Closing the Digital Divide: How the Spread of ICT is Improving Quality of Life for Millions in the Third World

According to this online article from The Independent, there are now around 4 billion mobile telephone subscriptions in the world, of which more than 280 million are on the continent of Africa. This means that many people who never had a landline phone, or a car, or a bicycle, own a mobile phone. Many people walk several kilometres, two or three times a week, to keep their phone charged, in much the same way that people need to walk to obtain water. The uptake of cell phone usage has caused optimistic predictions about their relationship to economic development.


Research by cell phone service provider Vodafone suggests that in a typical developing country, an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people boosted gross domestic product (GDP) growth by 6 per cent. For example, "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....[C]raftsmen 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."


Research shows the opposite economic side of mobile communication also. For example, in Tanzania researchers 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 phone justified the costs. The fact that businesses have led the advance of technology dissemination in the mobile market is explained by their plans to profit from the "roll-out" of services. "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."


Richard Heeks, Professor of Development Informatics at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, 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, particularly if communication meanings are pre-established among callers (a beep may mean that it is time to meet at a prearranged location, for instance, or that a product is available.) Mobiles functions are, in some cases, developed by users, like the use of prepaid airtime to send money to relatives. This has evolved into m-banking, now being formalised by the banking sector as a way to send money, make payments, or execute other business through text messaging. "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."


Online communication has been slower to penetrate the developing world because a more extensive and costly infrastructure, including fibre-optic cable, is being put in place for internet communication. Meanwhile, questions about whether and how cyber communication will help people develop significant answers to common problems - including economic poverty - are being researched.