M-Paisa Afghanistan

Article

A TechCrunch article, ‘M-Paisa: Ending Afghan Corruption, One Text at a Time’, on Roshan’s mobile payments service, which began paying Afghan National Police salaries by phone in 2010 using SMS and interactive voice response. Developed with the Ministry of the Interior and modelled on Kenya’s M-Pesa, it saw many officers’ pay rise by more than a third, which the piece says helped stem defections to the Taliban. It describes an early case in which a commander took his subordinates’ SIM cards to collect their money and was stopped after a Roshan employee reported him, and notes a $12.5 million Gates Foundation grant to the GSMA for mobile banking.