NET RESULTS:WHEN I ring Anne O'Mahony in Concern's office in Kenya, she sounds distracted and asks if I can ring back in 15 minutes. When I do, she is jubilant.
"I'm trying to get a good deal on chargers," she said. She's just successfully made arrangements directly with the best manufacturer of solar-powered mobile phone chargers, which are used to run the mobile phones that have become a key piece of their food aid programme in the country.
For six months, Concern has experimented - very successfully - with delivering aid via text message rather than trucking in food to remote areas. Now it is preparing to expand that programme from the original 570 families to 8,000.
What Concern does is send money directly to recipients by texting them a PIN number. This enables them to receive cash or goods from any shop that acts as an agent for the Kenyan telecom operator, Safaricom.
Many African operators are now using a simple mobile-based solution to a major money transfer problem - how to cheaply transfer cash between, say, workers and families when a migrant worker may be
hundreds of miles from his or her waiting family.
Using Western Union is prohibitively expensive for many poor Africans, says O'Mahony. The text-based solutions are secure and reliable and many tiny local shops all over Africa act as agents, much as small shops act as agents here for operators to sell mobile top-up cards or call cards.
Concern makes use of Safaricom's money transfer programme called M-Pesa ("pesa" is the Swahili word for money, says O'Mahony). The agent makes a percentage of each transfer for handling the money for Safaricom, either for sending the cash or paying it out.
The system makes food and aid distribution much easier for Concern. "We don't have to worry about logistics, tendering, transport and distribution and all that stuff that takes an inordinate amount of time," says O'Mahony.
It also saves Concern money - on average it has reduced costs by 18 per cent.
More important though is the change in the relationship between agency and recipients.
"The principle of giving cash to people rather than relief food is one we support," she says. "It's putting control back with the people who can buy the food they want and it's much more dignified."
Aid also goes further. Texting cash means the money also benefits the local economy. Rather than aid groups buying in foodstuffs from other wealthy countries like the US, local merchants sell their locally sourced goods directly to the recipients. Agents also gain from their percentage of the cash transactions.
Even the people who are given the solar chargers - one person in each group of 10 - can create a small business in renting it to others with mobiles. Chargers go to the poorest family in each group, says O'Mahony. Cash is also given primarily to the women - elevating their position within communities.
Talking to her, I couldn't help wondering why we don't have a similar programme here. Wouldn't it be incredibly useful to be able to transfer modest sums of money by mobile phone? Wouldn't it be useful too to the many immigrants here who send cash back home? Or to be able to text cash to another person - say, to pay your share of lunch?
Then I remembered that actually, once upon a time, there was such a programme for money transfers by mobiles. It was called PayPal. Yes, that PayPal.
In 1999 for Wired.com, I wrote one of the very first stories on the new PayPal service to be offered by parent company Confinity, which involved creating a digital wallet for money transfers, using the infrared ports on hand-held devices like mobiles or PDAs.
"All these devices will become one day just like your wallet," Confinity chief executive Peter Thiel told me then. "Every one of your friends will become like a virtual, miniature ATM."
Well, the rest is history - we all know that the sweet spot for PayPal never did end up being digital wallets on mobiles, but instead, funding your impulse purchase of a Beanie Baby collection or a fake Prada handbag on eBay.
Maybe it is time now to go back to the future and have a handy mobile facility for transferring cash to others. Maybe it's time for the developed world to use an excellent idea from the developing world.
Watch a video about the Concern programme: http://tinyurl.com/4rvydp
klillington@irish-times.ie
blog: www.techno-culture.com
