This archive report was first published on 7 July 2020.
July 7, 2020, marked a significant milestone for Patrick Macharia, a Kenyan entrepreneur who was among the first to adopt M-Pesa, a mobile money service launched by Safaricom in 2007.
By 2017, Macharia had expanded his M-Pesa agency shops to 256 locations across the country, earning him a significant income.
“Most of us (early adopters) were unfamiliar with the kind of jargon being used. So, we had every reason to think that this was a con game. We were reluctant to embrace it,” Macharia told a local business newspaper in an interview.
Initially, Macharia operated a cyber café on Nairobi’s Mfangano Street, but he soon shifted his focus to M-Pesa after realizing its potential. His till number was 209, making him one of the first batch of business people through whom M-Pesa has grown to become a business with an annual revenue of over Sh. 40 billion.
Starting with an initial investment of Sh. 70,000, Macharia's business quickly took off, with his earnings exceeding Sh. 54,000 in the first month, a significant increase from the Sh. 20,000 he used to get from the cyber café.
As his M-Pesa business expanded, Macharia started to recruit other people to operate under him but soon noticed that they were growing faster than him. He then decided to open agency branches in numerous towns, which led to a significant increase in his earnings.
By 2010, Macharia had 170 shops, and by 2013, he had expanded to about 400 M-Pesa shops. At his peak, each shop used to return a monthly profit of Sh. 200,000.
Currently, each M-Pesa shop earns him between Sh. 5,000 and Sh. 120,000 per month, a significant income spread that Macharia attributes to the size of the shop and its location.
