119-742: M-PESA ( M for mobile, PESA is Swahili for money) is a mobile phone-based money transfer service , payments and micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Safaricom , the largest mobile network operator in Kenya . It has since expanded to Tanzania , Mozambique , DRC , Lesotho , Ghana , Egypt , Afghanistan , South Africa and Ethiopia . The rollouts in India , Romania , and Albania were terminated amid low market uptake. M-PESA allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money, pay for goods and services ( Lipa na M-PESA , Swahili for "Pay with M-PESA"), access credit and savings, all with
238-470: A "special" license from regulators, despite concerns by regulators about non-branch banking adding to the current state of financial instability. Safaricom released the new M-PESA platform dubbed M-PESA G2 to offer versatile integration capabilities for development partners. Client-to-business and business-to-client disbursements are some of features available through the API. The near-monopolistic providers of
357-565: A 'little bit' of some characteristic, like -y or -ish in English). For example, there is kijani "green", from jani "leaf" (compare English 'leafy'), kichaka "bush" from chaka "clump", and kivuli "shadow" from uvuli "shade". A 'little bit' of a verb would be an instance of an action, and such instantiations (usually not very active ones) are found: kifo "death", from the verb -fa "to die"; kiota "nest" from -ota "to brood"; chakula "food" from kula "to eat"; kivuko "a ford,
476-403: A 28% increase from 2013, and almost half the value of the country's GDP. On 19 November 2014, Safaricom launched a companion Android app, Safaricom M-Ledger for its M-Pesa users. The application, currently available only on Android, but as of now it's supported by iOS devices. The app gives M-PESA users a historical view of all their transactions. Many other companies business models rely on
595-1101: A Monkey ;" " Mwalimu Goso, " "Goso the Teacher," a cumulative tale ; and " Sungura na Simba, " "The Hare and the Lion," a story about the trickster hare . Here are some of the proverbs that Steere recorded in Swahili: Here are some of the riddles that Steere recorded in Swahili: Department for International Development King Charles III [REDACTED] William, Prince of Wales [REDACTED] Charles III ( King-in-Council ) [REDACTED] Starmer ministry ( L ) Keir Starmer ( L ) Angela Rayner ( L ) ( King-in-Parliament ) [REDACTED] Charles III [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] The Lord Reed The Lord Hodge Andrew Bailey Monetary Policy Committee The Department for International Development ( DFID )
714-401: A failure to incorporate business failures and crowding out of competitors in the analysis. Bateman et al. call M-Pesa an extractive activity, by which large profits are created from taxing small-scale payments, which would be free if cash was used instead. As a large part of these profits are sent abroad to foreign shareholders of Safaricom, local spending power and demand are reduced, and with it
833-791: A historical process in which /l/ became elided between the second last and last vowels of a word (for example, kondoo , "sheep" was originally kondolo , which survives in certain dialects ). As a consequence, long vowels are not considered phonemic . A similar process exists in Zulu . Where not shown, the orthography is the same as IPA. Some dialects of Swahili may also have the aspirated phonemes /pʰ tʰ tʃʰ kʰ bʱ dʱ dʒʱ ɡʱ/ though they are unmarked in Swahili's orthography. Multiple studies favour classifying prenasalization as consonant clusters, not as separate phonemes. Historically, nasalization has been lost before voiceless consonants, and subsequently
952-573: A major role in spreading both Christianity and Islam in East Africa . From their arrival in East Africa, Arabs brought Islam and set up madrasas , where they used Swahili to teach Islam to the natives. As the Arab presence grew, more and more natives converted to Islam and were taught using the Swahili language. From the arrival of Europeans in East Africa, Christianity was introduced to
1071-578: A means of national integration in Tanzania. Key activities mandated for the organisation include creating a healthy atmosphere for the development of Swahili, encouraging use of the language in government and business functions, coordinating activities of other organisations involved with Swahili, standardising the language. BAKITA vision are: "1.To efficiently manage and coordinate the development and use of Kiswahili in Tanzania 2.To participate fully and effectively in promoting Swahili in East Africa, Africa and
1190-435: A mobile device. The service allows users to deposit money into an account stored on their cell phones, to send balances using PIN -secured SMS text messages to other users, including sellers of goods and services, and to redeem deposits for regular money. Users are charged a fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service. M-PESA is a branchless banking service; M-PESA customers can deposit and withdraw money from
1309-524: A network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets acting as banking agents . M-PESA spread quickly, and by 2010 had become the most successful mobile-phone-based financial service in the developing world. By 2012, a stock of about 17 million M-PESA accounts had been registered in Kenya. By June 2016, a total of 7 million M-PESA accounts had been opened in Tanzania by Vodacom. The service has been lauded for giving millions of people access to
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#17328009944491428-652: A pass" from -vuka "to cross"; and kilimia "the Pleiades ", from -limia "to farm with", from its role in guiding planting. A resemblance, or being a bit like something, implies marginal status in a category, so things that are marginal examples of their class may take the ki-/vi- prefixes. One example is chura ( ki-ura ) "frog", which is only half terrestrial and therefore is marginal as an animal. This extension may account for disabilities as well: kilema "a cripple", kipofu "a blind person", kiziwi "a deaf person". Finally, diminutives often denote contempt, and contempt
1547-433: A prenasalized consonant, they are pronounced as [e] , [ɪ] , [o] , and [ʊ] . E is also commonly pronounced as mid-position after w . Polomé claims that /ɑ/ is pronounced as such only after w and is pronounced as [a] in other situations, especially after /j/ ( y ). A can be pronounced as [ə] in word-final position. Long vowels in Swahili are written as doubled vowels (for example, kondoo , "sheep") due to
1666-445: A raise or that there had been a mistake, as their salaries rose significantly. The National Police discovered that there was so much corruption when payments had been made using the previous model that the policemen did not know their true salary. The service was so successful that it was expanded to include limited merchant payments, peer-to-peer transfers, loan disbursements and payments. In September 2010, Vodacom and Nedbank announced
1785-553: A report on "Financing for Development", the United Nations write: "The digitalization of finance offers new possibilities for greater financial inclusion and alignment with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and implementation of the Social Development Goals. In Kenya, the expansion of mobile money lifted two per cent of households in the country above the poverty line." However, these findings on
1904-468: A second language spoken by tens of millions of people in the five African Great Lakes countries ( Kenya , DRC , Rwanda , Uganda , and Tanzania ), where it is an official or national language. It is also the first language for many people in Tanzania, especially in the coastal regions of Tanga, Pwani, Dar es Salaam, Mtwara and Lindi. In the inner regions of Tanzania, Swahili is spoken with an accent influenced by other local languages and dialects. There, it
2023-473: A significant number of loanwords from other languages, mainly Arabic , as well as from Portuguese , English and German . Around 40% of Swahili vocabulary consists of Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language ( سَوَاحِلي sawāḥilī , a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning 'of the coasts'). The loanwords date from the era of contact between Arab traders and the Bantu inhabitants of
2142-462: A substitute for k in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds, which many speakers outside of ethnic Swahili areas have trouble differentiating. The language used to be primarily written in the Ajami script , which is an Arabic script. Much literature was produced in this script. With the introduction of Latin, the use of Ajami script has been diminished significantly. However,
2261-847: A survey done by CBS in 2005, Kenya then had over 5,970,600 people employed in the informal sector. This informal sector constituted 98%. In 2002, researchers at Gamos and the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation , funded by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), documented that in Uganda, Botswana and Ghana, people were using airtime as a proxy for money transfer. Kenyans were transferring airtime to their relatives or friends who were then using it or reselling it. Gamos researchers approached MCel in Mozambique, and in 2004 MCel introduced
2380-516: A system of concord but, if the noun refers to a human, they accord with noun classes 1–2 regardless of their noun class. Verbs agree with the noun class of their subjects and objects; adjectives, prepositions and demonstratives agree with the noun class of their nouns. In Standard Swahili (Kiswahili sanifu) , based on the dialect spoken in Zanzibar, the system is rather complex; however, it is drastically simplified in many local variants where Swahili
2499-583: A tenth of this in neighboring Tanzania, where it was exposed to more competition. A study sponsored by USAID found that poor uneducated customers, who often had bad vision, were a target of unfair practices within M-PESA. They had expensive subscriptions for ring-tones and similar unnecessary services pushed on them, with opaque pricing, and thus did not understand why their M-PESA deposits depleted so quickly. If they did, they were often unable to unsubscribe from those services without help. The authors concluded that it
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#17328009944492618-402: A transaction to an unregistered user for transactions between KSh10 and KSh500 (US$ 0.92–US$ 4.56). For registered users the charge is KSh27 (US$ 0.25) or 5.4% to 27% for the same amount. At the highest transfer bracket of KSh50,001–70,000, the fee for a transfer to a registered user is KSh110 (US$ 1) or 0.16–0.22 %. The maximum amount that can be transferred to a non-registered user of the system
2737-695: A variety of gender-concord prefixes. This list is based on Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history . Modern standard Swahili, written in Latin, is based on Kiunguja, the dialect spoken in Zanzibar City . Swahili literature and poetry, traditionally written in Swahili Ajami , is based on Kiamu , the dialect of Lamu on the Kenyan Coast. But there are numerous other dialects of Swahili, some of which are mutually unintelligible, such as
2856-492: A view to creating jobs in an area subject to long-term industrial decline . In 1997, the department was separated again from the Foreign Office, when a Labour government returned under Tony Blair. Labour also reduced the amount of aid tied to purchasing British goods and services, which had often led to aid being spent ineffectually. In September 2020, the department and the Foreign Office were yet again merged to form
2975-460: Is KSh35,000 (US$ 319.23), with a fee of KSh275 (US$ 2.51) or 0.8%. Cash withdrawal fees are also charged. With a charge of KSh10 (US$ 0.09) for a withdrawal of KSh50–100 or 10% to 20%, and up to KSh330 (US$ 3.01) for a withdrawal of KSh50,001–70,000 or 0.47% to 0.66% . In an article published in 2015, Anja Bengelstorff cites the Central Bank of Kenya when she states that CHF 1 billion
3094-562: Is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch . In Guthrie's geographic classification , Swahili is in Bantu zone G, whereas the other Sabaki languages are in zone E70, commonly under the name Nyika. Historical linguists consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant, since it takes around 15% of its vocabulary directly from Arabic , and was initially spread by Arab slave traders along
3213-666: Is a compulsory subject in all Kenyan primary and secondary schools. Swahili is recognized as a national language in the Democratic Republic of The Congo and is widely spoken in the eastern regions. The local dialects of Swahili in Congo are known as Congo Swahili and differ considerably from Standard Swahili. In order to strengthen political ties with other East African Community nations, both Kiswahili and English have been taught in Burundian elementary schools since
3332-550: Is a first language for most of the people who are born in the cities, whilst being spoken as a second language in rural areas. Swahili and closely related languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi , Comoros , Malawi , Mozambique , Zambia and Rwanda . The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea in the 20th century. The East African Community created an institution called
3451-434: Is an active body part, and mto is an active natural force, but they are also both long and thin. Things with a trajectory, such as mpaka 'border' and mwendo 'journey', are classified with long thin things, as in many other languages with noun classes. This may be further extended to anything dealing with time, such as mwaka 'year' and perhaps mshahara 'wages'. Animals exceptional in some way and so not easily fitting in
3570-473: Is closely related to Swahili and is sometimes considered a dialect of Swahili, although other authorities consider it a distinct language. In 2022, based on Swahili's growth as a prominent international language, the United Nations declared Swahili Language Day as 7 July to commemorate the date that Julius Nyerere adopted Swahili as a unifying language for African independence struggles. Swahili
3689-545: Is generally only spoken by Somali nationals who have resided in Kenya and subsequently returned to Somalia. Lastly, a closely related language Mushunguli (also known as Zigula, Zigua, or Chizigua) is spoken by some of the Somali Bantu ethnic minority mostly living in the Jubba Valley . It is classified as a Northeast Coast Bantu language as Swahili is and has some intelligibility with Swahili. Swahili played
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3808-491: Is moved in fiscal year 2014, with a profit of CHF 268 million, that is close to 27% of the moved money. In 2016, M-PESA moved KSh15 billion (US$ 147776845.14) per day, with a revenue of KSh41 billion. In 2017 KSh6,869 billion were moved according to a figure in Safaricoms own annual report, with a revenue of KSh55 billion. This would put Safaricom's profit ratio at around <1 % of total money transferred. With
3927-575: Is not a native language, such as in Nairobi. In non-native Swahili, concord reflects only animacy: human subjects and objects trigger a-, wa- and m-, wa- in verbal concord, while non-human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger i-, zi- . Infinitives vary between standard ku- and reduced i-. ("Of" is animate wa and inanimate ya, za. ) In Standard Swahili, human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger animacy concord in a-, wa- and m-, wa-, and non-human subjects and objects trigger
4046-475: Is not the marginalized people in Kenya who benefit from M-PESA, but mostly Safaricom. A similar conclusion was reached by development economist Alan Gibson in a study commissioned by Financial Sector Deepening Trust Kenya (FSD Kenya) on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of FSD Kenya in 2016. He wrote that credit to business did not improve due to M-PESA and that credit to the agricultural sector even declined. He concluded in his otherwise very friendly survey that
4165-430: Is one of the early developers. The applications include a spelling checker , part-of-speech tagging , a language learning software , an analysed Swahili text corpus of 25 million words, an electronic dictionary , and machine translation between Swahili and English. The development of language technology also strengthens the position of Swahili as a modern medium of communication. Furthermore, Swahili Misplaced Pages
4284-556: Is one of the few Wikipedias in an African language that features a substantial number of contributors and articles. The widespread use of Swahili as a national language in Tanzania came after Tanganyika gained independence in 1961 and the government decided that it would be used as a language to unify the new nation. This saw the use of Swahili in all levels of government, trade, art as well as schools in which primary school children are taught in Swahili, before switching to English (medium of instruction) in secondary schools (although Swahili
4403-551: Is operated by Safaricom and Vodacom, mobile network operators (MNO) not classed as deposit-taking institutions, such as a bank. M-PESA customers can deposit and withdraw currency from a network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets acting as banking agents . The service enables its users to: Partnerships with Kenyan banks offer expanded banking services like interest-bearing accounts, loans, and insurance. The user interface technology of M-PESA differs between Safaricom of Kenya and Vodacom of Tanzania, although
4522-960: Is sometimes expressed against things that are dangerous. This might be the historical explanation for kifaru " rhinoceros ", kingugwa " spotted hyena ", and kiboko " hippopotamus " (perhaps originally meaning "stubby legs"). Another class with broad semantic extension is the m-/mi- class (Bantu classes 3/4). This is often called the 'tree' class, because mti, miti "tree(s)" is the prototypical example. However, it seems to cover vital entities neither human nor typical animals: trees and other plants, such as mwitu 'forest' and mtama 'millet' (and from there, things made from plants, like mkeka 'mat'); supernatural and natural forces, such as mwezi 'moon', mlima 'mountain', mto 'river'; active things, such as moto 'fire', including active body parts ( moyo 'heart', mkono 'hand, arm'); and human groups, which are vital but not themselves human, such as mji 'village', and, by analogy, mzinga 'beehive/cannon'. From
4641-567: Is spoken along the Benadir coast by the Bravanese people . Another Swahili dialect known as Kibajuni also serves as the mother tongue of the Bajuni minority ethnic group, which lives in the tiny Bajuni Islands as well as the southern Kismayo region. In Oman , there are an estimated 52,000 people who speak Swahili as of 2020. Most are descendants of those repatriated after the fall of
4760-582: Is still taught as an independent subject). After Tanganyika and Zanzibar unification in 1964, Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (TUKI, Institute of Swahili Research) was created from the Interterritorial Language Committee. In 1970 TUKI was merged with the University of Dar es Salaam , while Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (BAKITA) was formed. BAKITA is an organisation dedicated to the development and advocacy of Swahili as
4879-718: Is the lingua franca of other areas in the African Great Lakes region and East and Southern Africa . Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and of the Southern African Development Community . The East African Community created an institution called the East African Kiswahili Commission (EAKC) which began operations in 2015. The institution currently serves as
M-Pesa - Misplaced Pages Continue
4998-525: Is well known for being ahead of financial institutions globally in terms of maturity and technological innovation. According to Genesis Analytics, 70% of South Africans are "banked", meaning that they have at least one bank account with an established financial institution which have their own banking products which directly compete with the M-PESA offering. M-PESA was launched in India as a close partnership with ICICI bank in November 2011. Development for
5117-576: The East African coast. The word `Swahili' comes from an Arabic name for the area, meaning "coasts": The core of the Swahili language originates in Bantu languages of the coast of East Africa. Much of Swahili's Bantu vocabulary has cognates in the Unguja , Pemba , and Mijikenda languages and, to a lesser extent, other East African Bantu languages . While opinions vary on the specifics, it has been historically purported that around 16–20% of
5236-634: The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office by Boris Johnson's Conservative government. The DFID or ODA's role has been under: As of 2008, along with the Nordic countries , the DFID generally avoided setting up its own programmes, in order to avoid creating unnecessary bureaucracy. To achieve this, the DFID distributed most of its money to governments and other international organisations that had already developed suitable programmes, and let them distribute
5355-501: The International Finance Corporation released a report which explored many of these issues in greater depth and analyzed the strategic changes that Vodacom has implemented to improve their market position. As of May 2013, M-PESA in Tanzania had five million subscribers. In 2008, Vodafone partnered with Roshan , Afghanistan's primary mobile operator, to provide M-PESA, the local brand of the service. When
5474-857: The November 2021 shadow cabinet reshuffle . When it was the Overseas Development Administration, a scandal erupted concerning the department's funding of a hydroelectric dam on the Pergau River in Malaysia, near the Thai border. Building work had begun in 1991 with money from the British foreign aid budget. Concurrently, the Malaysian government bought around £1 billion worth of arms from British dealers, and thus became
5593-473: The Sabaki language . In fact, while taking account of daily vocabulary, using lists of one hundred words, 72–91% were inherited from the Sabaki language (which is reported as a parent language) whereas 4–17% were loan words from other African languages. Only 2–8% were from non-African languages, and Arabic loan words constituted a fraction of that. According to other sources, around 40% of the Swahili vocabulary comes from Arabic. What also remained unconsidered
5712-532: The Sultanate of Zanzibar . There are Swahili-based slangs, pidgins and creoles: In 1870, Edward Steere published Swahili Tales as Told by Natives of Zanzibar , a collection of 23 Swahili tales with facing-text English translation, along with a selection of proverbs and riddles. Some of the tales included are: " Kisa cha Punda wa Dobi, " "The Story of the Washerman's Donkey," also known as " The Heart of
5831-526: The Tanganyika African National Union used Swahili as a language of mass organisation and political movement. This included publishing pamphlets and radio broadcasts to rally the people to fight for independence. After gaining independence, Swahili was adopted as the national language. To this day, Tanzanians carry a sense of pride when it comes to Swahili, especially when it is used to unite over 120 tribes across Tanzania. Swahili
5950-420: The Arabic script (an unmodified version as opposed to proposals such as that of Mwalimu Sikujua) was relatively high. There were also differences in orthographic conventions between cities and authors and over the centuries, some quite precise but others different enough to cause difficulties with intelligibility. Thus despite a lack of official governmental backing, attempts at standardization and Swahilization of
6069-482: The Arabic script continued into the 20th century. Swahili nouns are separable into classes , which are roughly analogous to genders in other languages. In Swahili, prefixes mark groups of similar objects: ⟨m-⟩ marks single human beings ( mtoto 'child'), ⟨wa-⟩ marks multiple humans ( watoto 'children'), ⟨u-⟩ marks abstract nouns ( utoto 'childhood'), and so on. And just as adjectives and pronouns must agree with
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#17328009944496188-587: The Arabic script that were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India . Various colonial powers that ruled on the coast of East Africa played a role in the growth and spread of Swahili. With the arrival of the Arabs in East Africa, they used Swahili as a language of trade as well as for teaching Islam to
6307-612: The Comptroller and Auditor General agreed would be valuable. The study found that the DFID had improved in its general scrutiny of progress in reducing poverty and of progress towards divisional goals, however noted that there was still clear scope for further improvement. In 2016, the DFID was taken to task with accusations of misappropriation of funding in the British Overseas Territory of Montserrat . Whistleblower Sean McLaughlin commenced legal action against
6426-617: The DFID was to be merged with the Foreign Office to create the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office . The department was scrutinized by the International Development Committee . Following Labour's 2024 ascension to government, there has been speculation that DFID could be reestablished as a ministry of its own once more. However, since the General Election , the new Government has not yet committed to this. The final permanent secretary
6545-576: The Department for International Development and its predecessors have been independent departments or part of the Foreign Office. After the election of a Conservative government in October 1970, the Ministry of Overseas Development was renamed the "Overseas Development Administration" (ODA) and incorporated into the Foreign Office. The ODA was overseen by a minister of state in the Foreign Office who
6664-462: The Department of Trade and Industry arose in part because of the introduction of French mixed credit programmes, which had begun to offer French government support from aid funds for exports, including for projects in countries to which France had not previously given substantial aid. After the election of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the ministry was transferred back to
6783-569: The East African Kiswahili Commission (EAKC) which began operations in 2015. The institution currently serves as the leading body for promoting the language in the East African region , as well as for coordinating its development and usage for regional integration and sustainable development. Swahili is among the first languages in Africa for which language technology applications have been developed. Arvi Hurskainen
6902-621: The Foreign Office, as a functional wing again named the Overseas Development Administration. The ODA continued to be represented in the cabinet by the Foreign Secretary while the Minister for Overseas Development, who had day-to-day responsibility for development matters, held the rank of minister of state within the Foreign Office. In the early 1980s, part of the agency's operations was relocated to East Kilbride in Scotland, with
7021-528: The Kenyan and South African markets, including the banking regulations at the time of M-PESA's launch in each country. According to MoneyWeb, a South African investment website, "A tough regulatory environment with regards to customer registration and the acquisition of outlets also compounded the company's troubles, as the local regulations are more stringent in comparison to our African counterparts. Lack of education and product understanding also hindered efforts in
7140-476: The Kenyan finance minister to audit M-PESA, in an effort to at least slow the growth of the service. This ploy failed, as the audit found that the service was robust. At this time the Banking Act did not provide a basis to regulate products offered by non-banks, of which M-PESA was one such very successful product. As at November 2014, M-PESA transactions for the 11 months of 2014 were valued at KSh2.1 trillion,
7259-467: The M-PESA service are sometimes criticized for the high cost that the service imposes on its often poor users. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation warned in 2013 that lack of competition could drive up prices for customers of mobile money services and used M-PESA in Kenya as a negative example. According to the Foundation, a transfer of $ 1.50 cost $ 0.30 at the time, while the same provider charged only
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#17328009944497378-461: The M-PESA system in Kenya, such as M-kopa and Sportpesa . On 23 February 2018, it was reported that the Google Play store started taking payments for apps via Kenya's M-PESA service. On 8 January 2019, Safaricom launched Fuliza , an M-PESA overdraft facility. M-PESA was launched in Tanzania by Vodacom in 2008 but its initial ability to attract customers fell short of expectations. In 2010,
7497-414: The Swahili vocabulary is derived from loan words, the vast majority Arabic , but also other contributing languages, including Persian , Hindustani , Portuguese , and Malay . Omani Arabic is the source of most Arabic loanwords in Swahili. In the text "Early Swahili History Reconsidered". However, Thomas Spear noted that Swahili retains a large amount of grammar, vocabulary, and sounds inherited from
7616-465: The academic year 2005/2006. Kiswahili is now used widely in Burundi but is not recognised as an official language; only French, Kirundi, and English have this distinction. Since 2013, Swahili has been included in the all Burundian education system. Uganda adopted Kiswahili as one of its official languages (alongside English ) in 2022, and also made it compulsory across primary and secondary schools in
7735-424: The bank began as early as 2008. Vodafone India had partnered with both ICICI and ICICI bank, ICICI launched M-Pesa on 18 April 2013. Vodafone had planned to roll out this service throughout India. The user needed to register for this service, registration was free and there were charges levied per M-PESA transaction for money transfer services and DTH and Prepaid recharges could be done through M-PESA for free. M-PESA
7854-645: The black market. Swahili language Swahili , also known by its local name Kiswahili , is a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people , who are found primarily in Tanzania , Kenya , and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands). Estimates of the number of Swahili speakers, including both native and second-language speakers, vary widely. They generally range from 60 million to 150 million; with most of its native speakers residing in Tanzania. Swahili has
7973-459: The central idea of tree , which is thin, tall, and spreading, comes an extension to other long or extended things or parts of things, such as mwavuli 'umbrella', moshi 'smoke', msumari 'nail'; and from activity there even come active instantiations of verbs, such as mfuo "metal forging", from -fua "to forge", or mlio "a sound", from -lia "to make a sound". Words may be connected to their class by more than one metaphor. For example, mkono
8092-468: The country. The Swahili language is not widespread in Somalia and has no official status nationally or regionally. Dialects of Swahili are spoken by some ethnic minorities on the Bajuni islands in the form of Kibajuni on the southern tip of the country and in the town of Brava in the form of Chimwiini ; both contain a significant amount of Somali and Italian loanwords. Standard Swahili
8211-776: The court system. With the Germans controlling the major Swahili-speaking region in East Africa, they changed the alphabet system from Arabic to Latin. After the First World War, Britain took over German East Africa, where they found Swahili rooted in most areas, not just the coastal regions. The British decided to formalise it as the language to be used across the East African region (although in British East Africa [Kenya and Uganda] most areas used English and various Nilotic and other Bantu languages while Swahili
8330-532: The department in the Eastern Caribbean Court, questioning the DFID fraud investigation process. In June 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would be brought together to form the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office from 1 September the same year, centralising oversight of Britain's foreign aid budget. The stated aim, according to Johnson,
8449-411: The department was "to promote sustainable development and eliminate world poverty". DFID was headed by the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for International Development . The position was last held by Anne-Marie Trevelyan , who assumed office on 13 February 2020 and served until the department was dissolved on 2 September 2020. In a 2010 report by the Development Assistance Committee , the department
8568-587: The department worked to support the United Nations ' eight Millennium Development Goalswith a 2015 deadline, namely to: The department had its origins in the "Ministry of Overseas Development" created during the Labour government of 1964–1970 , which combined the functions of the Department of Technical Cooperation and the overseas aid policy functions of the Foreign, Commonwealth Relations, and Colonial Offices and of other government departments. Over its history,
8687-408: The development potential for local enterprise. Kenya does not have a data protection law, which enables Safaricom to use sensitive data of its subscribers rather freely. A data scandal surfaced in 2019 when Safaricom was sued in court for the alleged breach of data privacy of an estimated 11.5 million subscribers who had used their Safaricom numbers for sports betting. The data was allegedly offered on
8806-624: The development process. M-PESA also reached out to international regulators, such as the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the payment card industry to understand how best to protect client information and adhere to internationally recognized best practices. Know your customer (KYC) requirements impose obligations on prospective clients and on banks to collect identification documents of clients and then to have those documents verified by banks. The Kenyan government issues national identity cards that M-PESA leveraged in their business processes to satisfy their KYC requirements. M-PESA obtained
8925-558: The east coast of Africa, which was also the time period when Swahili emerged as a lingua franca in the region. Due to concerted efforts by the government of Tanzania , Swahili is one of three official languages (the others being English and French) of the East African Community (EAC) countries, namely Burundi , Democratic Republic of the Congo , Kenya , Rwanda , Somalia , South Sudan , Tanzania , and Uganda . It
9044-481: The entire world over". Although other bodies and agencies can propose new vocabularies, BAKITA is the only organisation that can approve its usage in the Swahili language. Tanzanians are highly credited for shaping the language to appear the way it is now. In Kenya, Kiswahili has been the national language since 1964 and is official since 2010. Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (CHAKITA) was established in 1998 to research and promote Kiswahili language in Kenya. Kiswahili
9163-402: The fact that this is a British organisation; it could be anything. The Americans have USAID , Canada has got CIDA ." The 2009 National Audit Office Performance Management review looked at how the DFID had restructured its performance management arrangements over the last six years. The report responded to a request from the DFID's Accounting Officer to re-visit the topic periodically, which
9282-539: The financial sector benefitted handsomely from the expansion of M-PESA, while the living conditions of the people were not noticeably improved. Milford Bateman et al. even conclude that M-PESA's expansion resulted in holding back economic development in Kenya. They diagnose serious weaknesses in the much cited paper by Suri and Jack, which had found positive effects on poverty, as M-PESA enabled female clients to move out of subsistence agriculture into micro-enterprise or small-scale trading activities. Alleged weaknesses include
9401-464: The first authorised airtime credit swapping – a precursor step towards M-PESA. The idea was discussed by the Commission for Africa and DFID introduced the researchers to Vodafone who had been discussing supporting microfinance and back office banking with mobile phones. S. Batchelor (Gamos) and N. Hughes (Vodafone CSR ) discussed how a system of money transfer could be created in Kenya. DFID amended
9520-508: The following: Maho (2009) considers these to be distinct languages: The rest of the dialects are divided by him into two groups: Maho includes the various Comorian dialects as a third group. Most other authorities consider Comorian to be a Sabaki language, distinct from Swahili. In Somalia , where the Afroasiatic Somali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini (also known as Chimbalazi)
9639-420: The formal financial system and for reducing crime in otherwise largely cash-based societies. However, the near-monopolistic providers of the M-PESA service are sometimes criticized for the high cost that the service imposes on its often poor users. Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-PESA, a mobile-based payment service targeting the un-banked, pre-pay mobile subscribers in Kenya on a pilot basis in October 2005. It
9758-442: The former are kisu "knife", kiti "chair" (from mti "tree, wood"), chombo "vessel" (a contraction of ki-ombo ). Examples of the latter are kitoto "infant", from mtoto "child"; kitawi "frond", from tawi "branch"; and chumba ( ki-umba ) "room", from nyumba "house". It is the diminutive sense that has been furthest extended. An extension common to diminutives in many languages is approximation and resemblance (having
9877-431: The gender of nouns in some languages with grammatical gender, so in Swahili adjectives, pronouns and even verbs must agree with nouns. This is a characteristic feature of all the Bantu languages . The ki-/vi- class historically consisted of two separate genders, artefacts (Bantu class 7/8, utensils and hand tools mostly) and diminutives (Bantu class 12/13), which were conflated at a stage ancestral to Swahili. Examples of
9996-444: The initial roll out of the product." In June 2011, Vodacom and Nedbank launched a campaign to re-position M-PESA, targeting the product to potential customers who have a higher Living Standard Measures (LSM) than were first targeted. Despite efforts, as at March 2015, M-PESA still struggled to grow its customer base. South Africa lags behind Tanzania and Kenya with only ca. 1 million subscribers. This comes as no surprise as South Africa
10115-463: The language continues to have a tradition of being written in Arabic script. Starting from the later half of the 19th century, continuing into the 20th century, and going on in the 21st century, a process of "Swahilization" of the Arabic Script has been underway by Swahili scribes and scholars. The first of such attempts was done by Mwalimu Sikujua , a scholar and poet from Mombasa . However,
10234-637: The launch of the service in South Africa , where there were estimated to be more than 13 million "economically active" people without a bank account. M-PESA has been slow to gain a toehold in the South African market compared to Vodacom's projections that it would sign up 10 million users in the following three years. By May 2011, it had registered approximately 100,000 customers. The gap between expectations for M-PESA's performance and its actual performance can be partly attributed to differences between
10353-573: The leading body for promoting the language in the East African region , as well as for coordinating its development and usage for regional integration and sustainable development. In recent years South Africa , Botswana , Namibia , Ethiopia , and South Sudan have begun offering Swahili as a subject in schools or have developed plans to do so. Shikomor (or Comorian ), an official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte ( Shimaore ),
10472-579: The local Bantu peoples . This resulted in Swahili first being written in the Arabic script. The later contact with the Portuguese resulted in the increase of vocabulary of the Swahili language. The language was formalised in an institutional level when the Germans took over after the Berlin conference . After seeing there was already a widespread language, the Germans formalised it as the official language to be used in schools. Thus schools in Swahili are called Shule (from German Schule ) in government, trade and
10591-444: The market then depicted that only a small percentage of people in Kenya used traditional banking services. There were low levels of bank income, high bank fees incurred and charged; most of the services were out of geographical reach to the rural Kenyan. Notably, a high level of mobile penetration was evident throughout the country making the adoption of mobile payments a viable alternative to the traditional banking channels. According to
10710-488: The money as efficiently as possible. In July 2009, the DFID rebranded all its aid programmes with the "UK aid" logo, to make clear the contributions were coming from the people of the United Kingdom. While the decision was met with some controversy among aid workers at the time, Commons International Development Select Committee Chairman Malcolm Bruce explained the rebranding, saying "the name DFID does not reflect
10829-555: The original Sagentia team transferred to. Following a three-year migration project to a new technology stack, as of 26 February 2017, IBM's responsibilities have been transferred to Huawei in all markets. The initial concept of M-PESA was to create a service which would allow microfinance borrowers to conveniently receive and repay loans using the network of Safaricom airtime resellers. This would enable microfinance institutions (MFIs) to offer more competitive loan rates to their users, as costs are lower than when dealing in cash. The users of
10948-405: The original emphatic consonants /dˤ, sˤ, tˤ, ðˤ/ and the uvular /q/ , or lengthening a vowel, where aspiration would be used in inherited Bantu words. Swahili is now written in the Latin alphabet. There are a few digraphs for native sounds, ch , sh , ng ' and ny ; q and x are not used, c is not used apart from the digraph ch , unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as
11067-626: The other classes may be placed in this class. The other classes have foundations that may at first seem similarly counterintuitive. In short, Borrowings may or may not be given a prefix corresponding to the semantic class they fall in. For example, Arabic دود dūd ("bug, insect") was borrowed as mdudu , plural wadudu , with the class 1/2 prefixes m- and wa- , but Arabic فلوس fulūs ("fish scales", plural of فلس fals ) and English sloth were borrowed as simply fulusi (" mahi-mahi " fish) and slothi (" sloth "), with no prefix associated with animals (whether those of class 9/10 or 1/2). In
11186-429: The paper was that "access to M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2 % of Kenyan households, out of poverty." Global development institutions focusing on the development potential of financial technology frequently cite M-PESA as a major success story in this respect, citing the poverty-reduction claim and including a reference to Suri and Jack's 2016 signature article. In
11305-539: The pilot was a key component in Vodafone and Safaricom's decision to take the product full scale. The learning from the pilot helped to confirm the market need for the service and although it mainly revolved around facilitating loan repayments and disbursements for Faulu customers, it also tested features such as airtime purchase and national remittance. The full commercial launch was initiated in March 2007. A snapshot of
11424-438: The pilot was gaining the agent's trust and encouraging them to process cash withdrawals and agent training. However, once Vodafone introduced the ability to buy airtime using M-PESA, the transaction volume increased rapidly. A 5% discount was offered on any airtime purchased through M-PESA and this served as an effective incentive. By 1 March 2006, KSh 50.7 million had been transferred through the system. The successful operation of
11543-481: The powers of the minister for overseas development were formally transferred to the Foreign Secretary. In 1977, partly to shore up its difficult relations with UK business, the government introduced the Aid and Trade Provision. This enabled aid to be linked to nonconcessionary export credits, with both aid and export credits tied to procurement of British goods and services. Pressure for this provision from UK businesses and
11662-521: The process of naturalization of borrowings within Swahili, loanwords are often reinterpreted, or reanalysed, as if they already contain a Swahili class prefix. In such cases the interpreted prefix is changed with the usual rules. Consider the following loanwords from Arabic: Similarly, English wire and Arabic وقت waqt ("time") were interpreted as having the class 11 prevocalic prefix w- , and became waya and wakati with plural nyaya and nyakati respectively. Swahili phrases agree with nouns in
11781-407: The region. While the Arabs were mostly based in the coastal areas, European missionaries went further inland spreading Christianity. As the first missionary posts in East Africa were in the coastal areas, missionaries picked up Swahili and used it to spread Christianity, since it contained many similarities with other indigenous languages in the region. During the struggle for Tanganyika independence,
11900-467: The role of M-PESA in reducing poverty have been contested in a 2019 paper, arguing that "Suri and Jack’s work contains so many serious errors, omissions, logical inconsistencies and flawed methodologies that it is actually correct to say that they have helped to catalyse into existence a largely false narrative surrounding the power of the fin-tech industry to advance the cause of poverty reduction and sustainable development in Africa (and elsewhere)". M-PESA
12019-571: The service was launched, it was initially used to pay policemen's salaries set to be competitive with what the Taliban were earning. Soon after the product was launched, the Afghan National Police found that under the previous cash model, 10% of their workforce were ghost police officers who did not exist; their salaries had been pocketed by others. When corrected in the new system, many police officers believed that they had received
12138-409: The service would gain through being able to track their finances more easily. When the service was piloted, customers adopted the service for a variety of alternative uses and complications arose with Faulu , the partnering MFI. In discussion with other parties, M-PESA was re-focused and launched with a different value proposition: sending remittances home across the country and making payments. M-PESA
12257-485: The spread of a standardized indigenous variation of Arabic script for Swahili was hampered by the colonial takeover of East Africa by the United Kingdom and Germany . The usage of Arabic script was suppressed in German East Africa and to a lesser extent in British East Africa . Nevertheless, well into the 1930s and 1940s, rural literacy rate in Arabic script as well as a local preference to write Swahili in
12376-600: The support of Financial Sector Deepening Kenya and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , Tavneet Suri from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and William Jack from Georgetown University have produced a series of papers extolling the benefits of M-PESA. In particular, their 2016 article published in Science has been influential in the international development community. The much cited result of
12495-469: The terms of reference for its grant to Vodafone, and piloting began in 2005. Safaricom launched a new mobile phone-based payment and money transfer service, known as M-PESA. The initial work of developing the product was given to a product and technology development company known as Sagentia . Development and second line support responsibilities were transferred to IBM in September 2009, where most of
12614-473: The underlying platform is the same. While Safaricom uses SIM toolkit (STK) to provide handset menus for accessing the service, Vodacom relies mostly on USSD to provide users with menus, but also supports STK. Transaction charges depend on the amount of money being transferred and whether the payee is a registered user of the service. The actual cost is a fixed amount for a given range of transaction sizes; for example Safaricom charges up to KSh 66 (US$ 0.6) for
12733-401: The voiced consonants have devoiced, though they are still written mb, nd etc. The /r/ phoneme is realised as either a short trill [ r ] or more commonly as a single tap [ ɾ ] by most speakers. [x] exists in free variation with h, and is only distinguished by some speakers. In some Arabic loans (nouns, verbs, adjectives), emphasis or intensity is expressed by reproducing
12852-642: Was Matthew Rycroft , who assumed office in January 2018. The main piece of legislation governing the department's work was the International Development Act 2002 , which came into force on 17 June 2002, replacing the Overseas Development and Co-operation Act 1980 . The Act made poverty reduction the focus of the department's work, and effectively outlawed tied aid . As well as responding to disasters and emergencies,
12971-651: Was a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom , from 1997 to 2020. It was responsible for administering foreign aid internationally. The Department for International Development (DFID) was founded by the UK government in 1997. The department was established by the Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair. The structure of the DFID was authored by various Developmental Aid Experts including Chris Collins, Barnaby Edwards Machteld, Nicolas Brown and Timothy Montague Hamilton Douglas. The goal of
13090-523: Was accountable to the Foreign Secretary . Though it became a section of the Foreign Office, the ODA was relatively self-contained with its own minister, and the policies, procedures, and staff remained largely intact. When a Labour government was returned to office in 1974, it announced that there would once again be a separate "Ministry of Overseas Development" with its own minister. From June 1975
13209-667: Was considered unlikely that the service would expand into Western Europe anytime soon. In December 2017, Vodafone closed its M-PESA product in Romania. In May 2015, M-PESA was also launched in Albania . It was shut down on 14 July 2017. M-PESA expanded into Mozambique , Lesotho , and Egypt in May, June, and July 2013, respectively. A full listing of countries in which M-PESA currently operates can be found on M-Pesa's website. M-PESA sought to engage Kenyan regulators and keep them updated on
13328-549: Was described as "an international development leader in times of global crisis". The UK aid logo is often used to publicly acknowledge DFID's development programmes are funded by UK taxpayers. The DFID's main programme areas of work were Education, Health, Social Services, Water Supply and Sanitation, Government and Civil Society, Economic Sector (including Infrastructure, Production Sectors and Developing Planning), Environment Protection, Research, and Humanitarian Assistance. In June 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that
13447-433: Was first launched by the Kenyan mobile network operator Safaricom, where Vodafone is technically a minority shareholder (40%), in March 2007. M-PESA quickly captured a significant market share for cash transfers, and grew to 17 million subscribers by December 2011 in Kenya alone. The growth of the service forced formal banking institutions to take note of the new venture. In December 2008, a group of banks reportedly lobbied
13566-586: Was mostly restricted to the coast). In June 1928, an inter-territorial conference attended by representatives of Kenya , Tanganyika , Uganda , and Zanzibar took place in Mombasa . The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as standard Swahili for those areas, and the standard orthography for Swahili was adopted. Estimates of the total number of first- and second-language Swahili speakers vary widely, from as low as 50 million to as high as 200 million, but generally range from 60 million to 150 million. Swahili has become
13685-402: Was shut down from 15 July 2019 due to regulatory curbs and stress in the sector, with Vodafone surrendering their PPI licence on 1 October 2019. In March 2014, M-PESA expanded into Romania , while mentioning that it may continue to expand elsewhere into Eastern Europe, as a number of individuals there possess mobile phones but do not possess traditional bank accounts. As of May 2014, however, it
13804-493: Was started as a public/private sector initiative after Vodafone was successful in winning funds from the Financial Deepening Challenge Fund competition established by the UK government's Department for International Development to encourage private sector companies to engage in innovative projects so as to deepen the provision of financial services in emerging economies. The initial obstacle in
13923-576: Was that a good number of the borrowed terms had Bantu equivalents. The preferred use of Arabic loan words is prevalent along the coast, where local people, in a cultural show of proximity to, or descent from Arab culture, would rather use loan words, whereas the people in the interior tend to use the Bantu equivalents. It was originally written in Arabic script . The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa , Tanzania , in 1711 in
14042-447: Was to "unite our aid with our diplomacy and bring them together in our international effort". Three former British Prime Ministers ( David Cameron , Gordon Brown and Tony Blair ) criticised the plan. Johnson merged the two departments together in September 2020, forming the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. In criticism of the merge, Opposition leader Keir Starmer kept the shadow department and its ministers in place until
14161-571: Was used to strengthen solidarity within the nation, and remains to be a key identity of the Tanzanian people. Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes : /ɑ/ , /ɛ/ , /i/ , /ɔ/ , and /u/ . According to Ellen Contini-Morava , vowels are never reduced , regardless of stress . However, according to Edgar Polomé , these five phonemes can vary in pronunciation. Polomé claims that /ɛ/ , /i/ , /ɔ/ , and /u/ are pronounced as such only in stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, as well as before
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