N. F. MATVEEVA Institute of Africa, Russian Academy of Sciences Keywords: mobile phones, mobile innovation technologies, Safaricom, M-Pesa Africa currently occupies the leading position in the world in terms of annual growth in the number of mobile phone subscribers - 20% in the last five years-and in 2011 it was replaced by Asia, whose mobile phone market is close to saturation. According to the GSMA*, there were 735 million mobile subscribers in Africa at the end of 2012, up from 400 million in 2009 and 2 million in 1998.1 Google estimates that this figure will reach 1 billion by 2016.2. Influential positions in the African mobile market are occupied by such international giants of the cellular industry as the English Vodafone, France Telecom, India's Bhaiti Group, Sweden's Ericsson, Norway's Telenor and some others. They highly value the continent's resources for further expansion of cellular communications not only as a means of communication, but also for its wide application in various sectors of the economy: after all, many services provided through mobile communications in developed countries have not yet reached Africa. However, in recent years, some African States have made significant progress in applying various mobile technology innovations. The group of such countries - with the most dynamically developing mobile communication markets - includes Kenya. The first mobile phones in Kenya appeared in 1992, but the actual starting point for the large-scale development of cellular communications should be considered 1999, when the monopoly position in the communications sector of the state-owned Kenya Post and Telecommunications Corporation was eliminated and private companies came here. As a result, the number of mobile phone subscribers increased from 180,000 in 2000 to 29.2 million in 2012, exceeding the number of landline phone users by 107 times and accounting for 74% of the country's 44 million population (against 1% in 1999).3 In fact, in Kenya, as in ... Read more