Yesterday, a new report was released by the United Nations in which it revealed that by using digital payments to pay Ebola response workers, Sierra Leone was able to massively cut payment times, avoid large-scale strikes and ensuring a stable workforce to defeat Ebola. This study is of high significance because it is something that everyone, almost everyone in Africa, can relate to – especially here in Nigeria where strikes and industrial actions are natural occurrences – just like rainfall.
Coincidentally, civil servants across Nigeria are on strike as a result of the increment in the pump price of petrol. This is one of the very few reasons (two, I think) that workers in Nigeria go on strike – the second and most significant being delay in payment of salaries. According to media reports, states such as Osun, Oyo, Bayelsa, Ekiti and several others are owing salaries. Even though workers in these states still go to work, the passion is long gone and the various state secretariats are at best described as ghost towns. Everyone is unhappy even though workers anxiously await when the voucher for the month would be prepared and sent to the office of His Excellency to be signed before the money would be shared.
The contemporary process of getting paid is really long and several strikes had been held in the past because of delays – even some of which are man-made often occurring when His Excellency or someone else decides to use workers’ salaries for something else forcing the workers to down tool.
In this era of ghosts in civil service, government at all levels are interested in lowering their expenses and blocking the leakages including the flushing out the ghost workers. The current way they are going about it is through the deployment of BVN yet it is believed that this process is expensive and could still be beaten.
But the UN study proved that paying through mobile money eliminated some of the barriers encountered during salary disbursement to workers in Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa. The study carried out by the United Nations-based Better Than Cash Alliance offers valuable lessons on how to harness the power of technology to help emergency workers reach more people by paying them digitally during crises.
The study shows digital payments delivered compelling results in Sierra Leone, including:
- Cost savings of US $10.7 million for the government, taxpayers, development partners and response workers – the equivalent of funding Sierra Leone’s Free Health Care Program catering for 1.4 million children and 250,000 pregnant women annually.
- Reducing payment times from over one month on average for cash to one week.
- Preventing the loss of around 800 working days per month from the Ebola response workforce, helping save lives during this critical time.
- Saving response workers around $80,000 per month in travel costs by avoiding lengthy journeys to cash payment centers.
Even though asking governments and employers to start paying using mobile money may be farfetched for now especially considering the uneven penetration, adoption and affinity for mobile money in the various African countries, it is time employers started considering better, easier, and cheaper ways of paying salaries to their workers.
If Sierra Leone could pull it off, others should too. The vast majority of the cost savings were due to eliminating payments to people who were not legitimate Ebola response workers, known as “ghost workers”. The money saved was given to those who really needed it.
Digital payments offered a powerful solution, particularly given Sierra Leone already had mobile network coverage across nearly 95 percent of the country, and more than 90 percent of response workers with access to a mobile phone.
One of the major challenges of cash is that it is expensive, slow, difficult to transport and vulnerable to theft, graft and payment errors. Late or incorrect payments to response workers often led to strikes during past emergencies and at the start of the Ebola crisis before digital payments were implemented.
In Sierra Leone, digital payments reduced these strikes from an average of eight per month – causing the loss of about 800 working days per month – to virtually zero.
This could and should be replicated here, there, elsewhere and everywhere
