CEO Today Africa Awards

41 CEO TODAY AFRICA AWARDS 2020 Kenya Michael Joseph CEO of Safaricom Limited About Michael Joseph Michael Joseph is the current Chief Executive officer a position held since July 2, 2019. He joined the board on September 8, 2008. Michael is employed by Vodafone Group Services Limited as the Director of Mobile Money. He is also Vodafone’s Strategic Advisor appointed to the Boards of Vodacom Group South Africa, Vodacom Tanzania and Vodacom Mozambique. He is also the Chairman of Kenya Airways. Previously, Michael was the CEO of Safaricom Limited from July 2000 when the company was re-launched as a joint- venture between Vodafone UK and Telkom Kenya until his retirement in November 2010. During his tenure, he steered the company from a subscriber base of less than 20,000 to over 16.71 million subscribers. This phenomenal growth straddling nearly a decade was motored by the launch of many innovative products and services such as M-PESA. Today, Safaricom is one of the leading companies in East Africa and one of the most profitable companies in the region. Firm Profile In the year 2000, we began the Safaricom journey with a view to Transform Lives. Safaricom is one of a small group of about 400 companies across Africa whose annual revenues are more than $1 billion. Many of these companies are pan-African in their operations and are active in increasingly diverse sectors. We invest a unique way of doing business through our Purpose; to ‘Transform Lives’. We seek to create opportunities for Kenyans to be a part of our growth story by empowering them with the right tools for economic growth. The “Simu ya Jamii” innovation allowed Kenyans to earn money from operating small, mobile pay phones. We achieve our Transforming Lives vision through a number of channels, but the origin of our most impactful transformation stories is the base station. We now have over 4,000 towers connecting Kenyans from Turbo to Turkana with each one of these base stations having its own unique story to tell. Partnerships that Transform Communities Through our partnerships with various groups, we are delivering more than just voice or data to communities across Kenya. M-TIBA was developed out of strategic partnership between CarePay, PharmAccess Foundation and Safaricom. It leverages our respective strengths to deliver healthcare solutions to over 100,000 Kenyans through 60 health care providers all for less than KSHs.300. We have also partnered with the Government numerous times to extend more services to the Kenyan citizen by digitising primary schools, connecting health centres, streamlining payments to farmers and much more. By working with Eneza Education, we are enabling over 1 million children to access interactive educational material through the very simplest of mobile phones. Children from Class Four all the way to Form 4 can chat live with a teacher through either USSD or SMS, an online web app, an offline desktop app, or an Android app. www.safaricom.co.ke