In Kenya, a mobile-money service launched in 2007 did more than change how people sent cash. As M-PESA expanded geographically and into new services, its capabilities began reaching far beyond finance, connecting smallholder farmers with credit, machinery, and markets, illustrating how seemingly unrelated capabilities can combine to open new paths for innovation in developing economies.
When the nearest bank is miles away
Picture a farmer in rural Kenya in the mid-2000s. The farm may produce maize, vegetables, or livestock, but getting paid, buying fertilizers and other inputs, or sending money to family members back home can still mean relying heavily on cash, personal relationships and informal arrangements. A bank branch may be far away and access to formal credit limited, but the economy is hardly standing still. Yet there is one piece of technology increasingly within reach: a mobile phone.
While access to formal financial institutions remained limited for many Kenyans, particularly in remote areas, mobile phones were becoming increasingly widespread. The infrastructure for one activity was therefore beginning to reach people and places that the infrastructure for another did not.
As explored in Chapter 3 of WIPO's World Intellectual Property Report 2024, M-PESA emerged at this intersection. Launched in Kenya in 2007, it was developed through a public-private partnership involving Vodafone, Safaricom Kenya, the microfinance institution Faulu Kenya and the Commercial Bank of Africa, with support from Kenya's communications regulator. M-PESA used SMS technology available on basic SIM-card mobile phones to allow people to transfer money electronically. It could operate on basic mobile phones without requiring smartphones or internet access and could reach people with little or no access to formal financial institutions.
With mobile phones already widespread in Kenya, the technology could build on an infrastructure that was already familiar and accessible to many users.
What makes M-PESA particularly interesting is not simply that it introduced a new service, but how it built on what was already there. Designed around the conditions in which people would actually use it, a simple mobile technology could perform a function that had depended much more heavily on physical access to financial services. The innovation was new, but an important building block was already there.
Seemingly unrelated, until they are not: When fintech meets AgTech
M-PESA was emerging within a wider innovation landscape that was itself changing.
Source: WIPO, World Intellectual Property Report 2024
Between 2004 and 2020, Kenya expanded and gradually shifted its portfolio of scientific, technological and production capabilities upwards. Although Kenyan capabilities remained in the simpler range also the country acquired capabilities higher up the complexity ranking, as shown in the graph below.
M-PESA is a clear example of how a capability developed to solve one problem has become part of the solution to another. M-PESA increasingly became more than a way to send money. In agriculture, it gave producers access to finance and credit, while SIM-card identification provided a reliable way to identify participants in exchanges of products and services.
These capabilities opened opportunities for new AgTech businesses to build on the platform. For example, a few Kenyan start-ups have used the M-PESA platform to help farmers access credit and information on crop prices. Others have extended these possibilities to agricultural machinery. Hello Tractor, for example, has developed a digital platform that connects farmers who need machinery with tractor owners who have equipment available for rent, combining mobile connectivity, digital transactions, identification, and data.
More broadly, these digital capabilities have become part of Nairobi's evolving agricultural ecosystem, which now includes services in agricultural finance, supply-chain management, and digital marketplaces. In this way, capabilities that initially developed outside agriculture are finding new applications within the sector.
Why doesn't the same formula work everywhere?
If innovation can emerge from the capabilities already present in an economy, what happens when the same technology moves somewhere with a different starting point?
M-PESA eventually expanded beyond Kenya to markets including Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, and South Africa, as well as other countries outside Africa, such as, India, Romania, and Albania. Its reach extended further through international remittance services: a partnership with Western Union, for example, connected M-PESA wallets to transfers from dozens of countries and territories.
Its trajectory nevertheless differed across economies. M-PESA services were discontinued in countries such as South Africa, India, Romania, and Albania due to differences from access to formal financial services and alternative payment options to telecommunications and agent networks, regulation, and patterns of consumer use. South Africa, however, stands out as a particular case in point: unlike many of the African markets where M-PESA thrived, South Africa had relatively broad access to formal financial services, which reduced the need for the mobile money model that had proven so successful elsewhere.
An innovation can cross borders, but the conditions that made it particularly useful in one place do not necessarily travel with it. As explored in the World Intellectual Property Report 2026: Technology on the Move, what develops around a technology as it spreads across economies also depends on the capabilities, institutions, and market conditions it encounters.
Could the next opportunity already be there?
The question becomes increasingly relevant as a new generation of digital technologies spread across economies and sectors. Artificial intelligence, connected devices, cloud computing, and data analytics are creating new possibilities, but they do not arrive in an empty landscape. They meet technologies, knowledge, infrastructure, businesses, and institutions that have developed over time. Kenya's M-PESA experience offers one illustration of what can happen when these building blocks connect.
For developing economies, this suggests that identifying future innovation opportunities is not only about asking what is missing. It can also mean looking at what is already there, how those capabilities might connect differently, and which new problems they could help solve.
The next opportunity may not begin with something entirely new. It may begin with a connection that has not yet been made.
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