Safaricom, the country’s leading telco, plans to convert 2G and 3G enabled phones to 4G. They are targeting around 4 million phones. To actualize the plan, Safaricom has partnered with Google to provide one million affordable 4G enabled smartphones.
Already Safaricom customers have taken up approximately 50,000 smartphones. This was between late July and late September. On average, 769 customers visited Safaricom shops daily for the new handsets. The customers are required to make daily payments of at least kshs 20.
Notably, all Safaricom customers who have used their services for at one year are eligible for the program.
In case a customer fails to pay for four consecutive days, Safaricom will lock their device. Also, customers who fail to pay for a week risk having their devices barred from making calls and sending SMS. For failure to pay for one month, the customer will be blacklisted, the details forwarded to CRB, and blocked from accessing device loans in the future.
Sylvia Mulinge, the telco’s chief customer, said they were already glad about the positive results from the first quarter of the ‘Lipa Mdogo Mdogo’ rollout. There are no bad cases of defaults, which is a good sign of the program’s success.
