Towards the end of June, Safaricom unveiled a new loyalty reward promotion targeted at its 28.6 million M-PESA customers and the 156,000 agents who make M-PESA transactions across the country and beyond, possible.
You’ve probably already heard about the promotion because anyone making an M-PESA transaction over the last 2-3 weeks has been getting a separate text message from M-PESA Tu informing them of points awarded and calling on them to either check their points balance or redeem a prize. It is this prize that you are probably familiar with because it is basic at best. 8 megabytes of data here, 20 SMS there, etc.
While those target rewards appear scanty and, to be honest, insignificant to the extent that one ends up feeling unappreciated, they are part of a grand scheme of things and ought to be viewed that way. They are means to an end and not the end itself.
This is what you need to know about the promotion:
- You don’t need to do a thing. By default, all active Safaricom M-PESA customers are automatically enrolled in the promotion. The keyword here is active. This is because those whose M-PESA accounts have either been suspended or frozen are not eligible to take part in the promotion.
- As such, one only needs to start transacting on M-PESA in order to get rewarded and, according to Safaricom, “increase their chances of being a winner”.
- For every Kshs 100 that one transacts on M-PESA, they get 10 points in the Maisha Ni M-PESA Tu promotion. That simple.
- The points are not transferrable.
- Sending and receiving money via M-PESA, making mobile banking transactions (bank to M-PESA), making payments via M-PESA (Lipa na M-PESA – Paybill and Buy Goods) and even international money transfer all contribute towards earning one points in the promotion. However, things like buying airtime for yourself (and others) and sending money to non-Safaricom subscribers won’t earn one any points. The same is the case for loan and savings products like KCB M-PESA and M-Shwari.
- The end goal is to win one of the 7 apartments on offer throughout the promotion even though, at this point, one of those already has an owner: Gikomba market metal artisan James Njagi Waweru who is the promotion’s first apartment winner.
- One can only redeem the weekly target rewards once per week throughout the promotion’s remaining 6 weeks. More on those here.
- The promotion is not just limited to M-PESA customers. Even agents where we deposit and withdraw money from are in. For every Kshs 100 transacted through them, an M-PESA agent gets a point in the Maisha Ni M-PESA Tu promotion.
- Whereas agents are not in the running to win the apartments on offer, they stand to win cash prizes of Kshs 1 million.
- Those who are not interested in the promotion can as well opt out by dialing the promotion short code, *444*0#, and selecting the last option.
- There are daily and weekly draws for which Kshs 110 million in daily and weekly cash prizes is up for grabs. Another Kshs 100 million can be won daily and weekly in the form of airtime, SMS and data.
