Daraja 3.0, Agentic AI, and 5G Gaming: What Safaricom’s Decode 4.0 Means for Kenyan Developers

Twenty-five years ago, Safaricom launched as a telecommunications company. Today, it is something considerably more difficult to define: part infrastructure provider, part developer ecosystem, part AI accelerator. Naisenya Mungai, the company’s Digital Transformation Tech Lead, is comfortable with that ambiguity. In fact, she thinks it’s the point.

“For Kenyan innovators, this shift means that Safaricom is becoming more of an enabler than ever before,” she says, speaking to TechTrends Media ahead of the company’s annual Decode summit, now in its fourth edition. “Instead of building everything from scratch, developers and entrepreneurs can plug into scalable tools,  connectivity, payments, identity, fintech APIs, cloud and AI that are already widely adopted across the country.”

The occasion for our conversation is Decode 4.0, Safaricom’s flagship technology summit, which this year carries the theme Made of Kenya. It’s a deliberate provocation,  a pushback against the assumption that meaningful tech innovation flows only from Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. “Kenyan engineers are contributing to that global shift in uniquely practical ways,” Mungai says. “Across financial services, agriculture, transport and entertainment, local engineers are building solutions that respond directly to Kenya’s day-to-day realities.”

From M-PESA to Intelligent Systems

Any conversation about Safaricom’s technology ambitions inevitably begins with M-PESA, the mobile money platform that, when it launched in 2007, quietly rewired how millions of Kenyans moved money. Mungai is proud of that legacy but clear-eyed about where it needs to go. “Those rails are now championing financial wellness, hyper-personalisation, automation, intuitive services and fraud detection,” she says. “Decode sits at the crossroads of Kenya’s digital legacy and a future anchored on intelligence.”

Central to that future is Daraja 3.0, the latest iteration of Safaricom’s M-PESA integration platform. Where previous versions could be notoriously cumbersome for developers, onboarding alone was enough to discourage many early-stage startups. Daraja 3.0 has been rebuilt with speed and simplicity in mind. “Everything from onboarding to documentation has been redesigned to be clearer and more intuitive, with fewer steps and faster turnaround times,” Mungai explains. New capabilities in security, mini-apps, GSM and IoT have also been introduced, she adds, with the goal of lowering barriers enough that more innovators can participate in the digital economy without being slowed down by technical complexity.

Teaching AI in Practical Terms

If Daraja is about payments infrastructure, the more ambitious conversation at Decode 4.0 is about artificial intelligence,  specifically, what Safaricom calls “Agentic AI”: systems capable of operating autonomously to solve real business problems. It’s a concept that can sound abstract in a boardroom but lands differently when you’re a developer in Eldoret trying to build a logistics tool on a tight budget.

Mungai is conscious of that gap. “Our approach is centred on making advanced tools secure, usable and relevant in the African context,” she says. “At Decode 4.0, we’re creating an environment where innovators don’t just hear about AI,  they experience it.”

That experience is structured through Code Labs, a year-long guided programme covering application building and intelligent systems frameworks, and Builder Labs, a series of hands-on sessions developed in partnership with Huawei, Dell, Microsoft and Google. The aim is not to produce AI theorists but practitioners, developers who can design and deploy autonomous systems for problems like customer service automation, agricultural supply chains, and financial fraud detection.

Gaming 

One of the more striking additions to this year’s summit is a dedicated gaming pillar. It reflects both the commercial growth of Kenya’s gaming industry and the infrastructure now available to support it. Safaricom’s 5G rollout has given game developers and streamers access to the low latency and bandwidth that competitive gaming demands. “Developers can build more immersive experiences, and streamers can produce content that meets global standards,” Mungai says.

Beyond connectivity, the company is investing in creative community infrastructure through platforms like S-HooK and Baze, collaborative spaces where gamers, animators and storytellers can network and build together. The implication is clear: gaming is not a leisure category to be tolerated on the edges of a tech summit. It is, in Safaricom’s framing, a legitimate creative and economic industry deserving the same serious ecosystem support as fintech or agritech.

Taking Innovation to the Regions

Perhaps the most consequential announcement attached to Decode 4.0 is not what happens at the main summit, but what comes after it. Safaricom is launching Decode Cafés in Meru, Homa Bay and Eldoret, satellite innovation hubs designed to bring mentorship, technical training and community networks to developers outside the capital.

“Innovation thrives when opportunities are evenly distributed,” Mungai says plainly. The cafés will give students, entrepreneurs and developers in those cities access to the same tools and networks available in Nairobi, she explains. Alongside the physical hubs, Safaricom plans to train 50 lecturers across each of five regions, embedding AI literacy into educational institutions rather than leaving it to self-taught developers to figure out alone.

It is a recognition, implicit but significant, that Kenya’s tech ecosystem has long been over-centralised, that concentrating innovation activity in Westlands and Kilimani leaves enormous reserves of talent and problem-solving capacity untapped.

For startups that come through Decode and want to take their ideas further, the pathway leads to Spark, Safaricom’s accelerator programme. Mungai describes Decode as the discovery and connection point,  a place where founders can showcase products, gather expert feedback and refine their thinking, while Spark provides the funding, technical support and structured guidance needed to actually scale.

“Promising ventures can turn innovative ideas into fully developed businesses ready for the Kenyan and regional market,” she says.

It is, in miniature, a model of what Safaricom is attempting at a much larger scale: to build an ecosystem where the raw materials; connectivity, APIs, capital, community, training are available to anyone with a good enough idea, wherever in Kenya they happen to be.

Whether that ambition fully materialises will depend on execution. But twenty-five years in, Safaricom has at least earned the right to make the argument.

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