The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is looking to catalyse the Haitian market with a grant of $10 million US to companies within the market looking to deploy mobile money services. The fund includes incentives for companies who bring scale to their initial deployment.

As commented earlier in articles on the Exchange, Haiti is the perfect market to roll out mobile money services and it is unfortunate that plans to do so weren’t achieved before the disaster hit the nation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and spearheading the efforts to use the disaster to dramatically improve the lives of Haitians.

This will prove a fascinating example of whether large investments can scale mobile money deployments.