Safaricom poured billions of shillings into education, health and community programmes in its 25th year, even as its own climate targets kept slipping further out of reach.
The telecom giant’s FY26 Annual Report shows a company investing heavily in people while its Planet ambitions, the ones it set for itself, continue to lag behind schedule.
A New Strategy For A 25 Year Milestone
Safaricom marked its 25th anniversary in October 2025 by rolling its climate, circularity and community work into what it calls the Purpose Strategy, split into two pillars: People, focused on transforming society, and Planet, meant to catalyse what the company terms a net positive future. The Board frames the ambition plainly: Safaricom wants to become Africa’s leading purpose led technology company by 2030, and it says every purpose project now maps to a 2030 target the company can be measured against.
Billions Flow Into Education, Health And Communities
Over the past five years, the Safaricom and M-PESA Foundations have invested KShs 17.41 billion in education, reaching 2.61 million beneficiaries, and KShs 3.14 billion in health, reaching 11.85 million people. Environmental and livelihood programmes drew KShs 1.46 billion, reaching 1.92 million beneficiaries, while humanitarian response accounted for KShs 820.19 million across 284,700 beneficiaries. In FY26 alone, the Foundations touched more than 4.4 million lives, and the company says its social and economic initiatives have positively impacted 25.9 million lives over its full 25 year history.
Much of that education spending now sits under Citizens of the Future, launched in November 2025 to unify Safaricom’s scholarship, infrastructure and digital skills work. In its first year, the programme onboarded 261 senior secondary scholars from all 47 counties, achieving 51 percent female representation, completed upgrades at 47 schools benefiting 35,000 learners and over 1,500 teachers, and enrolled 400 vocational scholars under its Wezesha Vijana technical training track. The M-PESA Foundation Academy added 149 scholars, lifting total enrolment to 487, a 44 percent jump on the year before.
Not every figure moved in the right direction this year. Social value generated through Foundation investments fell to KShs 6.8 billion in FY26, down from KShs 8.9 billion the year before, and the share of supplier spend directed to women, youth and people with disabilities came in at 5.07 percent. Women now make up 49.5 percent of Safaricom’s workforce across the Group, edging up from 49 percent in FY25.
The Payoff: What All That Spending Is Worth
Safaricom’s True Value assessment, a model the company uses to convert its social and environmental footprint into shillings, puts that value at 16 times its financial profit. The FY25 assessment, the latest completed one, found Safaricom contributed 5 percent of Kenya’s GDP and supported more than 1.3 million jobs directly and indirectly. That builds on a run of steady growth Khusoko has tracked over the years: the company’s FY25 contribution to Kenya’s economy stood at KShs 983 billion, representing 5.1 percent of GDP and supporting over 1.28 million jobs, itself an increase on the KShs 601 billion and 978,633 jobs the company reported for FY19.
Where Climate Ambition Meets Climate Reality
Safaricom added 570 new solar powered sites to its network in FY26, bringing the total to 2,002 against a target of 5,000 by 2030. Green energy now powers 35 percent of the network, still well short of a 95 percent goal the company set for itself. That gap matters because Safaricom’s own report calls solarisation the key lever for cutting reliance on diesel generators, even as it acknowledges that network growth keeps adding pressure to the emissions side of the ledger.
The company has also set firmer numbers around its climate ambition. It built a 2035 Decarbonisation Strategy this year, complete with a Climate Transition Plan aligned to the Science Based Targets initiative and the 1.5 degree pathway, and it wants to cut Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 43 percent and Scope 3 emissions by 41 percent on the way to net zero by 2050. Understanding Scope 3, the emissions tied to suppliers, freight and travel, remains a work in progress, the report notes candidly.
To help fund the transition, Safaricom issued its debut green bond in December 2025, part of a KShs 40 billion medium term note programme. The offer drew strong appetite from the market: the report shows it was oversubscribed by 175.7 percent, with nearly 96 percent of applications coming from more than 2,400 individual investors.
Steady Wins In Trees And Waste Management
Safaricom’s reafforestation partnership with the Kenya Forest Service has now planted more than three million trees, including 681,000 added in FY26 alone, across over 3,000 hectares, working toward a five million tree target by 2030. A separate KShs 15 million Biodiversity Restoration project, run with 21 universities and involving 3,528 students, has planted 60,195 indigenous and fruit trees toward a 250,000 tree goal meant to offset the environmental cost of network expansion.
On waste, the company collected and recycled 230 tonnes of electronic waste in Kenya during FY26, up from 190.75 tonnes the year before, and says it beat its annual recycling target by 99 percent. Safaricom also trained circularity champions against the ISO 59004 standard, cut back on single use plastics and stripped down SIM card packaging to reduce both waste and cost.
A Company Ahead On People, Behind On Planet
That contrast defines Safaricom’s sustainability story this year. The Foundations delivered real money to real communities, from school upgrades to scholarships to healthcare access, and the numbers back up the scale of that commitment. But climate action tells a different story: green energy sits at 35 percent against a 95 percent target, and the company itself admits some interventions have moved slower than planned. Safaricom can point to strong social spending as proof of purpose. Whether it can close the gap on climate before 2030 arrives is a separate question, and one the company has not yet answered.
