Increasing Use of Mobile Payments Among Kenya's Chemists

Jessica Vernon and Jennifer Stutsman of Maisha Meds in Kenya will encourage chemists and pharmacies to accept mobile money in East Africa by integrating their tailored software application with an established mobile payment system, and providing automatic registration and financial incentives. Chemists have found it particularly difficult to track transactions made using mobile money and therefore tend to avoid using it. Their existing software program can be run on locally available tablets and enables digital recording of pharmacy's sales and purchases, and stock tracking. They will integrate this with a mobile payment system and offer it to a network of chemists who use mobile money to evaluate the effect on frequency of mobile money transactions. They will also test whether automatic registration to a mobile payment system along with access to competitive loans can sign-up more chemists than existing subscription packages.