What has Safaricom done to create jobs in Kenya?
Well, that’s one of the really exciting things in this business. We started with nothing eight years ago. We now have over 1,600 people working for this company. But we also have close to 400 dealers who sell our airtime, and another 4,000 M-Pesa dealers who deal just with M-Pesa, and each one of them has sub-dealers and sub-sub-dealers. So we’ve probably created 100 jobs for every employee in this company – about 150,000 jobs. It’s a fantastic business, but it operates in this peculiar environment. If you want to go and buy airtime now, for instance, you won’t go to a big shop. You’ll likely go to some shop on the side of the road. That person probably didn’t get the airtime from one of our dealers. He bought it from another person, who bought it from another person, who bought it from another person. It’s this creative distribution channel selling our products and services that’s created a tremendous amount of work apart from all of the other things we do, like building our base stat
Well, that’s one of the really exciting things in this business. We started with nothing eight years ago. We now have over 1,600 people working for this company. But we also have close to 400 dealers who sell our airtime, and another 4,000 M-Pesa dealers who deal just with M-Pesa, and each one of them has sub-dealers and sub-sub-dealers. So we’ve probably created 100 jobs for every employee in this company – about 150,000 jobs. It’s a fantastic business, but it operates in this peculiar environment. If you want to go and buy airtime now, for instance, you won’t go to a big shop. You’ll likely go to some shop on the side of the road. That person probably didn’t get the airtime from one of our dealers. He bought it from another person, who bought it from another person, who bought it from another person. It’s this creative distribution channel selling our products and services that’s created a tremendous amount of work apart from all of the other things we do, like building our base stat
