BBC News World Edition
Next time you take a taxi in Nairobi, you might not need cash to pay the fare. Instead, you’d text message the fare’s value in surplus mobile phone minutes to your cabbie using Safaricom’s pre-paid airtime cards. The model is similar to Smart Communications’, as first reported in a Digital Dividend What Works case study last summer. It targets low-income entrepreneurs and customers, who can use surplus minutes as an electronic currency of sorts – a currency more secure and traceable than cash. BBC reports:
Just the other day [Safaricom] unveiled a new service allowing subscribers to buy prepaid phone cards which then enable them to transfer any selected amount of surplus minutes to other subscribers, using text messaging. You can pay a supplier with it, or even create a little bank of phone call credits to sell to others. What [Safaricom] has actually done is to create a new currency -- a cyber currency that can be sent anywhere in the country at the press of a button, without needing a bank account or incurring high bank charges. You see what's happened: the mobile phone is multiplying its revolutionary impact on the lives of the poor, giving them facilities once available only to the rich.
Via WorldChanging. Thanks, Jeremy!
Mutual Benefits of Profits from Poverty
Next time you take a taxi in Nairobi, you might not need cash to pay the fare. Instead, you’d text message the fare’s value in surplus mobile phone minutes to your cabbie using Safaricom’s pre-paid airtime cards. The model is similar to Smart Communications’, as first reported in a Digital Dividend What Works case study last summer. It targets low-income entrepreneurs and customers, who can use surplus minutes as an electronic currency of sorts – a currency more secure and traceable than cash. BBC reports:
Just the other day [Safaricom] unveiled a new service allowing subscribers to buy prepaid phone cards which then enable them to transfer any selected amount of surplus minutes to other subscribers, using text messaging. You can pay a supplier with it, or even create a little bank of phone call credits to sell to others. What [Safaricom] has actually done is to create a new currency -- a cyber currency that can be sent anywhere in the country at the press of a button, without needing a bank account or incurring high bank charges. You see what's happened: the mobile phone is multiplying its revolutionary impact on the lives of the poor, giving them facilities once available only to the rich.
Via WorldChanging. Thanks, Jeremy!
