M-Pesa

M-Pesa is a mobile-phone-based money transfer, payment and micro-financing service, whose name joins 'M' for mobile with pesa, the Swahili word for money, letting a user deposit, withdraw and send funds through an ordinary mobile phone without needing a bank account. It was created jointly by the Kenyan mobile network operator Safaricom and its partner Vodafone, which had won development funding for the project from the Financial Deepening Challenge Fund, a competition run by the United Kingdom's Department for International Development aimed at reaching people without access to banking. The service began as a pilot in Kenya in October 2005 aimed specifically at unbanked, prepaid mobile subscribers, had moved roughly 50.7 million Kenyan shillings through the system by March 2006, and launched commercially across Kenya in March 2007; it later expanded into Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt and Ethiopia, though separate attempts to launch the service in India, Romania and Albania were later shut down for lack of demand.