Visa has reaffirmed its pledge to work closely with its partners to avail to small and medium businesses (SMBs) in Kenya accelerated access to digital payments.

Visa says it will unveil dedicated Kenya editions of both its Visa Everywhere Initiative and She’s Next global fintech innovation alongside women empowerment programs over the next 12 months.

Visa’s She’s Next is set to be launched in Kenya in 2023 in partnership with financial institutions and will target women entrepreneurs to tackle funding and operational needs of their businesses.

Similarly, Visa is also scheduled to have the first Kenya-dedicated edition of its Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) fintech challenge in 2023.

VEI is a global innovation program that tasks start-ups to compete to solve the commerce challenges of tomorrow, and pitch visionary solutions for Visa’s vast network of partners.

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The program is also a platform for entrepreneurs to showcase their products and gain the support they need to scale.

Launched in 2015, the program has aided startups from more than 100 countries to raise over $2.5 billion in funding, one of the biggest hurdles facing early-stage entrepreneurs.

The expanded efforts follow the launch of Visa’s first pan-African Innovation Studio in Nairobi in April 2022, providing a state-of-the-art facility to co-create future-ready payment, commerce and money movement solutions.

Kenya boasts of an estimated 7.4 million SMBs and Visa has set its eyes on a fivefold surge in the number of Kenyan small businesses they intend to digitize in the next five years.

Since the starts of the pandemic, Visa has directly supported more than 40 million SMBs globally, following its pledge in June 2020 to digitally enable 50 million SMBs.

“We are excited to be able to collaborate with government and our partners to bring our global programs for startups to Kenya,” said Visa Senior Vice President and Head of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Aida Diarra.

She added, “We have also seen how transformative digitisation initiatives have been for small businesses in Kenya and are looking forward to partnering to drive even further access to more financial services for these businesses where gaps still exist, particularly among women.”

Visa recently committed US$200 million to support SMBs around the world over a period of five years in a bid to foster the economic advancement of women in different countries.

In this regard, Visa launched several local initiatives, including a grant of US$2.4 million to Hand in Hand, a nonprofit, to execute the Kenya Micro Enterprise Success programme (KMES).

Up to now, the programme has worked directly with 10,750 beneficiaries to improve their quality of life and financial resilience and surpassed its original target of 10,200 people.

Generally, the programme has established 5,178 jobs against its initial target of 2,766, and improved 8,708 enterprises, with 86 per cent of them being owned by women.

“The Hand in Hand partnership is an example of the impact we can have through collaboration and our extended commitment to enabling SMBs is testament to our belief in the potential of this segment to improve lives and drive economic growth for our country,” said Visa Country Leader for Kenya Eva Ngigi-Sarwari.