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Eyeing his cellphone with a mixture of suspicion and amazement, Paul Kangethe reads and rereads the SMS he has just received. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Kangethe says of the alert that instructs him to report to the nearest cell phone shop to retrieve money his brother-in-law sent him just moments ago. Kangethe is one of more than 65,000 registered users of M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer system recently introduced by Safaricom, Kenya’s leading mobile operator, that enables people with access to a cell phone to send and receive money over their handsets in an African first.