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Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecoms operator, plans to extend data minimisation across its mobile money service M-PESA by late 2026, expanding controls that limit the exposure of customer phone numbers in mobile money transactions. The change will cover bank transfers and merchant payments, according to the telco’s chief financial services officer, Esther Waititu, who spoke on Wednesday at the company’s Nairobi headquarters. “Later in the year, we will be working with banks to make sure that that data is also masked, because we can’t be doing it in one area and then omitting the other,’ Waititu said. The move targets one of the most common ways personal data is misused in Kenya’s payments system, where phone numbers shared in transaction alerts are later reused for spam, marketing and fraud. Extending masking to merchant payments and cross-platform transfers cuts off a major source of such data at scale. The rollout builds on an earlier update scheduled for March 24, when Safaricom will begin masking part of a sender’s phone number in peer-to-peer M-PESA transactions. The next phase targets merchant payments, one of the main areas where customer data is still widely exposed. Buy Goods and Paybill, Safaricom’s cashless payment services that handle a large share of everyday transactions, typically send merchants SMS confirmations that include customers’ full phone numbers. Small businesses rely on these alerts to track sales and confirm payments. The same numbers are often reused to send promotional messages or shared beyond the original transaction, making merchant payments a key source of unsolicited marketing. Customers will still complete payments and merchants will continue to receive confirmation, but full phone numbers will no longer appear in SMS alerts. This limits how easily personal data can be collected and reused outside the transaction. The expansion will also include cross-system payments. Transfers between M-PESA, banks, and other mobile money services, such as Airtel Money, pass through several platforms, each of which creates a point where data can be viewed or stored. Applying the same limits across these flows will reduce exposure at each stage and establish a common standard for providers handling the transaction, Waititu said. The scale of M-PESA means the change will be widely felt, as the service processes 37 million daily peer-to-peer transactions worth KES 27 billion ($209 million), out of a total of 137.9 million transactions valued at KES 118 billion ($914 million). Safaricom’s data minimisation push has developed over several years. It began in 2020 with Pochi La Biashara, a product designed to allow small traders receive payments without exposing full customer details. In 2021, the company reduced internal access to customer data. A year later, it trimmed personal information from M-PESA statements. By 2023 and 2024, similar controls had been added to merchant-facing APIs used by large organisations, before extending to peer-to-peer transactions in 2026. Extending the same approach to merchant payments closes one of the main remaining gaps. It also creates new operational pressure for businesses that rely on phone numbers to reconcile transactions or follow up with customers. Without that identifier, merchants may need to depend more on transaction codes or internal systems to match payments. “If you think about security and safety, there is always some level of inconvenience. People have built habits around how they interact with each other, but it is more important to keep everyone safe,” said Peter Ndegwa, Safaricom CEO. Waititu said dispute management is likely to be the biggest risk as the change rolls out, as businesses adjust to resolving payment issues without full access to customer phone numbers. “The main risk will be dispute management. The process will require an additional step, which could introduce some friction. We are working to address that by ensuring access to information where all parties are able to consent,” Waititu added.
Read MoreOn March 12, Rwanda’s Ministry of ICT and Innovation (MINICT) launched Innovate Rwanda, a digital platform designed to connect startups, investors, talent, and ecosystem support organisations across the country, on the sidelines of the recently concluded Innovative Fintech Forum in Kigali, the country’s capital. “We want it to be a platform where startups can discover who else is playing in the field they want to play in,” Esther Kunda, the director general of the innovation and emerging technologies directorate at MICINT, told TechCabal. For a young tech ecosystem like Rwanda, the platform hopes to fix the information scarcity problem. The country has over 70 active startups and several incubators and hubs, like Norrsken, but information about these startups and investors has been fragmented because the ecosystem has yet to mature. “Entrepreneurs starting an idea were not able to find out who is providing the right support for the stage they are at, whether it’s ideation or scaling, or who is offering the right support or funding at their particular stage,” Kunda said. Founders can create profiles to showcase their ventures, discover relevant support programs, access funding and partnership opportunities, and connect with ecosystem organisations that can help them grow, she added. Outside of Innovate Rwanda, the government is also positioning itself as a direct buyer and often the first customer for Rwandan-based companies through a new public procurement regulation. In our conversation, Kunda explained how MINICT wants to fix the fragmentation that holds back the country’s startup ecosystem with Innovate Rwanda and why the government would rather let companies test emerging technologies than wait until it has all the rules figured out. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What inspired the creation of Innovate Rwanda? From the ICT Ministry’s perspective, one of our key roles is to enable collaboration and coordination of our innovation ecosystem. One of the key issues we kept hearing from ecosystem players was the ecosystem’s fragmentation and a lack of information across it. For ecosystem support organisations, one of the issues was being able to know what different programmes exist in the ecosystem. It is one thing to know that there’s an innovation hub called XYZ, but information that goes deep into the type of programmes they provide is not readily available. For the different startups that apply to their programmes, what other programmes have they been part of so that they don’t duplicate efforts or even over-train them, which is one of the biggest issues that entrepreneurs in Africa have. They are over-mentored, over-trained, and with little support in other meaningful ways. That’s why we created Innovate Rwanda. We want it to be a platform where startups can discover who else is playing in the field they want to play in. We want people to be able to see what ecosystem support organisations (ESOs) are doing, the kind of programmes they’re running, who else they’re supporting, and how they’re supporting them. We’ve also been able to aggregate investor data around who has invested in companies that are either based in Rwanda or have operations in Rwanda. So you might have big global companies with operations here. We’re trying to get and perfect the information around who’s investing in those companies so that if you’re a startup in a sector, you can target the right investors and say, ‘Investor XYZ is interested in this sector, so if I’m currently raising, these are who I should be targeting.’ When you run a directory like Innovate Rwanda, getting accurate data is a challenge. How do you think about getting data, verifying it, and putting it up on the platform? We have done a couple of things, and as we launch, the data is going to improve much better than what we have done so far. One, we are aggregating data from the different programmes running in our ecosystem. We are working with ESOs, but also with the programmes that the government is running, to get that information. Two, we have partnered with a global platform that has an algorithm and has perfected some of these ways of finding investment data and information across ecosystems globally. In the last few years, they have done very specific insights into a couple of African countries, and we are starting from that. The last one confirms that the companies on the platform are actually registered and operating in Rwanda. Some of them today we’re not going to classify as startups, but they feature because they’ve raised funding in the last couple of years, mentioning Rwanda as one of their operations. We’ll be cleaning the data, making sure it becomes reliable. It’s really going to rely on how we, as an ecosystem, share data as we go along. It’s a journey, and it’s going to take some time. What specific outcomes will you be measuring to determine whether Innovate Rwanda is succeeding? Let me put it in plain words. If I get a lot of conversation from startups asking me, ‘Where should we go for an innovation hub?’ or ‘We’re raising this amount of money, where should we go? ‘ If this process becomes very easy because of this platform, that’s one metric of success. The other one: if we can measure the quality of the programmes provided in our ecosystem and start being very ruthless on the quality of innovation programmes in our market, that’s another metric we’ll look at. Third, and very specifically: increased funding in our ecosystem. That’s very crucial. And also job creation. What other things is your ministry working on to help startups in Rwanda? Other than the platform, we have been running our flagship programme. It’s a national startup competition where we crown the best startup every year. Around that, we have several sub-programmes: funding programmes in agriculture and funding and support programmes for startups in sexual and reproductive health. We also have, together with one of our development banks, a grant programme for startups that are starting, and we fund between $50,000
Read MoreEvery evening in Nairobi, a transaction happens that no algorithm has ever improved upon. Njeri watches the day thin out. The sukumawiki that was KES20 (roughly $0.15) at noon becomes KES10 ($0.08) at dusk. The bread that didn’t sell moves quietly to the woman two stalls away. The pig farmer swings by on Tuesdays. The broker takes the remainder at a price that has a thin margin but wastes nothing. No app. No notification. No ESG carbon offset report. What the tech industry calls food waste, Nairobi’s informal economy calls secondary inventory. The pig farmer on Nairobi’s periphery, documented by the International Livestock Research Institute as dependent on urban surplus feed, is not a beneficiary of food waste. He is part of the supply chain. The broker redistributes near-expiry produce to the city’s price-sensitive consumers. Mama Mboga, too, with her handwritten credit book, sells single eggs to customers who cannot afford six. This is not a broken system waiting to be fixed. It’s a fifty-year-old circular economy that has functioned without an app. Yet a growing number of digital platforms are arriving to disrupt it without understanding the system they are entering. The assumption behind surplus-food platforms launched in Africa is simple: food waste is a market failure, and technology is the correction. It makes sense if you are looking at the problem from Copenhagen, London, or San Francisco, where unsold food at the end of the day goes into a bin. In Nairobi, it goes into a network. A 2024 study by Jeremy Wagner for the Hungry Cities Partnership found that the ‘supermarket revolution model’ fails to account for Nairobi’s reality. Informal vendors remain central to food security for low-income residents. Supermarkets cater to middle and upper-income groups. The informal economy is not a primitive version of the formal one. It is a parallel system with its own logic, trust infrastructure and way of finding a fair price before sunset. Every platform that has attempted to digitise it has learned this at a high cost. Twiga Foods raised over $60 million but restructured in May 2025, cut more than 300 jobs and retreated to an asset-light model after years of friction with the informal supply chain it was trying to formalise. Marketforce, built to bring digital tools to small-scale food traders, shut down in 2023 after burning through its runway against the same wall. The wall is not logistics. It’s not connectivity. It is an assumption that arrived before the product did. When a digital platform enables a supermarket to push near-expiry bread at 60% off, something happens that the carbon metrics will never capture. The supermarket absorbs the discount as a loss leader, a rounding error against its monthly revenue. The kiosk owner next door runs on a 10% daily margin. Njeri does not absorb anything. She loses a customer to a platform she cannot join. India watched this play out in real time. Between 2024 and 2025, quick commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto grew by 280%. 82% of buyers shifted at least a quarter of their purchases to these apps. Nearly $1.28 billion in annual sales moved from small traditional retailers to digital platforms in a year. Nearly 200,000 Kiranas closed. The Indian government built an open digital commerce network (ONDC) to bring informal traders onto a level playing field. There is a third option. It is hiding in plain sight. Njeri the Mama Mboga is the infrastructure they need to build on, if they are willing to see her that way. Any platform touching the informal economy needs to do what Systems Architects do: study the terrain. The behaviour of the buyer. The logic of the supply chain. The trust networks that have sustained it for fifty years. You cannot onboard a new system into a complex environment and call it disruption. You are just adding chaos with better branding. Njeri already has the last-mile presence in neighbourhoods formal retail has never entered, a trust network built over decades and a surplus problem of her own. M-Pesa did not ask Kenya to behave like a Western banking customer. It asked what Kenya trusted and built from there. Formalisation was the outcome, not the premise. That’s the architectural lesson every platform entering this space should inherit. Disruption and displacement are distinct concepts. Kenya’s next five years of food tech will depend on whether founders know the difference. The informal economy will not announce the verdict. It will simply route around every platform that was not designed for its terrain, the way it always has. The food is not wasted in Nairobi. It is moving. The question is whether the next generation of platforms moves with it or against it. ____ Carolyne Manyeki is a Nairobi-based Learning and Development Practitioner and writer who tracks what happens when global models land in environments they were never designed for. She is also a lecturer in Communications who publishes Strategic Insights on LinkedIn.
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