Thank you.
I would actually go so far as to say that I think working with the private sector has been essential to meeting our goals. I'll give you a couple of specific examples.
Afghanistan has been a complicated country for all of us for quite some time. Now about half of their civil servants are actually paid in cash. They think that about 50% of the police and the military do not show up every day, and in large part it's because they're getting their salaries, they're walking to the bank to get their money out of the bank, and then they're walking to their families to give them money.
So we partnered with the largest mobile operator there—we've gone on to expand this program to all mobile operators—and we ran a test in which the police officers were actually paid through mobile money instead of this cash. We discovered that they got a 30% raise. That was the estimate of how much more they got, on average. Another way to look at it is that this was the amount that was siphoned off between the time the money left Kabul and the time it got to a police officer.
What's really critical about this is that not only is there that sort of corruption or fraud tax being paid, but at 30% less, those police officers were being paid less than the Taliban was willing to offer them. When they got their full salary, we were then above what the Taliban was paying.
We don't have an infrastructure in Afghanistan to actually pay electronically, nor does the Afghan government, but the mobile company does. We've been so thrilled with that kind of experiment that we now have created an innovation fund to try to get all the mobile companies in Afghanistan to start using mobile money. As you know, Kabul Bank, the largest bank, also collapsed, so it's not dissimilar to Haiti. When you have a collapse of a major part of the financial infrastructure, the ability to stand it up in a very different way....
There are a lot of issues in making mobile money safe, so we worked very closely with our treasury department to make sure this is not a new vehicle for the bad guys to be raising money or deploying money in money laundering and terrorist financing. We think these issues are complicated, but that gives you an example of where we think that as an aid agency we would never have had the ability to pull that off without a partnership with the private sector.