Recently I became a Child Sponsor at World Vision, a charity organization that improves children’s lifes all over the world. I’ve always been very sensitive to the argument that we’re very lucky to have grown up in a wealthy countries with all the support and opportunities we could wish for. The tough part is, that this argument is applicable to at least ninety percent of all the NGO’s in the world. So I’m currently managing my charity organization subscriptions on a FIFO basis. Anyway, looking at the picture of my newly sponsored child, Scola Jalale (in Malawi that’s a real common name), a mobile idea popped up.

About a year ago I wrote an article about mobile charity payments on TheNextWeb. In this article I argue that since the mobile payment system is already in use in Africa, we could use it to send money directly to certain African based people we care about. And now I’m Scola’s sponsor I had to think of it again. Scola is eight years old and currently at school, how fantastic would it be if World Vision could somehow provide her with a phone so we could text each other? This project would seemlessly fit in her school program and the money I would send her would benefit her and her community.

This system should be pretty easy to set up, since the mobile payment system has already proven to be a success in Kenia. The costs of the text messages could be billed to the sponsor through a reversed billing system, which is also used in tv show votes. By selecting a certain number the sponsor can chose to reversely bill the outgoing message with either  0.50, 1, 1.50 or 2 dollars/euros/pounds. And given that World Vision probably wants to stay in control of the process, they could facilitate the cash points and take a share of the gift to invest in the whole community. If I was fifty and had a couple of millions in the bank, I’d start developing tomorrow.

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