For over a decade, Kenya has stood as the global poster child for mobile money innovation. Yet, beneath the soaring transaction volumes of M-PESA lay a persistent economic nuance: while mobile wallets bridged basic financial divides, a distinct gender gap remained in how deeply men and women micro-entrepreneurs could leverage digital merchant tools.
A groundbreaking report published by the GSMA Connected Women programme, in collaboration with Safaricom PLC, reveals how intentional, gender-inclusive product design is shifting this paradigm. Titled Pochi la Biashara and Women Micro-Entrepreneurs in Kenya: From insight to action, the multi-year study chronicles the evolution of Safaricom’s specialized micro-merchant wallet, Pochi la Biashara (Swahili for “Pocket for Business”), proving that addressing the unique challenges of women is not just a social imperative, it is a massive commercial growth engine.
Before the widespread adoption of dedicated merchant wallets, Kenya’s market vendors, kiosk owners, and small-scale traders operated in a financial grey area. For women micro-entrepreneurs, this reality came with unique societal and behavioral hurdles.
The GSMA report highlights that women frequently struggled with financial blending, the involuntary mixing of household daily expenses with business revenue. Without a distinct boundary, business capital was often inadvertently drained to cover domestic emergencies, making growth tracing nearly impossible.
Furthermore, women faced severe privacy and safety constraints. Traditional peer-to-peer mobile transactions required displaying a personal phone number to customers, exposing female merchants to subsequent digital harassment, unsolicited calls, and targeted fraud. Compounded by a digital confidence gap, where lower baseline tech literacy sparked a fear of losing hard-earned money to transaction errors—many women opted to stick safely, but restrictively, to physical cash.
Recognizing these friction points, Safaricom structured Pochi la Biashara to act as an insulated ecosystem within M-PESA, allowing merchants to separate business earnings from personal cash flows seamlessly. By implementing security safeguards and focusing marketing and onboarding efforts around digital confidence, the platform achieved a stunning demographic breakthrough.
The quantitative data outlined in the report underscores a commercial phenomenon. Between late 2024 and December 2025, the number of women actively utilizing Pochi la Biashara grew by an explosive 92%, significantly outpaced the already robust 78% growth rate seen among men.
By the end of 2025, a historic milestone was reached: women accounted for just over 52% of all active Pochi la Biashara users, translating to more than 900,000 active female micro-merchants across Kenya. In the broader landscape of fintech, where digital products historically skew heavily toward male adoption, Pochi la Biashara stands out as a rare and vital anomaly where women constitute the clear majority of the active marketplace.
For the nearly one million Kenyan women piloting these digital storefronts, the transition from cash to a dedicated business wallet has rewritten their daily operating models.
By isolating business revenues in their Pochi, women reported a newfound discipline in their savings habits. The automated segregation meant that revenue stayed where it belonged, reinvested into inventory. Paired with intuitive, simplified mini-statements, women gained granular visibility into their daily cash flows, allowing them to track slow versus peak days and plan purchases with corporate-like precision.
Crucially, shifting transactions away from physical cash mitigated the daily losses associated with shortchanged balances, theft, and counterfeit bills. But perhaps the most profound long-term impact is the creation of a digital footprint. By routing their business earnings through an auditable, digital ecosystem, these women are generating a verifiable transactional history. Safaricom has been able to leverage this data to assess creditworthiness, effectively throwing open the doors to formal micro-loans for a demographic that has historically been locked out of traditional banking institutions.
The findings of the GSMA report carry profound implications far beyond the borders of Kenya. For Digital Financial Service (DFS) providers across other Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), Pochi la Biashara serves as a definitive case study.
The report concludes with clear, actionable takeaways for the global tech community:
- Prioritize Privacy as a Core Feature: Safety is a prerequisite for financial inclusion. Guarding personal information, such as masking phone numbers during commercial transfers, directly builds the trust required to onboard female users.
- Value Simplicity and Visibility: Financial tracking features must accommodate varying levels of digital literacy. If a user can visually see and understand her money in real-time, her digital confidence thrives.
- Intentional Product-Market Fit: Fintech innovators must actively design for the sociological realities of their users, such as the overlapping of home and business life that characterizes female entrepreneurship.
Read the full report HERE.