilience’

Founded in 2011 in Kenya, M-KOPA has expanded into Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana and is currently starting operations in South Africa. By 2022, it had deployed greater than $1 billion in credit with a deal with providing solutions that give people access to the digital world and help them financially in a way that’s reasonably priced and sustainable.

Nancy Sangoro, director of customer experience and retail at M-KOPA says, “Our mission is to make financing for on a regular basis essentials reasonably priced to everyone.”

That financing gives M-KOPA customers access to essential products they should improve their lives, she says.

“When I feel in regards to the challenges that loads of customers face, I can group them into two. One is financial resilience … Most customers are incapable of coping with unexpected emergency situations. Through our upgrade products like medical health insurance, these customers are in a position to cope with unexpected emergencies.”

She says that M-KOPA has issued about 204,000 customers with medical health insurance policies.

“The second challenge pertains to access to credit,” she says. “Eighty-two percent of our customers have reported that by with the ability to access credit, they’ve been in a position to expand their businesses and grow their income investing the surplus funds in essentials like food, rent and education, which essentially improves their quality of life.”

Nicholas Njama, 44, a taxi driver in Nairobi, learned about M-KOPA at a critical moment in the autumn 2022. His smartphone had broken, and he couldn’t afford to purchase a brand new one. “I depend on my smartphone because a lot of my clients are in India they usually must find a way to achieve me for once they are here,” he says. “I used to be losing business.”

“A friend told me about M-KOPA and I applied for a phone,” he says. The corporate requires an initial deposit, typically about 20% of the associated fee of the phone. “I couldn’t have gotten a loan from an everyday bank, and the payments were sufficiently small.”

Once he paid it off, he had a credit line, and he took out loans to repay school fees for his two children. One loan was 9,000 shillings, and the payback is 75 shillings a day (around 50 cents). The interest charges amount to about 2,000 shillings, based on an M-KOPA spokesperson.

“M-KOPA helped me because I used to be weighed down with school fees and I used to be carrying a balance,” he says. “I even have one kid in highschool and the opposite one within the second 12 months of university.”

Njama, like many M-KOPA clients, stays with the corporate since it has turn out to be a trusted source of help to get ahead.

M-KOPA has been growing rapidly. And while a part of M-KOPA’s mission is to assist foster entrepreneurship, it also creates hundreds of jobs. In Kenya alone, it has over 12,400 sales representatives and employees, a lot of whom are sales reps whose pay is predicated on commission for locating recent clients.

Empowering women

Sangoro of M-KOPA says that female customers are more likely than their male counterparts to extend their spending on education and health. She says also they are more more likely to report an improvement of their quality of life because they have a tendency to avoid wasting more and use earnings to support their families. Due to these trends, Sangoro says, M-KOPA is offering recent opportunities to extend women’s financial access.

“One out of three of our customers are women, and two in five of our sales agents are also women,” she says.

Ruth Njuguna, 27, is considered one of those sales agents. She sells phones where she lives, within the low-income community of Kawangware, about 15 kilometers, or 9 miles, west of Nairobi’s business center.

Unemployment there may be high and every day income averages lower than 300 shillings, or about $2, every day.

After losing her smartphone greater than a 12 months ago, a friend told her about M-KOPA. “Having the ability to get quality smartphone and gaining access to it at such a low price appealed to me,” she says. The low payments made it more attractive than settling for what she could afford at an everyday smartphone store.

She later joined M-KOPA as a direct sales representative, selling M-KOPA smartphones in her community and earning a commission in return. The purchasers who buy an M-KOPA smartphone and make timely payments on it get access to money loans. She says her clients have included ride share app drivers and folks running businesses through social media apps who need smartphones to operate.

“I like my job and I like seeing how my clients’ lives improve,” she says.