Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

PROJECTS: Safaricom’s socio-economic programmes in the financial year ended March 31, 2021 has been valued at Sh664 billion, with over one million jobs created.

East Africa’s most profitable company, which registered a Sh68.7 billion after tax profit in its full year results, has various social impact intervention programmes.

These projects are within the financial, retail, education and environment sectors, with backward linkages to other sectors that provide millions of Kenyans with sources of livelihood.

While releasing its social sustainability report titled “Standing together; Going beyond,” yesterday, chairman Michael Joseph said the firm contributed Sh557.1 billion to the economy in the period under review, equivalent to 5.2 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Independent analysis of Safaricom’s true value to society identifies the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the company, and quantifies them in financial terms.

“Our Sustainable Business report, which covers our last fiscal year from April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021, discloses our efforts to achieve our purpose of transforming lives by transparently showing our successes, setbacks and future focus areas, all of which are important to our business and of interest to our stakeholders,” said Joseph.

Providing solutions

Chief Executive Peter Ndegwa said the company will continue providing solutions to society’s most pressing challenges and support other businesses, especially small and medium enterprises to thrive through connectivity and financial services solutions.

“Going forward we will also endeavour to play a key role in driving healthcare and education inclusion as well as enabling smallholder farmers to become wealthier and commercially sustainable,” he said.

Despite economic shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic, the telco still sustained 190,273 direct and indirect jobs and eased economic hardships through interventions such as Zero-rating M-pesa person to person transactions below Sh1,000 and pay-bills for government hospitals and dispensaries. 

The firm also provided concessional data rates to specific educational content for learning institutions, which dented M-pesa revenues by Sh5.5 billion or to 7.3 per cent of the mobile money platform’s annual earnings.