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joinafrica features |
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Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa
to 21st Century
YANGUYE, Aug 25, South Africa - On this dry
mountaintop, 36-year-old Bekowe Skhakhane does even the simplest
tasks the hard way.
Fetching water from the river takes four hours a day. To cook,
she gathers sticks and musters a fire. Light comes from candles.
But when Ms. Skhakhane wants to talk to her husband, who works
in a steel factory 250 miles away in Johannesburg, she does what
many in more developed regions do: she takes out her mobile
phone.
People like Ms. Skhakhane have made Africa the world's
fastest-growing cellphone market. From 1999 through 2004, the
number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million,
from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent.
South Africa, the continent's richest nation, accounted for
one-fifth of that growth.
Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual
average of just 34 percent in that period.
"It is a necessity," said Ms. Skhakhane, pausing from washing
laundry in a plastic bucket on the dirt ground to fish her blue
Nokia out of the pocket of her flowered apron. "Buying air time
is part of my regular grocery list."
She spends the equivalent of $1.90 a month for five minutes of
telephone time.
Africa's cellphone boom has taken the industry by surprise.
Africans have never been rabid telephone users; even Mongolians
have twice as many land lines per person. And with most Africans
living on $2 a day or less, they were supposed to be too poor to
justify corporate investments in cellular networks far outside
the more prosperous cities and towns.
But when African nations began to privatize their telephone
monopolies in the mid-1990's, and fiercely competitive operators
began to sell air time in smaller, cheaper units, cellphone use
exploded.
Used handsets are available for $50 or less in South Africa, an
amount even Ms. Skhakhane's husband was able to finance with the
little he saves from his factory job.
It turned out that Africans had never been big phone users
because nobody had given them the chance.
One in 11 Africans is now a mobile subscriber.
Demand for air time was so strong in Nigeria that from late 2002
to early 2003 operators there were forced to suspend the sale of
subscriber identity module cards, or SIM cards, which activate
handsets, while they strengthened their networks.
Villagers in the two jungle provinces of Congo are so eager for
service that they have built 50-foot-high treehouses to catch
signals from distant cellphone towers.
"One man uses it as a public pay phone," said Gilbert Nkuli,
deputy managing director of Congo operations for Vodacom Group,
one of Africa's biggest mobile operators. Those who want to
climb to his platform and use his phone pay him for the
privilege.
On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by
beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to
television in the 1940's in the United States.
Africa has an average of just one land line for every 33 people,
but cellphones are enabling millions of people to skip a
technological generation and bound straight from letter-writing
to instant messaging.
Although only about 60 percent of Africans are within reach of a
signal, the lowest level of penetration in the world, the
technology is for many a social and economic godsend.
One pilot program allows about 100 farmers in South Africa's
northeast to learn the prevailing prices for produce in major
markets, crucial information in negotiations with middlemen.
Health-care workers in the rural southeast summon ambulances to
distant clinics via cellphone.
One woman living on the Congo River, unable even to write her
last name, tells customers to call her cellphone if they want to
buy the fresh fish she sells.
"She doesn't have electricity, she can't put the fish in the
freezer," said Mr. Nkuli of Vodacom. "So she keeps them in the
river," tethered live on a string, until a call comes in. Then
she retrieves them and readies them for sale.
William Pedro, 51, who deals in farm and garden plants, said he
tried for eight years to lure customers to his nursery in a
ragtag township near George, a resort town on South Africa's
southern coast. Only when he got a cellphone two years ago, he
said, did his business take off.
"White people are afraid to come here to my place in the
township to buy plants," Mr. Pedro, who is of mixed race, said
as he stood outside his makeshift greenhouses. "So now they can
phone me for orders and I can deliver them the same day."
Hamadoun Touré, development director for the International
Telecommunication Union, said the economic blessings of
cellphones were magnified in the developing world.
Source: New York Times
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