Counting by touch in M-Pesa business

Many would hesitate to run an M-Pesa shop if the only way to tell the value of a currency note was through their sense of touch.

Not so 25-year-old Dennis Nyariaro, who has beaten his path to success after grabbing a failed M-pesa business.

Mr Nyariaro refused to allow his lack of sight stifle his inner vision to run the business.

This was soon after he completed his degree course at Kenyatta University in April. He will graduate in December.

"I don’t believe in this idea that you must be formally employed because like myself, you are blind and so cannot start your own ventures,” he says, adding: “Life is tough, and you have to fight for yourself even in the most challenging circumstances.”

With the little saving he had after finishing university from the government sponsored loans, he bought the M-pesa shop.

The dealer, he says, was at first unwilling to sell to him the business because he was blind. He simply didn’t wasn’t to sell a failed business venture to such an individual.

“He thought it would be unfair if I also failed. He warned me that there were so many other M-Pesa shops here, but I insisted on the deal,” he says.

The deal was closed in a few minutes and Dennis became a businessman.

“I ran the business on the first month on my own and miraculously, I never lost any cash to conmen.”

He would just ask customers the amounts they had withdrawn or deposited without verifying a confirmation as is done in any other M-Pesa business.

“The only thing I have mastered are the phone keys. My only problem is in making withdrawals, because much as I would feel the monies and know the denominations I have issued or received, there was no way I would see the verification on the cell-phone,” he told the Nation.

Mr Nyariaro says he often went to the bank for new bank notes to make it easy to verify the various denominations because they have a more distinct texture.

He says dishevelled, old notes can sometimes be difficult to verify.

Sooner or later, people who visited the M-Pesa — most of whom are Kenyatta University students — kept asking him how he could run the business which requires much verification.

Later, some students told him of computer applications that would be connected to a cell-phone to help him hear and thus verify the transactions.

Mr Nyariaro got a Nokia software called Non Visual Desktop Access that reads the key pads that have been pressed and prompts a feedback from the phone to the computer.

Through its integrated speech synthesizer, the application picks the message from the mobile phone which is attached to the computer and this is transmitted through a speaker, reading out the contents of a transaction and any feedback messages to a phone.

Now Mr Nyariaro says his M-Pesa shop has become popular because it offers fast service.

Curious students also go there to make as little withdrawals as Sh100 just to see how he does his thing. They often come in groups as if to confirm to each other what they might have had from friends about a blind man running an M-Pesa shop.

“I can hear their murmurs but it is alright because per day I serve close to 200 customers which has given me mileage in this place,” he says.

Safaricom staff

Safaricom staff visited his shop last week just to see how he had beat the odds to undertake the business. The visit, he says, humbled and encouraged him.

Vision, as Mr Jonathan Swift said, lies in the art of seeing the invisible.

Even while he was a university student, Mr Nyariaro demonstrated his passion to succeed.

He vied to be elected a student leader and beat a host of other candidates to be the special needs representative for the students.

Though passionate, he is more cautious and less cocky as he speaks about his ambition — not to be a teacher only, but to become a successful businessman as well.