Interestingly, my understanding is that Somalia also has a fairly ubiqutious mobile payments system, which operates over SMS.

It's not perfect - it seems to rely on individual companies to remain honest, for instance - but one can go to a local market and add funds to their account with cash, then send those funds to others via a text message.

Seeing that such a system has still yet to take off in many industrialized countries, I find that pretty amazing :)