Patapaye: Mobile Salary Payments for Central African Civil Servants

Central African Republic's 2012-2015 civil conflict destroyed bank branches and roads, leaving civil servants to travel long, sometimes insecure distances to Bangui for pay or rely on intermediaries skimming 5-10% of salary value. Launched March 2020 by the Ministry of Finance and Budget with World Bank, IMF and EU financing, Patapaye pays state employees via mobile money through telecom operators Orange and Telecel and banks Ecobank Centrafrique, BPMC and BSIC.

The pilot phase enrolled about 250 civil servants with 94% take-up among staff at participating banks. By September 2023 the government certified roughly 19,000 civil servants and state agents as covered, with rollout extending across 14 prefectures by 2024.

An independent 2023 Carnegie Endowment analysis is more measured than government messaging, finding high transaction fees, poorly informed users and cumbersome identity-verification requirements 'have limited its success thus far', and noting no public evidence is available to assess whether the anti-corruption objective has been achieved.