As cellphones spread like wildfire over the African continent it should be humbling to leftists that big corporations are helping poor Africans in more practical ways than tree-huggers and socialist NGOs could ever imagine.
Huddled under a spiky tree next to the new cellular mast, Mhlapo interrupts a family meeting to check an SMS and deftly fires off a reply."Now I can contact my children. Before we had to wait months for them to come," she said in a mix of Sotho and Afrikaans, tucking her prized phone away inside a striped dress.
Mhlapo says she spends as much as 200 rand on airtime some months. Margaret Chinhete, a Zimbabwean woman who lives down the gravel road says she spends about 100 rand a month on her new phone, but easily covers that with the extra cash she makes from selling crafts now she can contact customers by phone.
"When I bought this I had never made a phone call. Now I use it to call business contacts. It saves me from walking kilometers every day and I have doubled my monthly earnings," Chinhete told Reuters, as she hauled home her wares.
Rural areas of the third-world are skipping over telephone lines completely and going straight to cell service, which requires less infrastructure per service area and per person. The testimony above shows that the technology immediately enhances quality of life, and as more people get connected the network effect will keep the benefits growing. Combined with ultra-low-cost computing, rural Africa may be able to leapfrog decades of development and have internet connectivity before electricity grids.
You may be interested in reading about how the MIT Design Lab's Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship has started to encourage the development of mobile apps and technologies with developing countries in mind (or, ideally, BY developing countries), specifically the ones in Africa. Most mobile phone users are in developing countries but most designers and developers are not. Did you know that in Kenya there are 5.6 million mobile phones but only 200,000 households with electricity?
http://web.mit.edu/eprom/whyafrica.html
From that page: "For example, contract laborers can now provide their phone numbers to potential employers and move on, instead of having to wait for hours at a workplace in case a job arises. Access to market information through mobile phones also provides rural communities with invaluable information about centers of business; many African fishermen check the local fish market prices on their phones to determine where to bring the day’s catch. The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (Kace), now provides crop growers with up-to-date commodity information via text message (sms). This allows farmers to access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets, and many have quadrupled their earnings because they have access to information about potential buyers and prices before making the often arduous journey into urban centers to sell their produce".
http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/09/11/nathan_eagle_m.html
From that interview: "Today, in my small town of Kilifi, I can buy milk, pay for a taxi ride, even check the local vegetable prices on my mobile..."
Ah, and one other thing; And in a few years, when satellite mobile telephony becomes almost as cheap as cellular telephony, the phone companies won't need to build any infrastructure at ALL, they can just sell handsets that can work absolutely anywhere (and chargers that get their energy from motion or from the sun). If geo-mobile sat-phone technology fulfills this potential, I expect we'll see an even bigger boom in mobile telephony, especially in sparsely-populated areas, since all a phone company will have to do to get an area to use their services is ship them some phones, rather than build towers and set up new networks.
"... the phone companies won't need to build any infrastructure at ALL, they can just sell handsets that can work absolutely anywhere... "
"... all a phone company will have to do to get an area to use their services is ship them some phones... "
Once the satellites are up, I mean. Which they will be, since the Americas and the Middle East alone make launching such satellites profitable already.