After recently reviewing the broader state of Kenya’s digital economy in 2025, we went back through all four Communications Authority of Kenya sector statistics reports for 2025 to identify one specific battleground: voice calls. And the numbers tell an interesting story. Safaricom remains the dominant force by a wide margin, but Airtel steadily ate into that lead, at least in domestic mobile voice traffic.
Using the CA’s opening-quarter 2025 data from January to March and comparing it with the closing-quarter data from October to December, Safaricom’s total domestic outgoing voice traffic rose from 18.30 billion minutes to 19.59 billion minutes. Airtel, on the other hand, grew from 10.44 billion minutes to 11.83 billion minutes over the same period. That means Safaricom added about 1.29 billion minutes year-end versus the start of the year, while Airtel added about 1.39 billion minutes. In percentage terms, Safaricom grew voice traffic by about 7.1%, but Airtel grew faster at roughly 13.3%.
What stands out to me is that this was not some one-quarter fluke. In April to June 2025, Safaricom handled 18.50 billion voice minutes while Airtel posted 10.60 billion. By July to September, Safaricom had slightly dipped to 18.32 billion minutes, while Airtel jumped sharply to 11.55 billion. Then in October to December, both operators grew again, with Safaricom reaching 19.59 billion and Airtel climbing to 11.83 billion.
Airtel’s most noticeable leap came in the July to September quarter, when its voice traffic rose by about 9.0% quarter-on-quarter even as Safaricom edged down by just under 1%. That is the kind of movement that starts to matter when seen across a full year.
The share shift is small, but it is real. Based on the CA’s total domestic voice traffic figures for those two comparison points, Safaricom’s slice moved from about 63.4% in January to March to roughly 62.2% in October to December. Airtel, meanwhile, moved from about 36.1% to 37.6%. In other words, Airtel gained roughly 1.4% in voice traffic share across the year, while Safaricom slipped by a little over 1.1%.
Even the absolute traffic gap narrowed slightly, from about 7.86 billion minutes at the start of the year to 7.76 billion by the end. Safaricom is still far ahead, yes, but Airtel is no longer just growing in subscriptions and mobile money noise. It is showing up in actual usage.
There is another useful clue in the same CA reports. Airtel consistently posted longer average on-net call durations than Safaricom across all four quarterly reports. In January to March 2025, Airtel’s average on-net call lasted 2.9 minutes compared to Safaricom’s 1.6 minutes. In April to June, Airtel was at 3.1 minutes versus Safaricom’s 1.6. In July to September, Airtel recorded 2.8 minutes against Safaricom’s 1.6, and by October to December Airtel was still ahead at 2.7 minutes compared to Safaricom’s 1.6. That suggests Airtel users were not just placing more calls over time, but also spending longer on them.
To be clear, none of this means Safaricom is suddenly in trouble in voice. It still handled nearly 19.6 billion domestic voice minutes in the last quarter of 2025 and remained the market leader by a big margin. But if you are looking for hard evidence that Airtel is slowly chipping away at Safaricom’s grip, this is one of the cleaner examples in the CA data.
I would argue that voice traffic matters here because it reflects actual customer behaviour, not just registered lines sitting idle in somebody’s drawer next to an old charger and three dead phones. Airtel is still the challenger, but in 2025, it looked a little less distant than before.
The four CA reports are here for reference.
