President William Ruto has urged Finnish and European firms to shift from outdated perceptions of risk and recognise Kenya’s vast economic potential owing to the success of huge tech innovations, including M-Pesa.

Speaking during his state visit to Finland on Thursday, June 11, 2026, Ruto explained that Kenya has immense potential, the vast opportunities and a safe hub for innovation.

“We urge Finnish, and by extension European, companies to view Kenya not through outdated narratives of risk, but through the reality of our immense potential and the vast opportunities our nation offers,” Ruto stated.

On his part, the Head of State highlighted Kenya’s youthful, innovative entrepreneurs who are developing practical, affordable, and scalable solutions to real-world challenges.

Ruto further pointed to the global success of M-Pesa as a prime example of Kenya’s capacity to create transformative technologies with worldwide relevance.

“Kenya’s youthful and innovative entrepreneurs have built a culture of solving real-world challenges with practical, affordable and scalable solutions. The success of M-Pesa stands as a testament to this spirit of innovation and our capacity to develop transformative technologies with global relevance,”Ruto stated.

The wonder of M-Pesa

The idea of developing the mobile money product M-Pesa dates back to 2003 as a promising approach to sustainable development. The proposal was by Nick Hughes, then the head of social enterprise at Vodafone.

His proposal to use mobile phones to deliver financial services was awarded one million pounds by the Department for International Development (DFID) a United Kingdom government department.

Hughes leveraged on partnerships from those he reached out to and in 2005 after having brought on board Susie Lonie, who had a background in mobile commerce, M-PESA was ready for a pilot. Safaricom, M-PESA’s parent company went on a recruiting spree.

Safaricom identified airtime dealers for this and in October 2005, eight agents stores and later 15 were given phones with an M-PESA menu. On 6^th March 2007, M-PESA was officially launched. A month later, it had 19,671 mobile active users.

In November of that year, the numbers had ballooned to an unprecedented 1,041,522 active M-PESA users.

Today, at least 25 million Kenyans use the Safaricom-owned service through which they transacted 28 billion dollars in 2015. This was equivalent to about 44 per cent of the country’s GDP of 63.4 billion dollars.

In the first three quarters of 2016, it transacted 25 billion dollars to become the leading mobile money platform worldwide in terms of regular users and transactions.