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Comment by iamdanfox | Hacker News Reader

Are there opportunities for hackers to volunteer in projects like mobile payments? I feel like donating a bit of development time to the right project has the potential to have a bigger impact than just donating money.

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Hi there, I work for a mobile payments company called Zoona (check us out at http://www.ilovezoona.com). Our tech team is based in Cape Town but all of our actual operations are in Zambia, Malawi and expanding to a few more countries soon. Getting some help on the dev would be awesome, and I'd be happy to chat more about what might make sense.

Feel free to get in touch and we can see if something makes sense - hans@ilovezoona.com.

(Same goes for anyone else reading this! Depending on your interests, may be able to link you to a few other projects doing some interesting stuff)

I'm not aware of any for mobile money, however there are a number of projects that focus on health:

http://openmrs.org

http://openlmis.org (*full disclosure I'm involved here and we could use help organizing a community)

Generalized data collection:

http://opendatakit.org

SMS:

http://rapidpro.io

http://frontlinesms.com

Probably not, sadly. The technologies currently in use (such as M-PESA in Kenya or bKash in Bangladesh) seem to be corporate and proprietary which to some extent is necessary given the need for lots of physical places to offer cash-to-mobile-money exchanges. There seems to be little involvement from charities so far, except maybe GiveDirectly, though so far they're just using M-PESA.

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