Mobile Finance

M-Pesa Ethiopia signs deal with EthioPost

M-Pesa Ethiopia signs deal with EthioPost

M-Pesa Ethiopia last week announced the signing of an agreement with the country’s postal service EthioPost, officially designating EthioPost as the primary agent within the M-Pesa ecosystem.

This allows the postal company to leverage its established presence and extensive network of branches to provide mobile money services at its points of sale, supported by a broad network of sub-agents.

It also allows M-Pesa Ethiopia, part of Safaricom’s service in the country, to expand the reach of its mobile money platform, which arrived in Ethiopia, like Safaricom, in 2023. 

M-Pesa Ethiopia has enjoyed quite a few milestones already. This year we reported that M-Pesa Ethiopia and African AI creator platform Gebeya had launched a subscription package that allows Ethiopians to access AI creation tools and pay for them directly via M-Pesa. Late last year M-Pesa Ethiopia announced a new mobile money platform called M-Pesa LeHulum that works with any SIM card.

The Ecofin news service points out that, in October 2025, the operator integrated M-Pesa into the national payment network EthSwitch, and in March 2025, as we reported, it also partnered with the fintech company Lakipay to facilitate merchant payments.

2024 saw an agreement with the national electricity company to enable bill payments via M-Pesa and expansion of the M-Pesa Global service to Ethiopia, paving the way for money transfers between Kenya and Ethiopia.

Of course incumbent operator Ethio Telecom also offers mobile money through its Telebirr platform. Launched in 2021, it had nearly 60 million subscriptions by the end of December 2025, way ahead of M-Pesa’s 3.4 million active subscribers in September of that year.

However, M-Pesa is the only competition for Telebirr in a market where there is an estimated total user base of 62-63 million out of a population of close to 138 million. This user base could be even lower due to multiple SIM card ownership, offering considerable opportunities for growth.



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