EPISODE 01 · Nairobi, Kenya · HOW TECH SOLVES REAL PROBLEMS
Money Is a Message
20 minTHE FILM
Years before the West learned to tap a phone to pay, Kenya put a bank inside a text message — and handed it to the people the banks had never wanted. We followed the money to where it actually goes.
M-Pesa moved a country onto its phones before most of it had bank accounts, and the world has been quietly copying the homework ever since. We spend a week in Nairobi — with a market trader, a boda-boda rider, a fintech floor in Westlands — tracing a single payment from a hand in the market to a server farm, and asking what it means that the future of money got built here first, for the people with the least.
IN THIS FILM
- 01
THE PLACE
Nairobi — the Silicon Savannah, a capital that learned to leapfrog the things the rest of us are still stuck with.
- 02
THE PEOPLE
The trader, the rider, the agent on the corner who is the nearest thing the street has to a bank.
- 03
THE TECHNOLOGY
Mobile money built for a missing bank — how a text message became the rails a whole economy runs on.
