👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – More birr for Ethiopia’s Safaricom
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Safaricom invests an additional $11 million in its Ethiopian operations, targeting EBITDA profitability by March 2027 as customer numbers grow to 14.7 million.
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The Big Picture
Safaricom has injected another KES 1.4 billion ($11 million) into its Ethiopian subsidiary, bringing total funding to $1.23 billion by June 2026. The company's active customers in Ethiopia grew to 14.7 million, up from 13.6 million in March, a 46% year-on-year increase. Safaricom is now aiming for EBITDA profitability by March 2027, a key milestone given the high entry costs including an $850 million telecom licence fee and $150 million M-PESA licence fee. Despite Ethio Telecom's continued dominance, Safaricom's rapid customer growth suggests a viable path to self-sustaining economics, shifting the conversation from capital injections to potential profitability.
Why It Matters
Safaricom's additional $11 million investment in Ethiopia signals a strategic bet that its rapid customer growth—now 14.7 million—can translate into profitability by 2027, despite heavy entry costs. If successful, it would validate the viability of challenger telecoms in state-dominated markets, potentially encouraging more foreign investment in African telecom and mobile money sectors. This move also underscores the growing importance of Ethiopia as a frontier market for digital financial services, with implications for regional economic integration and financial inclusion.
Image Source: Omolara Dada, senior product marketing manager at Busha.
Omolara Dada is a senior product marketing manager at Busha, a Nigerian digital asset exchange, where she is building the business-to-business (B2B) marketing function from the ground up. With over six years of experience in African fintech, she has worked previously at Anchor, a Y Combinator-backed Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, and Earnipay, an earned wage access (EWA) product, leading go-to-market strategy, product positioning, and growth across B2B and consumer-facing financial products. Her work sits at the intersection of complex financial infrastructure and the human beings who need it explained clearly enough to act on it.
Explain your job to a five-year-old.
You know when you make something really cool but nobody knows about it? My job is to help people find out about cool things, understand why it’s useful, and want to use it. I work for a company that helps businesses move money, and I make sure the right people know we exist and understand how we can help them.
What’s the hardest part about working in fintech in Nigeria?
Trust, and how hard it is to earn, how easy it is to lose. You’re often asking businesses to move their money in a new way, through a newer company, in an environment where people have been burned before and where the economy itself is unpredictable. That means the bar for proof is high. It’s not enough to be clever or well-designed. You have to be credible, consistent, and genuinely reliable before anyone hands you something as sensitive as their money. This also makes the work meaningful because when a business trusts you, you know you earned it.
What’s the first thing you had to figure out with no playbook, building Busha’s B2B marketing from scratch?
Who exactly we were talking to. When you’re the first B2B marketing hire, nothing is pre-defined. So the very first thing was getting brutally clear on who the customer actually is, what problem we solve for them that they genuinely care about, and how to say it in a way that resonated with them. Everything else- the content, the channels, the campaigns comes after getting that clarity. I spent my early weeks asking a lot of questions.
Getting paid in cedis just got easier for African businesses operating in Ghana.
Visa appoints ex-Airtel Money Kenya chief as East Africa head
Image Source: Tenor
On July 25, Anne Kinuthia-Otieno, former managing director of Airtel Money Kenya, the telecom company’s mobile money arm, announced on LinkedIn that she was stepping down from her role.
A few speculations flew around on where she was headed next: banking, telecoms, or fintech. Now, we have an answer.
On Thursday, Visa, the payments giant, confirmed that the former mobile money executive was taking over as its East Africa Lead, bringing her experience—and years of banking expertise—to a different kind of fintech.
Why Visa wanted her: When Kinuthia-Otieno took over Airtel Money Kenya in 2021, Safaricom’s M-PESA controlled the market. Airtel Money held just 3.1% of mobile money subscriptions, and nearly five years later, that share had climbed to 10.2%.
Her new role: As Visa’s East Africa head, Kinuthia-Otieno will oversee the company’s operations across seven markets, working with clients and partners to expand digital payments, strengthen partnerships and bring more people into the formal financial system.
The timing makes sense: Visa is already midway through its five-year, $1 billion investment commitment in Africa, building infrastructure, experimenting with stablecoin-powered payments, and trying to make itself more deeply woven into Africa’s payments ecosystem.
Hiring someone who understands both banking and mobile money gives it an advantage. If she could help expand Airtel Money’s footprint in M-PESA’s backyard, Visa is betting she can help do the same for digital payments across East Africa.
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Safaricom invests $11 million in Ethiopian operations, eyes profitability in 2027
Image Source: Tenor
When Safaricom decided to expand into Ethiopia in 2022, there was uncertainty around whether it could achieve scale. State-owned telecom firm Ethio Telecom controlled an overwhelming share of the market—and still does—helped by the conservative economic model Ethiopia had maintained for years, which tended to favour local incumbents.
Yet, Safaricom has stuck with its plan. With 14.7 million customers in Ethiopia, it appears that Kenya’s largest telecom operator now believes it can capture a much larger share of the upside in neighbouring Ethiopia. It has just put in more cash to back that belief.
The latest cheque: Safaricom has injected another KES 1.4 billion ($11 million) into its Ethiopian subsidiary, taking its total funding contribution to KES 159.6 billion ($1.23 billion) by the end of June 2026.
The profitability race: The encouraging part is that the business is finally producing numbers that make the spending easier to justify. Active customers rose from 13.6 million in March to 14.7 million in June, adding over 1 million users in a single quarter and growing 46% year-on-year.
Between the lines: Safaricom is now targeting earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) profitability by March 2027. That matters because Ethiopia has already absorbed an $850 million telecom licence fee and the additional $150 million M-PESA licence fee required just to enter the market, and billions more in network rollout costs.
Hitting that milestone would be important not just for the Ethiopian unit, but for Safaricom’s broader regional expansion story. Investors have long worried that Ethiopia could become a permanently cash-hungry operation; rapid customer growth is the clearest evidence that there may be a path to self-sustaining economics.
Zoom out: Ethio Telecom remains the dominant player, so Safaricom is still very much the challenger. But after years of talking mostly about licence fees and capital injections, the conversation is shifting towards something more important: whether 14.7 million Ethiopian customers can eventually become a profitable telecom and mobile money ecosystem.
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Insights
Funding tracker
Image Source: Techcabal Insights
Fincart, an Egyptian e-commerce startup, raised $2.8 million in a seed funding round co-led by Launch Africa Ventures and Antler MENAP, with participation from Yango Ventures, Five35 Ventures, Bluestream Capital, Hi2 Global, Kalahari Venture Labs, and others. (Jul 27)
Here are the other deals for the week:
ORA Technologies, a Moroccan fintech startup, raised $2 million in a Series A funding round from undisclosed investors. (Jul 24)
Codar, a Nigerian edtech startup, raised $1.5 million in an equity and debt round from undisclosed investors. (July 27)
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