'New Commerce' Comes to Kenya

By giving Kenyans access to the services they want through the systems they have, these innovations promise to put the global marketplace within the reach of millions.
The quote is about mobile payment systems, but it could equally well apply to education.

from
'New Commerce' Comes to Kenya March 9, 2010

Kenya is the global hotspot for all things mobile money. The two chief payment systems, Safaricom M-PESA and Zain Zap, not only share ten million subscribers, but moved ten percent of Kenyan gross domestic product last year. According to Danson Muchemi, Philip Nyamwaya and Agosta Liko, the respective CEOs of JamboPay, iPay and PesaPal, those figures represent a massive market opportunity.

Danson highlights “very low banking services penetration” as the impetus behind JamboPay, the first online payment gateway in Kenya that processes credit & debit cards. By topping up an “online purse” via credit/debit card or mobile money, JamboPay enables users to buy online goods from Kenyan merchants without exposing their information. Unbanked users can access the service by topping up their accounts via mobile money. Ultimately, JamboPay aims to mitigate the same market failure that gave rise to PayPal in the West: the need for secure and multi-channel access to e-commerce.