2016 ICT4D Conference

If you needed to send 1000 shillings to tens of thousands of teachers all over Kenya, every time they attended one of your training sessions - how would you do it? If your answer involves millions of bank notes, armored vehicles and stacks of paper miles high, then you must have arrived in a time machine or perhaps from a western country that hasn't yet caught up to Kenya. Clearly the answer is to use mobile money, but the power of mobile payments is old news. Everyone knows that it is easy to send money. But is it easy to send it at scale? How do you reliably send money to 150,000 people being trained over a two week period? How do you confirm that you are using the correct phone number, that they actually attended the training? How do you interface with the mobile network operator. Will the operator give you a discount if you send 150 million shillings in one go?

Mobile payments have created new opportunities to undertake projects that simply weren't possible before. But standard approaches and best practices are still evolving, especially for large scale operations. RTI's Tusome project has combined technologies including interactive SMS, a cloud database, large teams of data processors and good old fashioned excel spreadsheets to leverage mobile money at scale. But now with Safaricom's API, camera equipped phones and other technology there are even more opportunities for improved efficiency.