Safaricom Bonga Points: what a point is actually worth

Run by

Safaricom

Who it knows

The SIM card, not the person

How you earn

1 point per KES 10 of out-of-bundle airtime; 1 per KES 20 on bundles; 1 per KES 100 of M-Pesa transaction charges

What a point converts to

KES 0.20 with merchants · KES 0.30 as airtime · KES 0.33 as a bundle

Expiry

None. A three-year expiry was quashed by the High Court in November 2024

Unredeemed points held

KES 3.59 billion at 31 March 2026

Bonga is the loyalty programme almost every Kenyan is in, whether or not they think about it. It is also the clearest example of something a brand manager should understand before designing a reward: a point is not money, and the gap between the two is where loyalty programmes live.

How you earn

Safaricom’s current terms, last updated in August 2025, set three rates. Airtime spent out of bundle earns a point for every KES 10. Any bundle — data, voice or SMS — earns a point for every KES 20. And M-Pesa earns a point for every KES 100 you pay in transaction charges, which means you are earning on the fee, not on the money you moved.

You join by dialling *126#, and the points attach to the line rather than to you.

What a point is worth depends on how you spend it

This is the part most people never work out. The same point is worth three different amounts:

• KES 0.20 when you pay a merchant with Lipa na Bonga.
• KES 0.30 when you turn it into airtime — 100 points buys KES 30 of airtime.
• KES 0.33 when you turn it into a Safaricom bundle.

So a shopper who spends KES 1,000 on out-of-bundle airtime earns 100 points, and those points are worth between KES 20 and KES 33 depending on a choice most people make without reading a table. Redeemed airtime and minutes then have their own clock: they are valid for seven days.

The earning rate moved, and the published terms disagree

Until July 2025, bundle spend earned a point for every KES 10. The terms amended on 21 July 2025 changed that to a point for every KES 20 — half the previous rate on the same spend.

What makes this worth naming is not the change itself but how hard it is to find. As of September 2026, Safaricom’s own consumer page for Bonga Points still describes the older KES 10 rate, and the FY2026 annual report repeats the earlier wording too. Three official sources, three versions. A customer trying to work out what their spending earns has no obvious way to know which one is current.

A point is a promise whose value the issuer can change, in a document the customer will never read.

Points can be taken back

Two mechanisms are worth knowing. If you take an Okoa Jahazi airtime advance and it is unpaid after 15 days, Safaricom settles the debt from your Bonga Points. And points are tied to the line: when a SIM churns, the points go with it, and Safaricom recognises the value as revenue.

In November 2024 the High Court quashed the three-year expiry rule Safaricom had introduced, with Justice Chacha Mwita holding that once points are awarded they are the customer’s property. An application to stay that ruling pending appeal was refused in July 2025. The current terms contain no expiry clause — though a superseded page describing the old rule is still published.

What it costs Safaricom

The balance sheet gives the clearest number in the whole programme. Unredeemed Bonga Points were carried at KES 3.59 billion at 31 March 2026, roughly flat on the KES 3.60 billion a year earlier.

That is a real liability, and it is also the tell: a large, stable pile of unredeemed points means a great many are earned and never used. Safaricom says it values the liability using historical redemption behaviour. It does not publish the redemption rate, and it does not publish how many people are enrolled.

What it cannot tell a brand

Everything above belongs to Safaricom. If you sell tea, cooking oil or soap through Kenyan retail, Bonga tells you nothing at all: not who bought your pack, not whether they bought it again, and not what they thought of it. The programme knows a SIM, and the SIM bought airtime.

This is the structural problem with borrowing somebody else’s loyalty scheme. The relationship it builds is between the customer and the issuer. Your brand is, at most, a place points get spent.

What a guaranteed on-pack reward does differently

It is worth being fair about the comparison. Bonga is a permanent programme for a company that bills its customers monthly and knows exactly who they are. An FMCG brand has neither the billing relationship nor the identity, so it needs the reward to do the identifying.

• The reward is money, at a value the shopper can read on the pack — not a point whose conversion rate lives in a terms document.
• It is paid when they buy, not accrued against a future redemption they may never make.
• It cannot be devalued after the fact, because it was funded before the code was printed.
• And every reward is attached to one purchase of one product, which is the thing a brand has never been able to see.

Researched 20 September 2026 from the sources below. Rates and terms change — check Safaricom's current terms before relying on any figure here.