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Safaricom wins affordable housing internet deal
Safaricom will provide pre-connected internet to all 14,000 housing units in the Mukuru Affordable Housing project and others spread across the country.
Safaricom has secured a deal to supply fibre internet to the government’s Affordable Housing Programme, extending broadband connectivity to thousands of low-cost homes nationwide.
The telco has already connected the first phase of the Mukuru Affordable Housing project in Nairobi, which was launched in May. Safaricom will provide pre-connected internet to all 14,000 housing units in the Mukuru project and others spread across the country.
The contract was disclosed by Safaricom’s South African parent company Vodacom Group.
“In Kenya, we are extending fibre to low-cost government housing developments,” Vodacom said in its latest disclosures.
Safaricom confirmed that the rollout will be replicated across other affordable housing projects under construction nationwide.
“We will roll out similar services to the other housing projects across the country under the Affordable Housing programme,” a Safaricom spokesperson told the Business Daily via email.
This marks the latest significant contract for the telco from the public sector, with the company having participated in the multi-billion-shilling digitisation of the Social Health Authority (SHA) and the National Surveillance, Communication and Control System.
The government has a 20 percent stake in Safaricom in which it retains significant influence.
The affordable housing units will be connected through Wi-Fi Bamba, a tokenised fibre broadband service that Safaricom is using to target lower-income households.
The package costs Sh800 and offers speeds of up to 15 megabits per second (Mbps), allowing connection of up to three devices at a time.
Unlike conventional fibre installations that rely on point-to-multipoint fibre access technology – hence requiring joinery (splicing) at cables' ends – Wi-Fi Bamba uses a single plug-and-play cable. This reduces deployment time and installation costs.
The package is significantly cheaper than Safaricom’s standard Home Fibre plans, which start at Sh2,999 per month for 40Mbps and rise to Sh20,000 for 1 Gigabits per second (Gbps). It is designed for households with irregular incomes and customers who cannot commit to conventional monthly subscriptions.
The government is implementing affordable housing projects across all 47 counties, targeting the delivery of 500,000 affordable, social, institutional and student housing units by June 2029. To meet that target, it will need to complete about 124,500 houses annually between July 2025 and June 2029.
The housing contract complements Safaricom’s broader push into lower-income broadband customers as it seeks to grow beyond higher-income households and businesses.
The company also plans to roll out tokenised Wi-Fi services this year, offering hourly, daily and weekly access options similar to Kenya’s pay-as-you-go mobile data model. The service is expected to launch in both Kenya and Ethiopia.
Chief executive Peter Ndegwa has said that tiered pricing, targeted deployment in high-demand locations and lower-cost delivery models would help expand broadband adoption and reach millions of households currently priced out of fixed internet.
“By tiering pricing, we can deliver propositions that expand participation and that will also reduce cost to serve, to allow us to reach the extra three million customers [not served by the broadband market],” Mr Ndegwa said in a recent video published by the telco on YouTube.
As of March, Safaricom controlled 35.4 percent of Kenya’s fixed internet market with 941,501 subscriptions, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA).
The company estimates that the domestic market has the potential for about four million fixed broadband connections.
Its growth strategy combines fibre expansion, fixed wireless access powered by 5G and more affordable devices, marking a shift from its traditional focus on premium customers to lower-income segments.
