In 2010, Jesse Moore, Nick Hughes, and Chad Larson started M-KOPA with a simple but radical observation: millions of Africans were paying for kerosene every single day, small amounts, daily, reliably but no bank would give them a loan because they had no credit history.
The insight was not about charity. It was about data. If someone pays for kerosene every day without fail, that is a credit signal. It is consistent, measurable behaviour that demonstrates the ability and willingness to make regular payments. The problem was that no financial institution had ever thought to use it that way.
M-KOPA did. And fifteen years later, it has extended over $2.5 billion in credit to more than 7 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, most of them people who had never accessed a formal loan in their lives. In 2024 it reported its first-ever profit. Its revenue grew 66 percent to $416 million. It is nearing 10 million customers and currently signs up more than 10,000 new users every single day.
This is the story of how M-KOPA built one of Africa’s most important financial institutions not by copying a Western model, but by building something entirely new from the ground up.
“We don’t sell devices. We build credit journeys for people the formal system ignores.” — M-KOPA Leadership, 2025 Impact Report
7M+
Customers served across Africa since founding nearing 10 million in 2026
$2.5B
Total credit extended since founding including ₦320B disbursed in Nigeria alone
$416M
Revenue in 2024 up 66% year-on-year, first full year of profitability
10,000
New customers signing up every single day as of 2026
The Problem M-KOPA Was Built to Solve
To understand M-KOPA’s model, you need to understand the specific trap that millions of low-income Africans were stuck in before it existed.
A smallholder farmer in rural Kenya, a boda boda rider in Kampala, a market trader in Lagos all of them had one thing in common: they needed tools to earn money, but they could not afford those tools upfront, and no bank would lend to them because they had no formal credit history. The farmer needed a solar light to work after dark. The rider needed a smartphone to access ride-hailing apps. The trader needed a reliable phone to take mobile money payments. All of these were income-generating tools investments, not consumption. But without credit, they were out of reach.
The alternative was expensive and wasteful. Kerosene lamps cost more per lumen than grid electricity. Renting a phone costs more per month than owning one. Buying airtime daily costs more than a monthly bundle. Poor people in Africa were paying a poverty premium spending more for inferior solutions because they lacked the upfront capital to access better ones. M-KOPA’s founders saw this not as a sad fact of life but as a solvable market failure.
The Pay-As-You-Go Model: How It Actually Works
M-KOPA’s model is elegant in its simplicity. A customer receives a product initially a solar home system, later a smartphone without paying the full price upfront. Instead, they make daily or weekly micropayments via mobile money, typically the equivalent of what they were already spending on inferior alternatives like kerosene or airtime top-ups. The payments are made through M-PESA in Kenya, MTN MoMo in Uganda, or similar mobile money platforms in each market.
The device itself contains a GSM-enabled lock. If a customer misses payments, the device can be temporarily disabled remotely. This is the key innovation that makes the model work at scale: M-KOPA does not need collateral, guarantors, or a formal credit bureau check because it has a better form of security, a device the customer depends on and wants to keep working, that can be managed remotely at near-zero marginal cost.
Every payment a customer makes builds their credit profile on M-KOPA’s proprietary scoring engine. After completing payments on a first product typically 12 to 18 months customers become eligible for additional products and larger credit lines. A farmer who repaid a solar system faithfully can access a smartphone. A smartphone owner with a clean repayment record can access digital loans, insurance, or an e-motorbike. The model turns payment behaviour into a credit journey exactly what the three founders envisioned in 2010.
From Solar Panels to Financial Services Platform
M-KOPA’s evolution from a solar company to a full-spectrum financial services platform is one of the most instructive growth stories in African tech.
It started with solar home systems replacing kerosene lamps with clean, affordable light. Solar was the right entry point because the value proposition was immediate, visible, and undeniable: better light for less money than kerosene, paid in familiar daily instalments. By the time M-KOPA had built a base of hundreds of thousands of solar customers with repayment track records, it had something more valuable than solar hardware. It had credit data on people no bank had ever bothered to assess.
The pivot to smartphones was the strategic masterstroke. Smartphones are not just communication devices in the African context, they are income tools. M-KOPA’s 2025 impact data shows that 70 percent of its customers use their M-KOPA device to generate income, and 59 percent report earning more since they received it. For a gig economy worker, a smartphone is as essential as a taxi is for a driver. Financing it on pay-as-you-go terms transforms a luxury into an accessible productivity tool.
M-KOPA financed 1.3 million smartphones in 2025 alone, and its Nairobi assembly plant, now Africa’s largest smartphone manufacturing facility, produced two million devices in 2024. The decision to manufacture locally was not just about cost. It was about control: by assembling phones in Kenya, M-KOPA can pre-install its payment software, customize hardware for its use case, and offer devices at price points that imported alternatives cannot match. The plant also employs hundreds of Kenyans and trains technicians in electronics assembly, a skills transfer that goes beyond M-KOPA’s own operations.
Nigeria: M-KOPA’s Fastest-Growing Market
Nigeria has become M-KOPA’s most important growth story. The company launched Nigerian operations in 2019, and by 2025 it had surpassed one million customers, the fastest any M-KOPA market has ever reached that milestone.
In 2025 alone, M-KOPA disbursed ₦231 billion ($170 million) in loans to Nigerian customers. Since launch, cumulative disbursements in Nigeria have crossed ₦320 billion. The company currently operates in six states — Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, and others but has stated plans to expand to 20 states within five years, targeting more than ₦1 trillion ($737 million) in total credit to Nigerian customers.
The Nigerian customer profile is telling. Twenty-nine percent of M-KOPA’s Nigerian customers, approximately 290,000 people report being first-time smartphone users. Seventy-seven percent say they use their device to generate income. These are not consumers buying a luxury item on credit. These are workers accessing a professional tool that directly affects their earning capacity, and paying for it in a way that matches their income patterns.
The business fundamentals in Nigeria are also strong. M-KOPA contributed over ₦2.5 billion in taxes in Nigeria in 2024, a figure that, based on Nigeria’s corporate tax structure, implies annual revenues comfortably above ₦60 billion for its Nigerian operations. Local procurement spending in Nigeria reached ₦27.4 billion in 2024, meaning M-KOPA’s presence in Nigeria is generating economic value well beyond its own balance sheet.
The Profitability Milestone: Why It Matters
In 2024, M-KOPA reported its first-ever annual profit: $9.2 million, reversing a $24.7 million loss in 2023. This is not just a financial milestone, it is a proof of concept for an entire category of inclusive finance.
For years, the prevailing assumption in development finance circles was that serving low-income customers at scale required subsidy. The unit economics were assumed to be unfavourable: small ticket sizes, high default risk, expensive last-mile distribution, and customers who were one shock away from missing payments. M-KOPA’s profitability achieved with 7 million customers, $416 million in revenue, and growth demonstrates that the assumption was wrong.
The model works because M-KOPA has solved three problems simultaneously. First, the lock mechanism addresses default risk far more cost-effectively than loan recovery processes. Second, the mobile money payment infrastructure eliminates the cash handling costs that make microfinance expensive. Third, the layered product model solar to smartphone to loans to insurance means customer acquisition costs are amortised across multiple products over years of relationship, not just one transaction.
The Road to 10 Million and Beyond
M-KOPA is not slowing down. The company is signing up 10,000 new customers daily, is nearing the 10 million customer mark, and is actively expanding its product range beyond smartphones. In Nigeria, General Manager Babajide Duroshola has outlined plans to move into data bundles, additional financial products, and other goods that serve the informal economy. In South Africa, where the company launched in 2023 and has already extended $22.5 million in credit to 105,000 customers, plans include introducing refurbished smartphones to reach customers who cannot afford new devices even on PAYG terms.
The e-mobility opportunity is also significant. In Kenya, M-KOPA is financing electric motorcycles in partnership with Bolt, Roam, and Ampersand providing boda boda riders with e-bikes that save $3.50 per day on fuel compared to petrol alternatives. Every 13 refurbished phones M-KOPA processes saves one tonne of CO2 emissions. The climate dimension of M-KOPA’s model which started with replacing kerosene with solar is becoming more prominent as the company scales into e-mobility.
What M-KOPA Teaches the Rest of the World
M-KOPA’s story carries lessons that go well beyond Africa. In any market where large populations are excluded from formal credit because they lack conventional credit history not because they are not creditworthy, but because the data to assess them has never been collected, M-KOPA’s model offers a template.
Design credit around behaviour, not paperwork. Use technology to reduce the cost of risk management rather than adding it to the customer. Build product ecosystems that deepen relationships over time rather than extracting value from a single transaction. And start where the customer already is with the payments they are already making, for the things they already need.
Fifteen years after three founders looked at a kerosene lamp and saw a credit score, M-KOPA is one of Africa’s most important financial infrastructure companies. Seven million customers. $2.5 billion in credit. First-ever profit. Africa’s largest smartphone assembly plant. And 10,000 new believers signing up every day.
