DIGICEL today won a US$2.5 million grant from USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help the company provide mobile banking financial services in Haiti, which was devastated by a severe earthquake on January 12 of last year.

The Jamaican-based telecommunications provider beat American company Voila (a subsidiary of the Trilogy Group with operations in Haiti, Dominican Republic, New Zealand and Bolivia) and local player Hitel.

“You have to understand that in Haiti less than 10 per cent of the people have access to formal financial services. Given the condition of the country the banks have a limited number of operational branches. We are convinced that with the Tcho Tcho mobile banking service we are launching, we will be able to do exactly what we did with mobile telecommunications services. Before we entered the market in Haiti there were about 300,000 people using mobile phones, now that we have entered the market and five years later there are 3.5 million people using mobile phones of which 2.5 million are Digicel customers,” said Digicel Haiti Chief Executive Officer Maarten Boute.

The earthquake had displaced large parts of the population and unsettled commercial activity. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had seen a need to expeditiously implement mobile financial services on handsets and sought support from USAID to launch the project.

USAID’s Haiti Integrated Financing for Value Chains and Enterprise (HIFIVE) programme sought mobile providers to bid for grants as it looked to increase the interest and capacity of both banks and non-banks to offer financial products and services to help expand activity among micro, small and medium sized enterprises in semi-urban and rural areas.