Visa will collaborate with Kenyan small and medium-sized businesses to promote the use of digital payments.
Over the next 12 months, the company also plans to launch dedicated Kenya editions of its Visa Everywhere Initiative, and She’s Next global fintech innovation and women’s empowerment programs.
The company made the pledges at the Jamhuri Day Tech Innovation Summit, attended by President William Ruto, and outlined a five-year plan to enable small businesses in Kenya digitally.
Visa’s She’s Next program, which will be launched in Kenya in 2023 in collaboration with financial institutions, will help women entrepreneurs address funding and operational gaps in their businesses.
The Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) is a global innovation program that challenges start-ups to compete to solve tomorrow’s commerce challenges and pitch visionary solutions to Visa’s vast network of partners.
The program also provides a platform for entrepreneurs to showcase their products and gain the necessary support to scale.
Since its inception in 2015, the program has assisted startups from over 100 countries in raising more than $2.5 billion (kes 306 billion) in funding, addressing one of the most significant challenges confronting early-stage entrepreneurs.
The expanded efforts follow the April 2022 opening of Visa’s first pan-African Innovation Studio in Nairobi, Kenya, which provides a cutting-edge facility for co-creating future-ready payment, commerce, and money movement solutions.
Kenya is estimated to have 7.4 million small businesses, and Visa plans to digitize five times as many in the next five years.
Nonetheless, card payments in the country continue to fall, with the latest CBK data showing that the value of transactions fell by 3.8% last year to kes 157.72 billion, down from 164.09 billion the previous year.
Surprisingly, the number of transactions increased by 4.5% to 34.71 million. This is a 1.49 million increase over the previous year.
“The reason for the decline in card payments’ absolute value is attributed to the poor network of POS terminals and mobile payments being a substitute for card payments,” CBK said CBK said in the Kenya National Payments System Vision and Strategy 2021-2025 strategy.
According to Aida Diarra, Visa’s Vice President and Head of Sub-Saharan Africa, the company has seen how transformative digitisation initiatives have been for small businesses in Kenya and is looking forward to partnering to drive even more access to financial services for these businesses where gaps still exist.
“We are excited to be able to collaborate with the government and our partners to bring our global programs for startups to Kenya,” Diarra said.
Visa has a long history of supporting small businesses and recently committed $200 million to support SMBs worldwide over a five-year period, focusing on promoting women’s economic advancement.
As part of this strategy, Visa launched several local initiatives, including a $2.4 million grant to Hand in Hand, an NGO, to implement the Kenya Micro Enterprise Success program (KMES).
Against an initial target of 10,200, the program has worked directly with 10,750 beneficiaries to improve their quality of life and financial resilience.
Overall, the program has created 5,178 jobs, compared to an initial target of 2,766, and improved 8,708 businesses, with 86% of them owned by women.
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