Postal services unveils first of its kind services that converts mobile phones into virtual addresses

You no longer need to make endless trips to Kenya postal services to check and pick up your parcel.

With a simple click of a button at the comfort of your house or office you can receive your parcel literary at your door step and what more you don’t even need to have a postal address to begin with.

Postal Corporation of Kenya and Huduma Centre have unveiled a revolutionary mobile postal service that allows consumers to use their mobile numbers as postal addresses instead of a physical postal office address.

MPost, as the new services has been named will deliver Government documents like Identification Cards, NHIF and NSSF cards processed by Huduma Centres to any of the 622 post offices around the country or at a location preferred by the user.

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Dennis Nyamichaba, a marketing officer with Kenya postal services says in these times of technology, change is but inevitable.

“Basically what inspired us to come up with MPost is because we live in a world of technology and technology is shifting and so we have to adapt to it” he said.

“Most people are also online nowadays so we wanted to shift our business to where there are numbers and what other way to do so than to use technology to reach the masses”

Huduma Kenya Chief Executive Dennis Mutuku says subscribers of the service will get alerts when the documents are ready for collection and choose locations using an SMS interactive service.

MPost has so far signed up to 31,000 subscribers during the one-year trial period in Kibera, with 1,300 mail delivered.

“So far the reaction has been great and it’s a great partnership between Kenya postal services and Taz technologies” Dennis added.

The service is the first of its kind in the world, according to Taz technologies CEO and Founder Abdulaziz Mohammed.

“Almost 4,000 transactions have happened in the last one year and we are now working with the Uganda Postal Limited to implement the same solution,” Abdulaziz says.

All one needs to do to start enjoying this revolutionary service is to dial *890*90# on a Safaricom line with plans to expand to other networks and follow simple steps to register.

Compared to the hustle and cost of travelling to and fro to pick one’s parcel, MPost is incredibly cheap. For just Ksh300 one cans enjoy the service for a whole year.