Scarce – Only Safaricom network awards Bonga Points giving it exclusive rights to the system.
Portable – All you need is your MPESA-enabled mobile phone to accept and use Bonga Points.Durable – The Bonga Points system has been around since 2007 and is well established.Divisible – Bonga Points can be redeemed based on the value of goods and services down to a few cents to a shilling.There are over 50, 000 merchants in Kenya using MPESA Till Numbers Acceptability – All businesses with a Till Numbers are now allowed to accept and redeem Bonga Points for MPESA.M-Pesa is Africa’s leading mobile money service, with over 37 million active customers and almost 400,000 active agents operating across 7 countriesĪ closer look at Bonga Points fulfills all these five characteristics of money: Well, according to accepted definitions, a means of payment can be considered real money if it has these universal properties: They can thus not be regarded as having the properties of money, right? They usually have no much value beyond the network on which they are generated. While this may not be immediately evident, this is very similar to what other central banks and federal agencies do across the globe – generate or mint new currency and distribute it into the economy.īonga Points are rewards for using a system or network. However, this gives Safaricom new authority, essentially giving itself the mandate of the Central Bank of Kenya to generate and distribute new currency into the economy. By opening up the Bonga Points network to retailers across Kenya, Safaricom is backing up the token with real-world value as it enables the token to be redeemed for real-world assets under its MPESA system.įurthermore, these tokens are generated internally on the MPESA ecosystem. While it may look like this is just a simple digital token at face value, its implications are much deeper and broader in the long-run. SEE ALSO: Safaricom Moves to Enable Bonga Point Digital Tokens for Payment Across Kenya However, it is clear that this initiative will have far greater implications than we pesently envision.Īs per the latest update, Safaricom says that under the new initiative, Kenyans are now redeeming an average of 20 million points a day, and the initiative is aimed at cushioning Kenyans during the Covid-19 pandemic with an estimated KES 5.5B (Approx. A few days ago, we published a post on the wide usage of Bonga Points as payment and we classfied this as a new digital currency in Kenya that is just getting introduced in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic.