"Roshan, Afghanistan's leading total communications provider, and Western Union, a leader in global payment services, have today jointly launched the Western Union Mobile Money Transfer service in Afghanistan that enables Roshan's M-Paisa customers to receive money from abroad. Roshan launched M-Paisa in 2008, and became the first company to bring mobile financial services to the people of Afghanistan.

Now, M-Paisa customers in Afghanistan can receive Western Union Mobile Money Transfer transactions from around the world directly into their mobile wallet accounts from families, in particular from countries with the largest population of Afghans living abroad, like UAE, Germany and Canada.

"Roshan launched M-Paisa using technology from Vodafone, one of the world's leading international mobile communications groups. Today, since the launch of the mobile money service in November 2008, M-Paisa has over 1 million customers enabled to receive their salaries, pay bills, receive and repay microfinance loans, send and receive money and purchase airtime directly from their Roshan phone."

Read the full press release here:

Shainoor Khoja, former director of corporate social responsibility at Roshan, helped lead efforts to launch mobile money in Afghanistan.

Pioneering Mobile Money in Afghanistan
How do you build a struggling, war-torn economy if money can't change hands? Hear Shainoor Khoja, former director of corporate social responsibility at Roshan, Afghanistan's leading telecommunications firm, talk about how mobile technology moves money and other precious social commodities, like health, education and equal opportunity.

Nearly 70 percent of Afghans survive on less than $2 a day, so it's no surprise very few have bank accounts. But a substantial number—about 17 million—own cell phones. Harnessing Roshan’s technology edge and deep reach into the country’s most remote areas, Khoja and her team have worked to transform basic mobile phone knowledge into financial literacy.

Event: Thursday, June 7, at Mercy Corps in Portland, Oregon. Doors open at 6:30.

In virtually every single African nation, the leading mobile phone company is now the leading taxpayer to the government, the leading local donor to local causes, and one of the leading employers.

From G. Pascal Zachary's article in The Atlantic, "Africa's Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World".

International economist and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs weighs in:

If every village had wireless connectivity, and it had computers in the schools, in the clinics, in the community centers, in the farmer cooperatives; if community health workers and agriculture workers were carrying their cell phones, interconnected with the computers, there'd be no such thing as economic isolation anymore.

I don't think we're doing yet everything that can be done to use the power of wireless broadband and all that it will bring. But I see it before my eyes, in just the last few years, making a decisive difference. And now in every village where I go, someone's got a cell phone, somebody can make an emergency call, someone can find out the price on the market, someone can start a business empowered by the fact that they can reach a customer or a supplier, someone can drive a taxi or a truck for that reason as well. Everything is changing.

New technology that diagnoses HIV in infants has injected new hope into the veins of countless Kenyans.

The techno-wizards at Hewlett-Packard have partnered with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to support students from Kenya’s Strathmore Univeristy, who created database applications that make infant early infant diagnosis (EID) HIV test results available online and in real time. Currently, scarce computers and unpaved roads mean it takes up to 4 months for infants to get HIV test results. Sadly, nearly 70 percent of test results do not even reach rural families.

However, thanks to advances in cloud computing technology and HP’s $1 million investment in IT infrastructure development, diagnoses are now available through online sites and short message services (SMS) without delay, allowing life-saving anti-retroviral treatment to begin immediately.

“For my first two babies, I received their HIV test results 18 weeks after the blood sample had been collected, and this was given during the routine postnatal clinic visits. But for my third born, I received an SMS on my phone five days after the sample collection, asking me to collect the results," said Elizabeth Mwende, a resident of Mutomo village in Kitui.

A lag time of 17 weeks often means the difference between life and death for the 120,000 Kenyan infants exposed to HIV each year. Data indicates that children whose HIV medication is prolonged have less than a 50 percent chance surviving until age two.

Five HP data centers in larger Kenyan cities are being constructed to process the HIV results, with the SMS and web technology concurrently being set up in the rural clinics to receive the home facilities’ results. The project is expected to roll out to 50 facilities across Kenya’s rural landscape this year for trial testing before becoming available to the other 850 health centers currently open. Kenya’s Ministry of Health is also collecting real time analysis of the program. A successful collaboration between private sector and government could provide optimism for other nations looking to benefit from such advances.

“Technology and innovation are key to solving many of the most pressing challenges of our world, none of which are more urgent than a disease which takes the lives of 31 children every minute,” said President Clinton. “I’m pleased HP’s technology and expertise will enable the partnership with CHAI to save the lives of more than 100,000 infants in Kenya each year, and in the process, demonstrate how the private sector can and should operate in the developing world.”

In Palestine, new technology is helping new graduates find job opportunities. Souktel, an organization providing mobile phone services for developing countries, understands that swift texting could spell out gainful employment for many young adults.

Souktel’s JobMatch services exhibits social innovation at its finest. In four easy steps, job-seekers can create a resume and get connections to dozens of job opportunities on their mobile device.

Step One: Register.

Step Two: Answer survey questions via SMS texting to create a mini-resume of education and job history.

Step Three: At any time, text “match me” to Souktel, which sends a list of jobs that match the personalized resume profile.

Step Four: Call the contacts provided by Souktel to set up an interview with the potential employer.

And that’s how four steps plus two thumbs could equal financial success.

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Declaring Internet access a human right would dilute the rights that matter more, says Internet pioneer Vint Cerf. Photo: Veni Markovski (Wikimedia)

Get real: The Internet isn't a human right.

That's the message from a man often credited with inventing the Internet, Vint Cerf. Writing in The New York Times yesterday, Cerf, who now works for Google, argued that human rights are "things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives":

At one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

Today's Internet—publicly developed but privately owned and financed—is a key tool in toppling kleptocracies and enriching millions of poor farmers. So Cerf's position is provocative. But it's a reminder that those of us who believe in markets' power to help solve poverty shouldn't cling too tightly to any single "market-based solution."

That wouldn't be market-based at all.