STRO’s CEO, Henk van Arkel, is in Uruguay for two months to visit the local STRO projects. Read here his post on the first days of his visit.

My first days in Montevideo were dedicated to the research project on the effects of Mobile Money on local development. In this project STRO and researchers from the Brazilian Institute Getúlio Vargas target on the effects of new virtual means of exchange, such as mobile money, on local economies. The project is supported by the Canadian research funder IDRC.
Our researcher Magdalena Ramada will shortly publish the paper as a working paper at http://www.ssrn.com/ which is being consulted by many scientists. The paper concludes that new technologies that allow easy access and transfer of money can only be expected to have a significant development impact if they are combined with an approach that conditions money to stay in the targeted area longer than normal money would. For example, STRO’s Cyclos software can be used to create such conditions for the use of  money. New rules such as bonuses and fees, such as the case with the STRO C3 methodology, can guide money to circulate longer in a specific region. This is a revolutionary approach to money and is only possible because of new digitalisation processes.
I think this research will get increasingly more attention. People highly underestimate the effects of new technology on development. It can be compared to the micro credit movement: until recently everybody believed that mobile money will automatically be beneficial for poor people to discover over 20 years that a variety of outcomes is possible and among them ones in which the local economy does not profit at all, and interest payments are forcing money out of the communities.