Both mobile communications and mobile money markets in Kenya are dominated by Safaricom, potentially limiting consumer choice and leading to an unbalanced market for other operators. Plum was commissioned to compile a report looking at the potential impacts of increased or lessened competition in the Kenyan market, drawing on existing academic studies to quantify the estimated effects.

The study identified the direct impacts on competition on prices, service quality, and investment. From these, we considered how new services, uptake, and innovation would lead to changes in consumer welfare and GDP. We built a quantitative framework to run alongside a series of scenarios, ranging from a monopoly market (where ineffective regulation leads to the existing competing operators leaving the market) to a prescriptive regulation on pricing. Our model was able to estimate the overall impacts on price, penetration, investment and GDP for each scenario.