Over 1.5 mil Kenyans have benefited from the Safaricom Lipa Mdogo Mdogo initiative. This is a pay as you use your smartphone platform that is subsidising smartphone devices. The aim is to help address the barrier of affordability of smartphones.

Over 500,00 of the Neon pro ray smart phones were sold in the span of 1 year. 54% of these were bought by women.

This means that at least 1,016 customers have been buying smartphones per day. This, as revealed by Safaricom, has helped boost the telco’s goal to increase data revenues.

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Safaricom Lipa Mdogo Mdogo Smartphones

This report comes about 2 years after the telco launched Lipa Mdogo Mdogo. The service was mainly targeted at customers who still feature phones to give them an opportunity to upgrade their daily drivers through credit.

Safaricom had aimed at offering one million affordable smartphones in partnership with Google. This is all with the main goal of growing its data business in order to counter a decline in mobile calls, where saturation has caused a decline in revenue.

“Through Lipa Mdogo Mdogo, 500,000+ customers made use of the offer, with over 60 percent upgrading from 2G and 3G to 4G devices,” states Safaricom.

“This represents a growth of 39.8 percent year-on-year in 4G devices and will have been partially responsible for the 31.1 percent growth in data customers using more than 1GB.

“There was a significant increase in demand for mobile data, driven by our customers continuing to work from home and needing to stay in touch during the pandemic.”

Additionally, Safaricom aims to rev up its data business by moving more customers to higher internet speeds. The telco depends on data analytics to create personalised credit scoring for its customers, in order to choose who qualifies for the phone financing plan.