The country is Africa’s fastest growing economy but low smartphone ownership and gender-based digitial inequality are holding up growth
Safaricom’s M-PESA digital, financial services platform has launched M-PESA LeHulum in Ethiopia to offer telco-agnostic digital financial services. The claim is that this will remove longstanding obstacles to such services for Ethiopians.
Smartphone users download the app, register with any phone number and complete verification through the Fayda Digital ID portal. This is a national digital identification verification service, backed the country’s government, which uses ireal-time biometric authentication and an electronic version of know your customer (KYC) “for all use-cases”.
According to M-PESA, mobile subscribers who carry out these steps will be able to make transactions within minutes, from sending and receiving money, to paying merchants and bills, buying airtime, payments via QR codes. After 90 days using M-PESA LeHulum, they can also access the Errif Be M-PESA overdraft service launched in the summer.
The app is also claimed to enable “seamless transfers with banks and other wallets via ETHSwitch integration”.
The platform was developed in-house by M-PESA Ethiopia’s technology teams, and is said to meet the needs of Ethiopians while adhering to international standards.
Ethiopia at a glance
Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous country with about 135.5 million people according to the World Population Review in November this year. It is also the continent’s fastest growing economy, according to Further Africa, albeit from a low base.
According to the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025, published in May this year, smartphone penetration remains low, at just 15% of the population. There is also striking gender gap in ownership, with only 6% of women owning a smartphone compared to 18% of men, although the gap has narrowed slightly compared with the report from the previous year. The disparity is mirrored in mobile internet use, where women lag men by 36%.
The report also found that in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Rwanda, around 20% of female smartphone owners (and around 10% of male smartphone owners) are not using mobile internet, despite almost all of them being aware of it.
It will be interesting to see if M-PESA LeHulum moves the dial.
