Safaricom's Safire Connect campaign first season ends

Safaricom has ended its first season of the Safire Connect campaign with the empowerment of taxi-hailing drivers at Strathmore University in Nairobi on Tuesday.

The campaign, which was started in March last year, is aimed at hosting a series of customer engagement and networking forums, where aspiring entrepreneurs who use its mobile money platform MPESA get invaluable insights on the platform and are inspired by mentors to become entrepreneurs.

“So today we're talking to them about how they can grow their business, how they can access finance, digital tools and how they can work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase productivity,” said Esther Waititu, chief financial services officer at Safaricom.

She added, “This is important because entrepreneurs form the biggest base of our small to medium-sized businesses in this country, and we build solutions specifically for them. So, what we're doing here is giving them the tools that can enable them to grow their businesses, spread, engage with customers and get the knowledge that they need so then they can become our next large corporations in this country.”

Ms Waititu said their role at Safaricom is to transform, and so they have been working with entrepreneurs across the country to make sure that they have the right tools, have the power to connect, access their services and solutions and give them the power of research and innovation that can help to scale their businesses.

She said they chose taxi-hailing drivers and owners so that they can give them customised solutions just for their businesses.

“So the gaps that we've seen specifically in the hailing or transport business have been around access to capital as even asked in the forum and how do they support salaries if they have more than one vehicle and those are the tools that we're presenting today through our overlocked facilities for businesses, like these for businesses, where you can access overnight credit,” said Ms Waititu.

She said there are also short-term loans through their Taasi Pochi loan facilities, where one can borrow over a period of 14 to 30 days based on one’s needs.

“So the big thing that we see here is access to finance, and that's a problem that we're looking to solve, but also creating solutions around wealth creation,” said Ms Waititu.

She added: “So overnight, any cash flow that you have left over will then encourage a lot of these entrepreneurs to save them through our Ziidi for Pochi or Zidii for Biashara, where they can invest money overnight and get a return that allows them to pay for their expenses with the returns that they're able to make off our money market solution.”

Ms Waititu said they started off the campaign in the coast region, where they hosted the first one in Mombasa, have done the same in Rift Valley in Eldoret and the recent one in greater Western in Kisumu and now yesterday’s one in Nairobi.

“So, for this season, this is our last location, because this has been our fifth session that we've been working on. So we'll be coming back in the last quarter of the year to then engage with our customers,” she said.

William Murithi, Senior Faculty in Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Family Business at Strathmore Business School and who is leading the collaboration at Strathmore University with the Sapphire Connect, said the event targeted transport sector players because they are people who are striving, hustling, and some are just starting businesses.

Murithi said statistics show that they're on a path of growth, want to do better than they are today, and so they have realised that the two partners need to grow them.

“The only challenge is, of course, sometimes it's knowledge and information, and so we want to provide a platform for them where they can get to learn, build skills, get knowledge and get also practical solutions that can develop their businesses and to help them go from one step to another,” said Murithi.

He added: “Some of them want facilities, some of them want winning business plans, bankable business plans, have great ideas, and we want to learn to grow with them and tell and teach them how to grow their businesses as they go through their processes. We are people who know how to train, build capacity in business people and leaders as well. So we are here to bring that package of education and also knowledge to them, practical aspect from the industry and the practical solutions that Safaricom is building for them."