When I returned to work in Seattle following my trip to Kenya and Ghana, I was filled with tremendous optimism, mostly due to one fact: While we here at the foundation might be working hard to help lift people out of poverty, the poor are working harder.

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Today we announced that Digicel, Haiti’s leading cell phone company, won a $2.5 million prize for helping to make mobile money a reality in Haiti. Digicel’s service, Tcho Tcho Mobile (which is slang for money in Creole), is offering Haitians an alternative to long and costly trips to  pick up money sent by friends and family, waiting in long queues for salaries, or the insecurity of carrying cash. Haitians can now send, receive, and store money through their mobile phones without traveling to overcrowded banks or money transfer houses.

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When I visited Kenya last December I had a chance to observe M-PESA, which is a mobile money service that is being used by more than 13 million people for storing and transferring money.

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On November 16 and 17, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted a Global Savings Forum that brought together more than 250 leading players from around the world, including executives from financial service providers, mobile communication companies, international setting bodies, national regulatory agencies, and central banks, along with academics and financial inclusion experts.

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Plenty of people have heard about microcredit, about giving small loans to poor people. But very few people know about the new technologies that are making is possible for poor people to save the money they earn.

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