Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General and Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says: “Mobile communication is perhaps the single most transformative technology for rural African villages to improve access to health care and education, create new business opportunities and access to markets, and ultimately to help eradicate extreme poverty.
A 2005 report by Leonard Waverman of the London Business School, estimates that the average developing nations sees its economic growth rise by .06 per cent for every 10 per cent growth in the number of mobile phone subscribers. In 2007, the GSM Association applied Waverman’s methodology to a group of 57 developing nations and found that the impact was doubled, boosting economic growth by 1.2 per cent for every 10 per cent rise in mobile users.
The lack of affordable access to relevant information and knowledge services among the rural poor has been a concern to development economists for some time. Traditionally, information is regarded by economists as a critical element in the efficient functioning of markets. Recently, access to information is essential for the emergence of global information and knowledge based economy and has the ability to empower poor communities, enhance skills, and link various institutions involved in poverty reduction. Despite this being widely recognized, access to information has been limited in reality.
Mobile phones have become the most easily accessible and ubiquitous communications device in rural areas. Easy availability of low priced new handsets with basic features, make them within reach for even the poorest of the poor. Despite the increasing rural demand for relevant and timely information and market knowledge, the benefits from ICT investments have been unevenly distributed between and within countries resulting in what has become to be widely known as the digital divide and information poverty.
The first billion mobile phones took around 20 years to sell worldwide. The second billion were sold in four years. The third billion were sold in two years. Coverage has expanded and mobile phone subscriptions in developing countries have increased by over 500% since 2000 (Wireless Intelligence 2007).
With the introduction of new mobile services such as WAP, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), calendar and contact synchronization, as well as a multitude of other possibilities, mobile phones can now play an even bigger role in tackling rural poverty. This is in line with some of the Millennium Development Goals.
In particular, mobile phones can help address certain social issues of poverty such as:
- Lack of access to information
- Education
- Healthcare
- Political Power
However, these same positive developments pose challenges for the rural poor in using these new technologies for their own good. The challenges can be listed as follows:
- Network availability; Network coverage in many countries is almost 90%.
- Lack of electricity; phones are charge using car batteries
- Content (locally generated, relevant); Content is still remains “non relevant” in relation to the needs of the rural poor
- Provisioning
Developing economies have found ingenious ways around some of these challenges, given the obvious benefits that the use of mobile telephony can bring, e.g., the lack of electricity in rural areas was believed to be an insurmountable barrier to mobile take-up. However, rural communities developed various ways to adapt to this obstacle: (a) collecting several mobiles from one community and heading to another village to charge them, as at an Issuana mission in Tanzania; (b) using car batteries to charge mobile phones.)
Provisioning is an important area that has been largely ignored. The majority of the people in the developed countries do not have the so-called high end devices. We can distinguish between high end and low-end devices. In general, a high-end mobile device offers more sophisticated capabilities, including a full-featured browser, large screen size, and high resolution. These devices (depending on the operator) can already be configured with the correct settings.
A low-end mobile device is more basic, with a smaller screen and a more limited browser. This device needs to be configured to do more. The prevalence of low end Mobile Handsets is a major factor in the uptake and penetration of mobile value added services. Data services, which are essential for the poor fall into value added services. Many services are not performing to their potentials despite their usefulness and others cannot be introduced at all.
Mobile phones manufactured after the year 2000, are capable of these advanced features, but they are not enabled by default. Many mobile data services, which offer the poor better information, are highly dependent on the accurate configuration of the handset. It’s a problem that continues to act as a barrier to the adoption of mobile data services in the many parts of the developing world, where a large number of new phones are sold devoid of any settings.
Mobile terminals are by nature limited devices. They typically have limited memory, storage, and processing, capabilities. Therefore, mobile devices do not include all of the components required to access new or upgraded services that may be available. In terms of poverty reduction, access to information on health and sanitation for example. This type of information will either on a portal or some secure network that must be accessed through the mobile terminal. If that mobile phone does not have correct wap settings, then that service is unavailable to the community.
Finally
It’s important to also note that the correlation between GDP per capita and mobile penetration is not as strong is indicative of two dwindling myths. First, there is the myth that the rural poor are not able or not willing to pay for mobile telecommunication services. Initially, this led to a tendency to invest in the more affluent urban areas rather than poor rural areas but now there are also growing rural networks in many developing countries. Second, there is the myth that natural barriers, such as lack of education or electricity, would prevent mobile take-up. Strong growth in many developing countries, in spite of still-prevalent difficulties with low education, low access to electricity and low income levels has also gone some way to refuting this theory.
In conclusion, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the economic and social benefit of mobile telephony will be highest in rural areas, which currently have less telephony services. Both poverty and lack of information are common bed partners. Thus, the dissemination of information together with serving rural areas has double anti-poverty imperative. Studies have attributed multiple benefits to the mobile phone: from lowering negative aspects (e.g., corruption, crime, high prices) to raising positive aspects (e.g., levels of education, efficiency, health).
Francis Stevens George
