In the past year, units of India’s Bharti Airtel Ltd. and the U.K.’s Vodafone Group PLC have been locked in competition. Vodafone’s Safaricom Ltd. dominates the Kenyan telecommunications sector, with 77 percent of the market.

But in the third quarter, Bharti’s Airtel Kenya boosted its market share to 15 from 11 percent in the second and captured 60 percent of new mobile customers each month, according to Rene Meza, Airtel’s managing director in Nairobi. Airtel Kenya is on a path to “market leadership,” the 33-year-old Paraguayan says.

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Bharti did, however, forge a $10.7 billion deal last year to acquire most of the African operations of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co., better known as Zain. That deal gave Bharti its foothold in Kenya.

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Digicel is the first recipient from a $10 million fund set up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the project is designed to speed up the arrival of cellphone banking in Haiti. The effort follows other mobile banking projects such as the M-PESA program in Kenya.

For now, the Haiti Tcho Tcho service, as the banking program is known, allows customers to make deposits and withdrawals at retail outlets, as well as transfer money between Tcho Tcho accounts. Over time, the service is designed to expand to bill payment and international transfers, as well as the ability to pay for government services.

Bill Gates has been a big advocate of establishing banking and savings in emerging markets as a means of breaking the cycle of poverty in developing countries, and cellphones have shown particular promise as a means to provide authentication as well as to deal with the fact that many of the poor live in remote rural areas, making traditional branch-based banking not economically feasible. He touted the Kenyan program during a tour of U.S. colleges last year.

The grant comes at just about the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake on that island nation. Even before the quake, only one in 10 Haitians had access to a traditional bank. Digicel got the grant for being the first company to set up a mobile banking service in the country. A further $1.5 million will go to the next operator to launch service there, while the remaining $6 million will be handed out proportionally to the companies that handle the first five million transactions.

U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten said that the move is part of America’s effort to provide long-term assistance “to help the Haitian people build back better.”

“The role of innovative companies like Digicel will be critical to ensuring the sustainability of our investments here,” Merten said in a statement.

Conjuring up references to 1970s cult classics like “Shaft,” Just-a-Band’s latest video, “Ha-He,” introduces the fictional Makmende sporting shades, chains, an Afro pick and what appears to be polyester. Directed by Jim Chuchu and Mbithi Masya, the clip is a tribute to “ass-kicking” of days past–even the name “Makmende” is a throwback to a word used in mid-1990s Nairobi to connote a know-it-all or local hero (and bully.)

The video–with “Big-G,” “Godfrey and the Laydayz,” “Black Sahara” and others backing up Makmende–has drawn more than 24,300 hits in the week since its release and the success doesn’t end there. Kenyan bloggers and Tweeters have seized on the video and launched a campaign for the man they’re calling Kenya’s very own Chuck Norris–complete with one liners about Makmende’s superhero skills and prowess. Makmende on Facebook has already collected 19,200 fans–with more joining by the minute.

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“There are more Internet users in China than there are people in the U.S.,” Barrett notes, “And more cellphone users in South Africa than in the U.S.” But it won’t matter, he says, if the world doesn’t address inequities, starting with education. “If someone asked me what’s the most important technology you could put in the classroom, I would say, a really good teacher,” says Barrett. He brings onstage executives from NetHope, which is coordinating IT for developing countries, including Kenya, and Save the Children, which is working on getting Intel Classmate PCs into classrooms in Bangladesh.

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