ies do not have bank accounts and have no way to exchange goods and services other than through basic bartering or cash, which can be dangerous to handle. When a natural disaster happens, survival economies are dependent on food aid brought in by oversees agencies by truck or air. The cost per calorie of this food aid once administration, transport and security costs are included is ridiculously high. The Safari Com M-PESA scheme described in Chapter 11 has been an effective antidote to these problems. administered through a network of 10 000 local agents. Transaction volume is presently doubling every four months. The host operator, Safaricom, enjoys low churn rates and income from six million SMS messages a day. The publicity from the scheme helped with a stock exchange flotation which included a significant percentage of small shareholders to whom Safaricom has just sent a five-dollar dividend by SMS transfer - a transaction that would have been uneconomic using traditional banking. From a user perspective menu prompts are in English or Swahili. An unexpected side benefit of the project has been to increase basic literacy, numeracy and memory skills (remembering a PIN number). In the postelection riots subscribers were encouraged by Safaricom to share prepay credit in order to keep communication going. The riots meant that substantial food aid had to be brought in. The distribution of aid as cash instead of food parcels was piloted with SIMS issued to families who were then sent small amounts of money to allow them to buy food and supplies. This reduced the cost per calorie and targeting the aid where most needed. The process also helped to establish local supply chains and sustain the local economy. A similar initiative was then started in Afghanistan, where recent events suggest there were other applications that could be usefully developed. For example, the cost of providing international observers in the Afghan election was estimated as being of the order of $300 million dollars. This does not include the 