NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

By ABEL MUHATIA

Heated debate over a controversial telecoms report commissioned by the Communications Authority on market dominance was one of the key highlights of Kenya’s telco industry this year.

The detailed study, carried out by London firm Analysys Mason had some policy recommending that market leader Safaricom share its infrastructure with rivals.

Besides it would see the telco be split into two and Mpesa services hived off as a separate independent entity.

In 2016, the Treasury warned that collapse of mobile money service M-Pesa could cause widespread disruption of the economy.

While the mobile money platform has never collapsed, frequent outages due to maintenance has seen the debate as to whether Safaricom is a dominant player in Kenya’s telecoms market that requires extra regulatory action renewed.

Early this month, M-Pesa experienced the latest outage estimated to have cost the economy billions of shillings.