For decades, insurance in Kenya has struggled against a simple but stubborn problem: the people who need cover most are the ones least likely to buy it. Informal workers, gig earners, and low-income households often view insurance as a product for salaried professionals with the paperwork, the bank statements, and the spare cash to justify a monthly premium.
Safaricom’s Tuunza Mapato, now embedded within My OneApp under Do More With M-Pesa, is a direct answer to that gap. It is not a grand reinvention of insurance. It is something more useful: a quiet removal of the friction that has kept ordinary Kenyans out of the market.
The Case for Small, Continuous Cover
Tuunza Mapato offers Hospital Cash cover of Ksh 30,000 and Funeral cover of Ksh 100,000, starting from Ksh 60 a week. On paper, these numbers look modest next to a comprehensive medical scheme. But that is precisely the point. This is not designed to replace a hospital plan or a life policy. It is designed to catch the everyday financial shocks that push households into debt or force families to sell assets at short notice — a week in hospital, a funeral that must be arranged within days. For a boda boda rider, a market trader, or a casual labourer, Ksh 60 a week is a manageable outflow. A sudden need for tens of thousands of shillings is not.
What makes the product genuinely interesting is not the sum insured but the delivery mechanism. Premiums are collected automatically and continuously through M-Ratiba, Safaricom’s recurring payment tool. This matters more than it might first appear. Micro-insurance products in Kenya have historically suffered from a predictable failure pattern: a customer opts in with enthusiasm, pays for a few weeks or months, then forgets, gets busy, or simply runs short of cash — and the cover lapses without anyone quite noticing until a claim is needed and denied. Continuous auto-deduction removes the burden of remembering. The customer does not need to be disciplined; the system carries that responsibility instead.
Designing for Failure, Not Just Success
The more thoughtful part of the design is what happens when a deduction does not go through. Rather than silently letting cover lapse, the low-balance alert notifies the customer that a weekly payment has failed, giving them the chance to top up before protection quietly disappears. This is a small feature with an outsized effect on trust. Insurance products that fail invisibly breed cynicism; customers who believe they are covered, only to discover otherwise at the worst possible moment, rarely return to the category at all. By surfacing the failure immediately, Tuunza Mapato treats the moment of near-lapse as a recoverable event rather than a silent exit.
The Journey Matters as Much as the Product
The customer path, My OneApp, Do More With M-Pesa, Insure and Protect, then Tuunza Mapato- places insurance where financial behaviour already happens, inside the same app millions of Kenyans use daily for mobile money. This is a deliberate strategic move. Insurance uptake has long been constrained not just by affordability but by discoverability: standalone insurance apps or USSD codes require a customer to actively seek out cover, which few do until it is too late. Embedding the product inside an app already opened for airtime, transfers, and bill payments turns insurance from a destination into a feature encountered along the way.
The CVM layer closes the loop that most micro-insurance products leave open. Customers who opt in but stop short of purchasing are nudged to complete the transaction, and those with failed deductions are flagged so they can act. This converts insurance from a one-time sale into an ongoing relationship, managed proactively rather than left to customer memory or goodwill.
What to Watch
None of this guarantees success. Continuous auto-deduction only works if wallet balances are genuinely available when needed, and for customers living close to the margin, a Ksh 60 weekly deduction competing against airtime, transport, or food money could still lapse regularly despite the alerts. The real test will be retention data over months, not the elegance of the onboarding flow. Claims experience matters too, cover is only as credible as the ease of getting paid when the moment comes.
Even so, Tuunza Mapato represents a sound principle applied well: make protection cheap, make payment invisible, and make failure visible. That combination, more than the sum insured, is what could shift informal-sector insurance from a hard sell to a habit.
Read Also: Your Phone Just Got a Little Smarter: What’s New on My OneApp