TED Talks Daily
A story of moral imagination and bold entrepreneurship | Sitoyo Lopokoiyit and Jacqueline Novogratz
10 Jul 2025
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I'm always amazed by how entrepreneurial minds are able to solve some of the biggest, most intangible problems we face, seeing scalable solutions against all odds. This is one of those stories.
In this conversation, impact investor Jacqueline Novogratz speaks with Sotoyo Lobokoye, the CEO of M-Pesa, Africa's largest fintech platform, to learn how M-Pesa's digital banking ecosystem has revolutionized financial access across Africa. It demonstrates how financial inclusion and smart technology truly have the power to uplift entire communities. That's coming up.
I am so excited to have this conversation with C. Toyo for so many reasons, but three that I'll start with. First of all, he disrupted the first two industries I worked in. I started off in traditional banking and then in 1986 co-founded the first microfinance bank in Rwanda, both disrupted by M-Pesa.
For the last 25 years, I've been investing in social enterprises focused on solving problems of poverty. And for the last 20, M-Pesa has fundamentally accelerated them. And the second reason is the unexpected. M-Pesa was founded in Kenya. What's so extraordinary is this is 2007, which was the era of the iPhone and iPhones. When IBM introduced Watson, it was the year of Kindle and Airbnb.
And not enough people paid attention to this notion that cell phone banking could be a thing. It would take years before the United States and China took it on themselves. And now, when I'm in Nairobi, I can buy a banana or roasted corn on the street in ways that in New York, often at restaurants, I still can't. I need my credit card. And so it has fundamentally transformed society.
The third which we're going to get to is the moral imagination. Sitoya and I share a belief that what we need in the world are social entrepreneurs who are using business grounded in moral imagination. In other words, they are fundamentally designed from the perspective of those they are here to serve, particularly the overlooked and the underestimated.
And M-PESA has done that like very few other social enterprises. So thank you for this conversation.
You're welcome.
And let's start at the beginning, Sitoyo.
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