Wireless pioneer hopes to spur mobile banking in Haiti

John Stanton is helping to bring mobile-phone banking and technology internships to Haiti. But sometimes what he'd really like to have is a bulldozer.

Stanton, chairman of Trilogy International Partners, the largest U.S. investor in Haiti, said the absence of heavy machinery amid the debris of downtown Port-au-Prince epitomizes the current predicament.

Nine months after a big earthquake, tons of rubble still need clearing, and hundreds of thousands of people still live in makeshift tent camps, squalid conditions that provide a breeding ground for cholera.

Seen optimistically, the environment can also offer a breeding ground for new ideas, which Stanton hopes will help Haitians leapfrog over some of their obstacles.

The Bellevue wireless-industry pioneer, who co-founded the company that is now T-Mobile USA, is backing a plan with international relief agency Mercy Corps to create a "mobile wallet" system that would allow Haitians to receive wages and make payments using their mobile phones. Transferring money to a bank account would be the cost of a single text message.

Of Haiti's population of nearly 10 million, only about 130,000 people have bank accounts, Stanton said. The quake destroyed many bank branches that Haitians relied on to receive remittances from family abroad.

Called T-Cash, the program is modeled after the successful M-PESA program in Kenya.

Trilogy's Voilà wireless subsidiary and the Haitian bank Unibank are partnering to allow Haitians to receive on their phones the "cash for work" payments that Mercy Corps provides as part of its relief efforts.

"We give you a wheel barrel you would use to remove rubble and be paid at end of day with electronic transfer on your phone," Stanton said.

The service is awaiting approval from regulators.

In the meantime, Trilogy created a short-message-service application for the Red Cross in Haiti, enabling it to send text messages to targeted customers based on their location. Weeks after the earthquake, the application was used to send to a group of subscribers information about measles, tetanus and other basic vaccines. More than 152,000 people received the shots.

When storms were expected to hit Haiti in September, the Red Cross also sent text messages to subscribers near the northern coast with instructions for how to prepare or relocate, and later notified them after the danger had passed.

On Monday, Trilogy's Voilà Foundation and the group NetHope started a program with Microsoft, Cisco and Accenture linking technology with employment. Housed at Ecole Supérieure d'Infotronique d'Haìti, Haiti's top engineering school, the NetHope Academy gives Haitian computer-science students full-time paid internships as information-technology specialists at nongovernmental organizations working in Haiti.

Stanton acknowledges that Haiti needs to make more basic improvements.

"We are by no means the most important solution," he said. "They need strong political leadership, they need economic leadership. They have to get the money that's been pledged."

Only a small percentage of the $5.3 billion in aid promised to Haiti after the earthquake has arrived, Stanton said.

Even more than aid, Haiti needs private investment, he said.

Trilogy has invested about $228 million in Haiti since 1996. "That's a small number," Stanton said. "We desperately need American investment in Haiti."

In those 14 years, most other U.S. companies have left.

It's not hard to see why.

"Imagine building an assembly plant when you have power two hours a day and can't get roads to the facility," Stanton said.

But if you are an optimist, there are also good business reasons to stay, he said. "For us, we want to grow with the resurgence of Haiti."

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com