When Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Ethiopia in 2022, it was the latest expansion of the service that had changed the meaning of money in Kenya fifteen years earlier. By 2018, M-Pesa had already been exported to Ghana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Democratic Republic of Congo and other markets. The Kenyan innovation that had begun as a pilot project for sending small amounts of money home had become the gold standard of mobile financial services globally. Banks in Europe and America studied it. Governments in developing countries tried to replicate it. It had started in Nairobi.