PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI (AP) - Getting money in Haiti can be a harrowing experience: Bank branches are few, most of them are in the capital and a simple transaction can take half a day. Cash machines are scarce as well, and often broken or empty. And then there are the thieves who often wait nearby in hopes of finding a mark.
So aid agencies trying to remake Haiti after a catastrophic earthquake are promoting a new way to bypass banks altogether: easy money transfers by cellphone. The U.S. government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have pumped millions of dollars into the plan, which lets people save and move money in mobile phone accounts and quickly withdraw it at a network of retail stores around the country.
As yet, though, few Haitians are buying the idea, which has become one of many post-quake projects to fall short of expectations and a reminder of how hard it is to change a society that has been repeatedly set back by political upheaval and natural disasters.
“I’m not going to invest my money in something I don’t see,” said James Alexis, a 33-year-old truck driver, as he stood in line at a bank in downtown Port-au-Prince, a wait he expected would take two hours. “It could be a trick.”
Backers admit adoption has been slower than expected, though they remain optimistic it will expand, in part because so many Haitians rely on cellphones, often to find jobs. Some 800,000 people initially registered for the service, even if only about 22,000 people regularly use it.
The service “has gone on in the face of political violence, political instability, cholera, gas shortages, you name it, and we’re this far,” said Greta Greathouse, director of a U.S. Agency for International Development program to improve financial services in Haiti. “Does it mean we’re there yet? No. We want it to be sustainable and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”
A spokesman for the Gates Foundation in Seattle, Chris Williams, said by telephone that the project is a “work in progress” but that it’s going well.
“It’s not a huge surprise to find some disconnect between the number of registered users and currently active users,” Williams said. “It takes some time to build up to scale.”
The project began months after the January 2010 earthquake when the Gates Foundation announced that it was creating the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative with a $10 million donation. USAID contributed another $5 million for technical assistance.
The idea was to help the 90 percent of Haitians who don’t use banks by replicating a mobile money-transfer system that has gained popularity in countries such as Kenya, Uganda and the Philippines.
Two local cellphone companies, Digicel Group Ltd. and Voila, rushed to compete for the money by setting up their own mobile money transfer systems, and so far have been awarded a total of $6.8 million from the foundation.
The system is essentially an account linked to the telephone. Users can transfer up to $250 at a time to another subscriber, who can then withdraw the money from a network of shops ranging from auto-parts stores to internet cafes. As much as $1,500 can be transferred in a month. So far, international transfers are not allowed.
Digicel-Haiti’s former CEO, Maarten Boute, said at a Barcelona conference in February that it wasn’t easy to explain the system.
“Our main lesson learned is how difficult it is to educate customers,” said Boute, who is now a senior adviser to the Jamaica-based company. “When we launched the service we assumed it would be something like selling a mobile phone, where you stick a mobile phone into someone’s hand and almost anyone can start using it quite quickly because it’s very easy to understand. With a mobile banking service or a mobile money service it’s not quite that easy.”
The Christian charity World Vision joined the program, seeing it as a simple, cash-free way to pay small rental subsidies to help people move out of the gloomy settlements that sprang up after the earthquake.
View Entire StoryNational Finance Center shielded by Louisiana congressional delegation - nola.com
Washington -- With thousands of jobs lost or slated to be lost at Avondale shipyards, the U.S. Postal Service and the Michoud Assembly Facility, Louisiana officials are working to protect one of the region's biggest remaining government employers, the National Finance Center in eastern New Orleans. In each of the past five years, Louisiana congressional members have inserted language into spending bills for the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Finance Center, barring cutbacks there without advance notice and permission from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. The center provides human resources, payroll and administrative services for federal agencies.
The congressional mandates were prompted by the temporary reassignment of the center's federal payroll operations after Hurricane Katrina and fears that other cities would use the disaster to snare the facility and its 1,200-plus jobs.
For now, center officials say, the facility, which provides biweekly paychecks to 655,000 employees at more than 170 federal agencies, is secure.
"The center is well-positioned for the long term," Finance Center Director John White said. He said the center is continuing to "grow its ancillary payroll services" and its human resources work for the federal government.
The center currently employs 835 people at its New Orleans facility, plus another 381 who work for related Agriculture Department divisions. The 1,216-worker payroll is down about 10 percent since Hurricane Katrina.
After Katrina, the center lost the administration of the federal government's thrift savings plan, but few people lost their jobs, mainly as a result of attrition as workers retired or relocated after the hurricane destroyed so many homes and facilities.
Perhaps because the center does little to court publicity and its mission of payroll management isn't all that sexy, its public profile has been much lower than the Michoud Assembly Plant, which for 37 years built external fuel tanks for the recently ended NASA shuttle missions and has, as a result, lost hundreds of jobs. It also is not as well as known as the Avondale shipyards, which built massive LPD amphibious transport boats for the Navy and is slated to close next year as its owner, Huntington Ingalls Shipyards, consolidates ship production in Mississippi.
"We don't hear much about the Finance Center, and maybe that's a good thing," said Michael Hecht, CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc. Often when a facility is in the news, Hecht said, it's not good news, such as the New Orleans mail-processing facility falling on the U.S. Postal Service's closure list, which could cost the city more than 800 jobs.
Hecht said the Finance Center is critical to the economic future of eastern New Orleans and government and business leaders will continue to work hard to keep it operating at full strength.
White, the Finance Center director, recognizes the center's importance to the local economy. Pay for workers at the center ranges from about $25,000 for its GS-4 federal employees to $165,000 for senior executive service workers.
"The National Finance Center is a critical institution, not only for the federal government, but as an employer in New Orleans," White said. "The staff and leadership of the NFC are intent on managing back-office functions in an efficient and effective manner on behalf of its client agencies."
Like most employees, federal workers are paid almost entirely through direct deposit to their checking or savings accounts. That has cut costs because those functions can be done through automation, but it hasn't resulted in big job losses.
White said that's because, for the past seven years, the center has taken charge of many federal government's human resources functions.
In addition, the agency is partnering with the Department of Human Services to execute some requirements of the Obama administration's health-overhaul legislation -- though that work could be jeopardized if the law is overturned and the program is rolled back.
The most recent audit of the agency by the inspector general for the Agriculture Department and other officials at the facility concluded that the center had implemented sufficient controls to ensure that paychecks go out without error. But it was written with the kind of bureaucratic language that meant the report would not make any headlines.
The center's system of controls "are suitably designed and operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance that associated control objectives would be achieved if customer agencies and subservice organizations applied the controls contemplated," the inspector general's report concluded.
Bruce Alpert can be reached at balpert@timespicayune.com or 202.450.1406.
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