Closing the digital divide

In rural Tanzania, people are used to the daily walk to get water. Now there is a new chore: the trek to recharge the mobile. Many people walk several kilometres, two or three times a week, to keep their phone bleeping.

Mobile phones are one of the most popular technologies ever invented. There are now around |4 billion subscriptions in the world, meaning that many people who never had a landline phone, or a car, or even a bicycle, own a mobile.

The speed at which mobiles have become a fixture in even the poorest parts of the world took many professional observers by surprise. In 1990, there were just over 14,000 mobile phone subscriptions in Africa. By 2000, there were 16 million, and experts predicted that by 2005 there would be 67 million. They were wrong – by a margin of 70 million – while today there are more than 280 million. In just a few years, the digital divide between the rich and poor worlds has shrunk dramatically.

A rush of enthusiasm followed. “Extreme poverty is almost synonymous with extreme isolation,” wrote Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, last year. “But mobile phones and wireless internet end isolation, and will therefore prove to be the most transformative technology of economic development of our time.”

Phone companies soon supplied the figures to show that the mobile was an indispensible accessory for a country on the up. Vodafone research suggested that in a typical developing country, an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people boosted GDP growth by 6 per cent.

The difference that a mobile phone makes can be revolutionary. In Kenya, farmers can access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets through SMS. In the Indian states of Andra Pradesh and Gujarat, tens of millions of people are now within reach of ambulance services because they have access to a mobile. In the Brazilian state of Parana, the unemployed are now told about job opportunities by text.

Around the world, age-old customs are being bleeped away by the expanding empire of mobile phone masts – craftsmen no longer have to barter with middlemen, mothers of sick children no longer have to rely on the advice of local healers, casual labourers no longer have to wait around all day on the off-chance of getting work.

One thing is certain: tackling poverty will increasingly mean getting to grips with handsets and transmitters. “Pick any development problem – poverty, health, education, governance, climate change – and you’ll find that information and communications technologies, including mobiles, are already an integral part of the solution, and that will be increasingly true,” says Richard Heeks, Professor of Development Informatics at the University of Manchester.

But the feedback from the developing world isn’t all positive. Researchers in Tanzania found that almost half the people they spoke to sometimes sacrificed necessities such as food and clothes to keep their mobile phones running, and that less than 15 per cent thought the benefits of owning a mobile justified the costs.

The beauty and terror of the march of the mobile phone is that it is led, almost entirely, by businesses – governments and development organisations have struggled to keep up. This is the secret of its lightning advance, and also its Achilles heel when it comes to lifting people out of poverty.

“If the roll-out of mobile services in Africa had been a World Bank project, say, it is doubtful we would be anywhere near where we are today,” says Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, an organisation specialising in using mobile technology for development. “For mobile services to be sustainable in the developing world there needs to be a viable business model behind them. Service providers need to see the economic value in providing their service, or else they won’t do it.”

The fact that it is possible to make money even from the poorest people is the reason why villagers in rural India can now call an ambulance; why housekeepers in China are no longer at the mercy of their employers; why people who have HIV/Aids in Kenya can seek advice anonymously. The flipside is that everyone on Earth, no matter how rich or poor, is increasingly finding that they have to own a mobile, otherwise they will be left behind.

“The fact that farmers and fishermen can now find the best prices for their produce by using their mobiles has made a significant difference to people’s lives, but it also means that if you don’t have a mobile, or your mobile breaks, you could end up excluded and worse off than you were before,” says Banks.

None the less, people across the developing world are finding ways to use mobile phone technology at a price they can afford. Professor Heeks says that an estimated quarter of all calls made in Africa are “beeps” or “flashes”, meaning that a person calls another and hangs up before the phone is answered. This is proving an effective – and free – way of

communicating. “Beeps can be used simply to mean ‘I’m here/I’m OK’,” says Professor Heeks. “However, by pre-arrangement, they can be used to mean lots of things: that someone has arrived at a meeting location; that an item is ready for a customer to pick-up; and so on.”

Several of the most useful applications of mobile phone technology for poor people have been dreamt up, not by the research and development teams of multi-nationals, but by the people themselves. Several years ago, people in countries including Uganda started to use prepaid airtime to send money to relatives.

The idea was then taken up by businesses, and “m-banking” was born. This involves subscribers using their mobile phones to make payments or transfer money to other people – usually by sending a text message. Such initiatives have proved popular in the Philippines, South Africa and Kenya. M-Pesa in Kenya now has 5 million subscribers, including many people who never had a bank account before.

This lesson – that some of the best ideas may come from the people who live in developing countries– may help in tackling the next great technological challenge, getting the world online. Few people in the developing world have access to the internet. In sub-Saharan Africa, only three per cent of the population is online, and even fewer have broadband. One of the biggest problems is that the continent simply doesn’t have the communications infrastructure – or “backbone” – to support its 800 million inhabitants twittering all day.

But organisations whose job it is to help Africa develop – the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the International Telecommunication Union – have promised to help connect all major cities to broadband by 2012. This includes laying a fibre-optic cable along the east coast of the continent from Durban in South Africa all the way up to Port Sudan at a cost of more than £133m. The cable will connect 21 African countries to the rest of the world via high-quality internet, and is expected to be finished by early 2010. Currently, people in East Africa pay up to £200 per month for internet access – among the highest prices in the world. The cable will bring these down significantly, allowing consumers and businesses to get online.

The idea that the whole world might soon be chatting in cyberspace, solving common problems, lifting people out of poverty, is a compelling one. But whether a better connected world will be a fairer world remains to be seen.

One Nepali teacher who recently connected his remote mountain community to the worldwide web was philosophical about the benefits. He told the BBC: “The technology hasn’t changed the day-to-day life of people because they have to work in their field, raise cattle and grow food. However it has made their lives much easier when it comes to communicating between villages, with relatives living in the city or working abroad.”