Boston Review: Africa Calling
Can mobile phones make a miracle?
Ten years ago the 170,000 residents of Zinder were barely connected to the 21st century. This mid-sized town in the eastern half of Niger had sporadic access to water and electricity, a handful of basic hotels, and very few landlines. The twelve-hour, 900 km drive to Niamey, the capital of Niger, was a communications blackout, with the exception of the few cabines téléphoniques along the way.
Then, in 2003 a Celtel mobile-phone tower appeared in town, and life rapidly changed. “I can get information quickly and without moving,” a wholesaler in the local market told me. Before the tower was built, he had to travel several hours to the nearest markets via a communal taxi to buy millet or meet potential customers, and he never knew whether the person he wanted to see would be there. Now he uses his mobile phone to find the best price, communicate with buyers, and place orders.
Zinder, which has since grown to some 200,000 residents, still has no ATMs or supermarkets, and many roads to surrounding villages are made of sand or compressed dirt. But it is filled with small kiosks freshly painted in the colors of the prepaid mobile phone cards they sell.
Despite anemic economic growth rates, limited agricultural progress, and overwhelming poverty (85 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day), Nigeriens are now more connected than ever. More than 60 percent of them have mobile phone services—no small feat in a country three times the size of California, with bad roads, unreliable postal services, and two landlines per thousand people.
Niger’s telecommunications revolution is being repeated all over Africa, where people are using mobile phones at rates that far exceed the industry’s early expectations. In 1999 the Kenya-based service provider Safaricom projected that the mobile phone market in Kenya would reach three million subscribers by 2020. Safaricom currently has over thirteen million.
And mobile phone use is booming despite high costs. The cheapest mobile phone in Kenya costs half the average monthly income. In Niger the price of the cheapest mobile phone could buy 12.5 kg of millet, enough to feed a household of five for five days. Yet mobile phone subscriptions in Africa have risen from 16 million in 2000 to 376 million in 2008—or one-third of sub-Saharan Africa’s population. This does not mean that 376 million people have mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa—some people may own several handsets or subscriber identity module (SIM) cards, suggesting that official figures might overestimate the number of actual users. On the other hand, sharing mobile phones is a common practice in Africa, so usership could be even higher than subscriber totals suggest. There is, in either case, no question that Africans are using mobile phones in high numbers.
As the numbers have grown, the demographics have also changed dramatically. Between 2005 and 2009, the percentage of the Kenyan population living in areas with mobile phone coverage remained largely constant, but the number of subscriptions tripled, reaching 17 million by 2009. The first adopters were primarily male, educated, young, wealthy, and urban. But with prices dropping, usage has extended to a much broader population. …
Leave a Reply