int but at some stage growth becomes limited by resource and/or environmental constraints, and politics often gets in the way as well. The disputed election at the end of 1997 in Kenya resulted in 1500 deaths and the displace- ment of 600 000 people. No shops or banks were open for 5 days and no air time resellers were available to top up prepay accounts. Safaricom the local operator continued to allow calls and texts but more significantly a few months earlier a service called M-PESA had been established. The service was disarmingly simple. A sender wishes to send money to a friend or pay for product or service. He/she enters the recipient's phone number, the amount and a PIN number. The SIM-based software (either downloaded over the air or factory loaded) encrypts the SMS message. A centralised accounting system then transfers the funds and a confirmation message is sent. If the recipient owned an M-PESA account then this is a simple SMS receipt. If not, then a voucher is sent that is redeemable through a network of nominated agents. One year on there were more than two million registered M-PESA users in Kenya, totalling 20% of Safaricom's installed base. Another one million people had received money through the system and 10% of Kenyans had used the service with an estimate that as much as 20% of Kenyan GDP was passing through the system. A similar service was launched in Afghanistan and Tanzania with India and Egypt following later. http://www.safaricom.co.ke/index.php?id=250. Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial Success, First Edition. Geoff Varrall. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Making Telecoms Work Globally, only 1 in 7 people have a bank account, whereas (as we know) there are more mobile phones in the world than people, we just need to share them more evenly. Put another way, five billion people own a phone, one billion people own a bank account. Just on its own and/or counting partner and associate networks Vodafone reaches a billion pe