Players in Kenya's creative economy are set to benefit from Safaricom's renewed push to develop a more connected ecosystem that brings together music, gaming, and animation onto shared monetisation platforms.

According to Safaricom, this initiative will include increased support for gamers, and expanding developer skills in the evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) environment. Additionally, the telco has promised to help unlocking new pathways for creators through better discoverability and platform-led growth.

"Through platforms and partnerships, we are building the rails of the digital creative economy, enabling creators, gamers, startups, and young innovators to not just participate, but to thrive," said Fawzia Ali, Safaricom's Chief Consumer Business Officer.

She added: "For this industry to thrive, we must go beyond talent and build the right enablers; reliable connectivity, affordable data, seamless payments, distribution platforms, access to capital, digital skills, and global market access."

Fawzia was speaking at the 2026 edition of Safaricom's Decode summit held at Sarit Center, in Nairobi. 

She explained that through through platforms and partnerships, Safaricom is continuosly building the rails of the digital creative economy, offering thousands of creators, gamers, startups, and young innovators to not just participate, but to thrive.

Already, Safaricom's fitech platforms M-PESA, GlobalPay, Ziidi and Bonga enables seamless payments and financial growth, even as Baze power content distribution and monetisation.

What's more, SafaricomHook programmes helps drive access to data and digital skills while Spark Accelerator supporting startups, with a primary focus on the youth.

Kenya's creattive economy, which cuts across performing arts, music, digital arts and film is estimated at KSh500 billion, accounting for roughly 5 percent of the GDP.

On Wednesday, Safaricom unveiled My OneApp at the Decode summit, stirring the market with an application that brings together the functions of M-PESA payment app with MySafaricom, effectively setting a hub for money transfers, purchasing bundles, managing multiple accounts and redeeming Bonga Points.

The AI-powered initiative offers customers an intelligent platform and is yet another milestone under Safaricom's Fintech 2.0 growth plan.

In September last year, Safaricom completed a full architectural overhaul of M-PESA under a new push dubbed, Fintech 2.0, effectively scaling to 6,000 transactions per second on a cloud-native ecosystem that adapts, detects fraud, and self-heals. 

Daraja 3.0 now powers over 66,000 integrations across 105,000 developers, bringing stronger identity verification, fraud detection, and secure onboarding.

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