I just got back from Kenya a few weeks ago. While I was there I noticed the heavy use of mpesa. My wife uses it several times a week to pay bills or send her parents money. One time while out, she wanted to get something to drink, but we discovered that neither one of us had any money. I was expecting to just home, but she says "no problem", walks into one of many phone card stores with an mpesa sign (several on every block), talks to the gal, does something with her phone, the gal hands her 500 shillings and now we have some money.

There is a problem with mpesa though. Many transactions (not all) are heavily taxed. The government is starting to see mpesa as a gravy train and since it is centralized, there is nothing to stop them from raising taxes more and more. I think this may eventually push the population towards Bitcoin.

I rode with her one day to her job in Nairobi early in the morning. The bus was mainly young professionals going to work and I noticed that almost every one of them was using an android type smart phone. My wife has both a regular phone and an android phone. The productivity increase of having a cell phone more than pays for itself.

There is a money exchange place in downtown Nairobi where you can exchange bitcoins for fiat.