Mozambique’s mobile wallet M-pesa reaches over one million clients

The Mozambican mobile wallet M-pesa, run by the mobile phone operator Vodacom, announced on Wednesday in Maputo that it now has reached over a million clients nationwide, and that M-pesa transactions have reached 30 million meticais (about 750,000 U.S. dollars) a day.

The chairperson of Vodacom-Mozambique, Lucas Chachine, announced M-pesa’s success after signing an agreement with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), Angelo Miguel, under which UEM students will be able to pay for their rent and meals using the M-pesa platform, free of any banking charges.

Chachine said that Vodacom wants to encourage all its clients to make their routine payments through M-pesa. He said the main advantages of this mobile banking system are the ease of opening an account, with minimum paperwork, and operating costs for clients that approach zero.

For Chachine, the new partnership with the UEM will not only serve the interest of students, but will also make life easier for the university itself, in that it will avoid long queues for paying for university rent and meals.

Miguel described M-pesa as “an indispensible tool for financial inclusion.” He thanked Vodacom for the collaboration with the mobile company as said “M-pesa will rationalize and facilitate forms of payment in the university.”

The UEM is the oldest and largest university in Mozambique, and has about 30,000 students enrolled.

SOURCE:COASTWEEK