You heard? 32-year-old Gikomba market metal artisan James Waweru won an apartment in the ongoing Maisha Ni M-PESA Tu promotion last week, the first of several more to come.
You are probably wondering if you’ll be the next one to win such an apartment.
Or you’ve already given up on the whole thing and are resigned to the Kshs 8 worth of airtime you got the last time you tried to redeem the free rewards that are being dished out on a daily basis to M-PESA users across the country.
This is how the whole thing works:
Note: unless otherwise, all M-PESA users are automatically in the promotion. (Here’s all you need to know about that and more).
- Go to the mySafaricom app on your phone (or the SIM toolkit if you prefer that) and make a transaction. This could be anything. Maybe sending money to someone, paying for a bill etc.
- Once you pay, that’s it. There’s nothing else you need to do.
- For instance, in my case, the start of a new month found me with quite a number of bills that needed settling. Like my home internet or a rarity: a Posta bill. Remember post office boxes? As you can see from the screen grabs below, moments after each transaction was done, I got a message informing me of the number of points I had received as a result as well as the cumulative total number of points.
- While each text message after an eligible transaction (i.e. over Kshs 100) shows the number of points earned and the cumulative total, one can still get the same information any day any time by dialing *444*0#.
- The promotion works just like Bonga points, the other customer loyalty programme that Safaricom has been running for long. Think of the points that you get after every transaction that meets the threshold set (at least over Kshs 100) as Bonga points, but for M-PESA. Bonga points are usually awarded for everything you do with your airtime at a rate of 1 point for every Kshs 10 airtime spent (refer). M-PESA Tu points are awarded for almost every transaction made on M-PESA at a rate of 10 points for every Kshs 100 transacted. In fact, the only major difference between the Bonga rewards scheme and the Maisha Ni M-PESA Tu promotion is that the latter, as the name suggests, is a promotion. One that won’t last long (it ends in August, on the 26th). There’s more…
- There are weekly targets. Once one hits their targets, they get rewarded. The rewards come in the form of airtime, free SMS and free data. The weekly target rewards that many are familiar with are just that, rewards. They are free and one’s accumulated points are not used up when they are redeemed.
- The weekly targets are part of a big thing: apartments to be won. The process, is the same, you don’t need to do anything. You just have to keep on transacting using M-PESA (the more the better, apparently) and lady luck may just happen to be pointing in your direction and you may walk away with any of the 6 remaining apartments (one is already gone as noted at the beginning of this article).
