Kenya, coordination
M-Pesa, and the regulator that let it run
Kenya's central bank let a phone company build a national payments system in 2007 and supervised it into ubiquity, and by June 2026 Kenya had 94.2 million registered mobile money accounts and 572,104 agents, in a population of about 55 million.
94,200,000 accounts, registered mobile money accounts, 2026-06. Central Bank of Kenya, mobile payments statistics, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
The central bank issued a letter of no objection instead of demanding a banking licence, set conditions on trust accounts holding customer float, and wrote the e-money regulations after the system worked, legalising what it had learned rather than licensing what it could imagine.
Preconditions
- A regulator senior enough to carry the risk of saying yes
- A mobile operator with national agent reach and its own fraud controls
- A banking sector too small in reach to block the entrant
Where it travelled: Mobile money spread across Africa and South Asia, but mostly where regulators copied the permissive sequencing. Where banking law was applied first, including in some of Kenya's neighbours for years, adoption stalled.
Limits: The delivery was Safaricom's, a majority-private company, so the record bears on public-private collaboration only through what the state did: permit, then supervise, then regulate interoperability. Registered accounts overstate people, since many Kenyans hold several, and account counts say nothing about fees, which are materially higher than card rails elsewhere. A single dominant operator is also a concentration the indicator's construct does not reward.
This record describes what Kenya delivered. It is linked to Public-private collaboration because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
The same gap elsewhere
2 deliveries linked to Public-private collaboration in other countries.
Dual-track vocational training
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Itaipu Binacional, the treaty-built power system
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