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employing dozens of people and building new supply chains for
the business. Before long, our seed trader is in the commodities
business, tracking world supply news through mobile television
services and hedging contracts through Java-based bank transac-
tions. This is fantasy today, but an absolute reality for tomorrow,
and what makes it possible is the communications infrastructure.
Development on the ground
Earlier this year, the BBC reported on a study from the Centre for
Economic Policy Research that looked at the social and economic
impact of mobile phones. It pointed out some successes – that
small business in South Africa relies on mobile phones and that
adoption in Nigeria is doubling annually. But it also contained
some depressing reading – that an average of only six per cent
of people in Africa have phones. This figure is way below the point
where an economic uplift can be established.
At its most basic, the phone is a strange device, because just
purchasing one for yourself is useless unless you know someone
who also has one, and with whom you wish to talk. While the
fixed-line telephone took ten years to become established for
exactly this reason of synchronicity, the same effect is in place for
the mobile phone in today’s developing nations. The question
remains: “Why should I get one if nobody else has one?”
But the long-promised winds of change are finally arriving in
Africa, courtesy of the mobile phone. In Tanzania, 97 per cent say
that they have access to a mobile phone – but only 28 per cent can
access a landline. Given that the latter statistic is unlikely to change
radically with the cost of developing landline infrastructure (although
the economics of Wireless Local Loop may assist this), the reality
is that the mobile handset must become the catalyst for change.
The change, when it does occur, is fairly rapid. In the study,
62 per cent of businesses in South Africa and 59 per cent in Egypt
said that mobile use was linked to higher profits. And this was
true even when a lower costs landline was available. When the
shift happens, it can be extraordinarily rapid, and today in South
Africa over 85 per cent of small businesses rely solely on mobile
phones for communications.
What was most telling from the Centre for Economic Policy
Research’s study was the statistic that a developing country which
had an average of ten or more mobile phones per 100 population
between 1996 and 2003 had a 0.59 per cent higher gross domes-
tic product growth than an otherwise identical country. Now, 0.59
per cent growth may not sound much, but in the context of a
developing nation this can be the engine that eradicates poverty
and provides the education and healthcare to which all strive.
In rural Uganda, the Grameen Technology Centre’s Village Phone
project has put over 1,300 mobile phones in villages in its first year
of operation. The Village Phone provides an interesting blend of
social and economic benefits – people are able to save time (oppor-
tunity cost in many cases) and travel costs if they don’t have to travel
tens of kilometres to access a phone. The phones get used for a wide
variety of purposes – staying in touch with families, getting
commodity prices and calling for medical care. The phone is a
community resource and is also economically beneficial to the indi-
vidual operator, who is able to run a business by selling usage of the
phone to others in the community at competitive rates (and fixed
rates – this is important as it enables people with mobiles to get
help from their neighbours at 3.00 AMwhen they have a sick child).
The 1,300 phones are clearly a tiny fraction of the 82 million
phones in Africa, but the model is an interesting one from the
perspective of combining mobile communication and develop-
ment – rural development in particular – with an eye towards
direct economic benefit to entrepreneurs along with tangible
community benefits.
The Tunisia experience
September 2004 was a milestone month, when the first ever 3G
call was made on the African continent. A WCDMA commercial
ZTE donated one set of “emergency mobile communication system” to Thailand for the Tsunami Disaster Recovery, April 2005