To accompany a short paper I presented at IFIP 9.4 online conference, I have written a blog post “Global transfers: M-Pesa and intellectual property rights” that discusses recent research on M-Pesa and its IPR
In July 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom announced a significant event – the intellectual property rights (IPR) for the mobile money service M-Pesa was finally “moving back into African control”. For this, it paid a sum of £7m to its UK-based parent company Vodafone.
The announcement didn’t receive much commentary at the time, but it raises a number of critical questions – Who controls the IPR of M-Pesa? Wasn’t M-Pesa created in Kenya, so why did Safaricom need to buy the IPR?
See blog post on Manchester CDD blog