This is Nomakula Dyokomba. She’s the first person in her neighborhood to use her mobile phone to buy supplies for her spaza shop (corner store). The service is provided by WIZZIT Bank. Nomakula says it’s better than cash for two reasons. First, because she no longer carries lots of cash, she is less worried about getting robbed. Secondly, Nomakula can settle her accounts using her mobile banking service, instead of closing the store for several hours and taking a bus to the next town over.

For 20 years or so Nomakula has run her small shop and tavern out of the back of her home in the South African township of Motherwell. Spaza shops are ubiquitous in South Africa, and 80 percent of spaza shop owners are women. Think of it as a low-tech version of a 7-11. Situated near the tourism and manufacturing center of Port Elizabeth, Motherwell is home to 500,000 people, most of them using cash to pay for goods and services or receive payments.

WIZZIT, one of 12 partners working with CGAP’s Technology Program, this week has begun a pilot project here to see how Nomakula and others like her could send and receive money over mobile phones instead of using cash to buy food and drinks from wholesalers. As the press release tells us, the project’s three key components use point-of-sale devices in combination with WIZZIT’s mobile phone banking platform:

A mobile banking payment service for the major wholesalers serving more than 500 microentrepreneurs (spaza shops) in the township of Motherwell, where three in five people are unbanked.

A pilot program for easy account opening and preferred pricing at Dunns outlets—a leading South African clothing retailer. If successful, this pilot program will expand to 289 stores throughout the country. To encourage sign-ups and use, customers will be given incentives to make purchases with their Maestro debit card rather than cash.

Easy account opening using a direct sales model and the South African Post Office for distribution.

Globally, there are only a few examples of successful banking services that reach poor people in remote areas. With this project, CGAP is looking to WIZZIT to demonstrate how the reach of such services can be expanded with mobile technology and local agents who handle cash.