If M-PESA Took a Week Off, Kenya Would Discover We Have a Problem.
M-PESA has become so reliable, familiar and deeply woven into everyday life that Kenya rarely stops to ask what happens if the bridge everybody uses suddenly closes. A hypothetical seven-day outage turns that question into a very Kenyan comedy of cash shortages, stranded payments and improvised solutions, while exposing a less amusing truth about what happens when an economy becomes too dependent on one payment rail.
Payments · 20 Sep 2026 · 10 min read