In Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Ebola response and recovery efforts were hampered by the difficulty paying key groups, particularly health workers and civil servants. Stakeholders recognized that mobile money could potentially facilitate safer, efficient, and more resilient payments to these groups. However, the quality and reach of the agent networks that facilitated cash-in and cash-out operations for mobile money were quite poor. This undermined the feasibility of mobile money as a distribution channel. To strengthen the quality of these agent networks and thus improve their suitability for critical payments, the activity focused on working with mobile money providers and agent networks to diagnose and resolve issues that would prevent mobile money from being a viable disbursement channel.
This document focuses specifically on USAID-funded technical assistance provided to one of the mobile money providers in Liberia, the telecom operator MTN, and examines several potentially replicable aspects of the activity.
