During his keynote at the Partos Innovation Festival Kenyan designer Mark Kamau mentioned that “45% of Kenya’s GDP was mobile.” That is an impressive statistic, so I wondered if I could verify it. With some public and open data, it was easy to follow up.

World Bank data pegs Kenya’s GDP in 2016 at some 72 billion USD.
Kenya’s central bank publishes monthly figures on the volume of transactions through mobile, and for September 2018 it reports 327 billion KSh, while the lowest monthly figure is February at 300 billion. With 100 Ksh being equivalent to 1 USD, this means the monthly transaction volume exceeds 3 billion USD every month. For a year this means 3*12=36 billion USD, or about half of the 2016 GDP figure. An amazing volume.