First Principles
Around 40 shillings a day. Five million customers.
In the Global South, you do not size the loan to the balance sheet. You size it to the day a wage arrives.
The credit system asks for one lump sum. A daily wage arrives in small amounts, every day.
Nairobi, 2011. M-KOPA built for that gap: a solar home system paid off in daily micro-payments on a basic phone, for around 40 shillings a day. Every on-time payment became a credit file the customer never had, and the record unlocked the next thing - a smartphone, a loan, insurance. More than five million customers now buy this way across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa.
The decision that mattered: price the product to the day a wage arrives, not the lender's lump sum.
In the Global South, credit is being rebuilt around the customer's real cash flow.
Source: M-KOPA Impact Report, 2024; Safaricom, 2018.