With regard to your second question, relating to diaspora groups, I can't say that Freedom from Hunger has had direct experience. Clearly this is a major opportunity for microfinance institutions that we are aware of. Many of them are, in fact, becoming very involved in facilitating transfer payments from people in the U.S. or Canada to countries like Haiti and Nicaragua and such.
This is a new area for microfinance institutions.
Regarding payment transactions through cellphones and other technologies, this is not, of course, exclusive to microfinance institutions. It's a pioneering area. There are a lot of cellphones out there. Most of them are very primitive. They're not smart phones. People will often have cellphones even in rural areas that are beyond the normal reach of cellphone service.
You have to be careful to assess the number of cellphones out there in terms of how many of them are actually being used effectively, much less being used for transfer payments and such. But it's very promising, and certainly there is a lot of very active experimentation. The Gates Foundation is particularly pushing this as a way for people not only to do transfer payments and financial transactions, but to save, to open savings accounts and save regularly, and even to receive loans.
There is the spectacular example of M-Pesa in Kenya. It's not entirely clear that the relatively unique combination of circumstances that made M-Pesa so successful is readily available yet in other countries.
So the enthusiasm for cellphone-based financial transactions is outpacing the reality of it, but it's still an extremely active area of experimentation and it's very promising.
In some cases, people see this as a way of working around the limitations of microfinance institutions and the need for the high-touch nature of microfinance as it's been traditionally developed. I find that a little alarming, because a lot of the benefits, the softer benefits, of microfinance are in the interpersonal interaction between staff of the institution and the people at the community level.
So it remains to be seen, but I think what we'll see and are seeing already is that the cellphone or some kind of device like that in the hands of field agents can be used as a way of improving their work, so that they're more effective as trusted intermediaries for the people they are working with in the field and as a source of information beyond financial information.