A global relief organization and a local mobile-phone provider in Haiti recently completed a test of its Mobile Money funds-transfer project in which Haitians affected by the Jan. 12 earthquake used mobile phones to receive payment for work and to make purchases at a local grocery store.
Portland, Ore.-based global relief organization Mercy Corps and Voila, a Haitian subsidiary of Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy International Partners, announced recently they had completed the Mobile Money funds-transfer pilot, which included about 400 Haitians in the Central Plateau area of the country.
The organizations gave the Haitians subsidized mobile phones to receive payments via an SMS text code for clean-up work Mercy Corps organized, Lisa Hoashi, the organization’s spokesperson in Haiti, tells PaymentsSource. The companies would not disclose the brands of the phones but say a full range of phones, from smart phones to basic, no-feature, low-end phones, can support the Mobile Money system, according to Pierre Liautau, Voilá’s vice president of product development.
The funds recipients then could cash in their payments at a local Unibank branch or use the value stored in an account held in a central database for purchases at a local grocery store. The merchant only needs a mobile handset to accept the payments via a text message from the Mobile Money accounts, says Liautau.
“In essence the system simply moves the money around the different stored-value accounts from customer to customer or from agent to customer or vice versa,” explains Liautau, who notes that the bank handles all settlements between the main account and an outside source, such as a merchant or individual withdrawing the funds as cash.
One goal was to use mobile technology to improve the victims’ situation by helping create a financial infrastructure for Haitians displaced by the earthquake, Hoashi says. “In Haiti, 85% of the people have mobile phones, and hardly any have bank accounts, “ she says.
The organizations hope to expand the program in Haiti over the next several months. “This was totally a closed-loop system between the partner bank and ourselves,” says Liautua. “However, we do have the capability to interconnect to international as well as to other local payment sources.”
Haiti is the first market the organizations have tested Mobile Money, but they plan to expand into other areas of need, says Hoashi. They hope to use the technology in such developing countries as Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
Mercy already supports mobile technology in developing areas such as Mongolia and Afghanistan, where local herders use SMS texting to provide pricing information to help make business decisions, says Hoashi.
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