Haiti Mobile Money Initiative — Building a National Mobile Money Market (MonCash & T-Cash)

After the 2010 earthquake, USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created the $10 million Haiti Mobile Money Initiative (HMMI) to jump-start a mobile-money market in a country where most people had no bank account. Rather than fund a single operator, HMMI offered competitive 'First to Market' and transaction-milestone prizes to whichever mobile network launched and scaled services fastest.

HMMI aimed to build a functioning, competitive mobile-money market in Haiti from scratch, using prize incentives rather than direct subsidy to a chosen operator.

Digicel/Scotiabank's TchoTcho Mobile won the $2.5 million First to Market award in January 2011, and Voila/Unibank's Ti-Cash (T-Cash) won $1.5 million in July 2011; both services had launched before the end of 2010. TchoTcho Mobile and T-Cash together earned a further $1.8 million for jointly reaching one million transactions. Digicel later relaunched TchoTcho Mobile as MonCash.

A CGAP case study found that within two years of the relaunch, MonCash's active customer base reached 805,000 (on a 90-day activity basis, versus 540,000 on a stricter 30-day basis), while monthly transaction value grew from about $3 million to $32 million after Digicel focused the product on peer-to-peer transfers. MonCash also became a channel for government-to-person payments: a 2023 World Bank study of Haiti's PSARA adaptive social-protection cash-transfer programme found that 57% of targeted beneficiaries with a valid national ID received their benefits through a MonCash e-wallet as of April 2023.

The same World Bank study is candid about the limits of this model, documenting constraints such as uneven agent liquidity, low device access and trust barriers that kept a large minority of beneficiaries from being reached digitally — evidence that mobile money expands, but does not by itself complete, financial inclusion amid Haiti's continuing instability.