[This is a guest post by Heather Horst and Erin B. Taylor, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Heather is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Erin is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney Department of Anthropology. For more on their collaborative efforts, click here.]

Just over a year ago on January 7th, 2010, Erin Taylor (see www.erinbtaylor.com) and I received notification that our proposed project on money, migration and mobile phones on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic (link) had been officially funded by Bill Maurer’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. Excited by the prospect of conducting new research, Erin and I exchanged emails and set a date to begin to plan what we anticipated would be a small, one-year project that explored the movement of people, currencies and mobile phone signals across the border (and by the same company, Digicel, who radically transformed the Jamaican telecommunications market in the first half of the decade). Five days later, on January 12, 2010, the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti.

Within days of the earthquake I received an email from an administrator at UC Irvine asking if we still planned to go to Haiti. Since our start date was still a few months away, we saw no reason to cancel our project but recognized that it would likely take on new dimensions as the daily life of Haitians – even in the distant region we planned to work – were transformed by the event and its aftermath. As distant observers, it was impossible not to pay attention to the reports of aid sitting and waiting transport, the use of mobile phones to ‘text’ donations and the non-stop stories circulating via mainstream media, twitter and a range of other social media. Money, mobile phones and (im)mobility seemed to be front and center. A few months later (with additional support from IMTFI), we decided to team up with Espelencia Baptiste (Kalamazoo College), an anthropologist who was spending her sabbatical outside of Port-au-Prince, to begin to look more systematically at what was happening on the ground.



In August 2010, our reconfigured research team began a rapid round of interviews and discussions in different parts of Haiti. Our modest aim was to begin mapping Haitian monetary ecologies in the post-earthquake, with an eye towards the challenges facing Haitians as they sought to access and circulate money. Collectively, we began to learn amazing things about the ways in which money IS moving – just how long (and how much money) it takes to deposit $US 20 into a bank account, the importance of sea routes for moving money from distant locales to Port-au-Prince, the same unit of measurement Sidney Mintz wrote about in the 1960s being used in contemporary markets, the emergence of mobile vendors selling increments of airtime and a range of other practices. While not a shock for most anthropologists, the very fact that social networks and intermediaries are still key to economic practices represents a cautionary tale for entities looking to introduce technological solutions to social and economic problems. They remain central not only because of uneven and unreliable access to banks, computers, mobile phones and transportation, but also because sharing resources is essential to managing the chronic poverty experienced by the majority of Haitians. These connections have become all the more essential.

Our report, a collaborative effort written on Google docs and enabled by Skype conversations while we were spread across the globe (Australia, Haiti and the US), was finalized in December 2010 and has been made available online by IMTFI. The report provides a qualitative snapshot of Haitian monetary ecologies six months after the earthquake, focusing upon the challenges that many Haitians face in their efforts to send, receive, exchange and store money, and the role of mobile phones and other conduits in this process. Specifically, we address three key challenges that shape everyday Haitians’ attitudes towards money, trade and exchange and the potential for social change through new financial services: bureaucracy and Power, time and cost, and security. The report concludes by providing a series of recommendations concerning the importance of social networks and intermediaries in moving money, the incorporation of the Haitian diaspora into financial inclusion models and the broader need to address Haitian values concerning savings, time and forms of exchange.