Cell Phones in Africa: Transcending Boundaries, Developing New Uses

Blogger's Note: Being the texting capital of the world, we, Filipinos, often forget what was like before the cellular phones arrive. I hope this story will remind us of our past lives and learn new things in applying this wonderful technology in the real world. Read on... 8-)

Cell phones reshaping Africa
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Amina Harun, a 45-year-old farmer, used to traipse around for hours looking for a working pay phone on which to call the markets and find the best prices for her fruit.

Then cell phones changed her life.

"We can easily link up with customers, brokers and the market," she says, sitting between two piles of watermelons at Wakulima Market in Kenya's capital.

Harun is one of a rapidly swelling army of wired-up Africans -- an estimated 100 million of the continent's 906 million people. Another is Omar Abdulla Saidi, phoning in from his sailboat on the Zanzibar coast looking for the port that will give him the biggest profit on his freshly caught red snapper, tuna and shellfish.

Then there are South Africans and Kenyans slinging cell phones round the necks of elephants to track them through bush and jungle. And there's Beatrice Enyonam, a cosmetics vendor in Togo, keeping in touch with her husband by cell phone when he's traveling in the West African interior.

As cell-phone relay towers sprout on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti plain, providers are racing to keep up with their exploding market.

The numbers are staggering.

Cell phones made up 74.6 percent of all African phone subscriptions last year, says the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union. Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in 2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western Europe, according to Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese who chairs Celtel, a leading African provider.

An industry that barely existed 10 years ago is now worth $25 billion, he says. Prepaid air minutes are the preferred means of usage and have created their own $2 billion-a-year industry of small-time vendors, the Celtel chief says. Air minutes have even become a form of currency, transactable from phone to phone by text message, he says.

This is particularly useful in Africa, where transferring small amounts of money through banks is costly.

"We are developing unique ways to use the phone, which has not been done anywhere else,"
says South African Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, one of two service providers in Kenya. For an impoverished continent, low-cost phones make "a perfect fit."

And cash-strapped governments which have had to give up their monopoly on land lines are looking to reap huge revenues from license fees, customs duties and taxes on calls.

"We all misread the market," Joseph said.

The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed.

The real reason for weak demand was that land lines were expensive, subscribers had to wait for months to get hooked up, and the lines often went down because of poor maintenance, floods and theft of copper cables.

Cell phones slice through all those obstacles and provide African solutions to African problems.
Wildlife researchers in Kenya and South Africa have put no-frills cell phones in weatherproof cases on a collar that goes around an elephant's neck. The phone sends a message every hour, revealing the animal's whereabouts.

It cuts the cost of tracking wildlife by up to 60 percent, said Professor Wouter van Hoven of the University of Pretoria's Center for Wildlife Management.

"You don't have to walk around the bush searching for the animals," he says. "I have sat around in Europe and was able to monitor animals in the mountains using a cell phone that had access to the Internet."

Saidi, the Zanzibar fisherman, can now check beforehand whether prices justify him sailing his catch to the Tanzanian mainland, while Wilson Kuria Macharia, head of the traders' association at the Nairobi market, says he no longer has to spend two to four weeks at a time roaming across Kenya and Tanzania in search of fresh produce.

"A few mobile phone calls take care of what used to be the most grueling part of the business," said Macharia, 61.

Cell phones also make traders more competitive, meaning better prices for farmers, he said.
People who don't own a cell phone can use public telephone centers linked to cellular networks, creating badly needed jobs.

Across the continent, in Nigeria, privately run cell phone services arrived in 2001 and started out charging $150 just to sign up. Nowadays four companies vie for customers by offering free sign-ups and introductory air minutes.

The number of subscribers in the nation of more than 130 million has jumped from about 700,000 to over 10 million, and hawkers make a living selling air time cards to motorists trapped in traffic.

On the downside, however, bus passengers on cross-country journeys have to turn off their cell phones because criminals are known to use them to coordinate highway robberies.

Inevitably, cell phones have become status symbols. "If you do not have one, your friends will laugh at you and say that you are outmoded," says Akpene Rose, a 23-year-old hairdressing student in Togo, a tiny West African country where every sixth person is estimated to have a cell phone.

And just as inevitably, there are those who wish they had never been invented.
Ayi Aime, a 60-year-old Togolese, says both her school-age daughters have cell phones. "I do not know how they got them. I do not mind," she says. "But the persistent noisemaking, constant ringing, has become a nuisance."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Find this article at: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/10/17/africa.goes.cellular.ap/index.html

Cell phones suit Africa's harsh realities
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Putting cell phone technology into the hands of Africans has resulted in ingenious solutions to everyday problems on the world's poorest continent, and in huge growth in the telecommunications business.

Kenyan and South African researchers have used cell phones to monitor wildlife. Fishermen and farmers can quickly gather information from several areas to help determine where and when they can get the best prices for their produce. Africans have even found a way to turn airtime into a virtual currency.

All this on a continent whose people were long considered too poor to afford cell phones.

"We all misread the market," said Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, one two service providers in Kenya. Joseph said the market was underestimated because entrepreneurs relied on data about the formal economy, such as GDP figures.

That ignored a "very strong and informal economy, which allows Africans to live beyond the figures indicated by official statistics," said Martin de Koning, corporate communications chief for Celtel, one of Africa's leading cell phone companies.

The relatively low use of land lines may also have fooled entrepreneurs. But Africans didn't pass up land lines because they didn't want phones. The problem was that getting connected was difficult for the unemployed or informally employed, people without the cash deposit and patience to wait months for a connection. Land lines are also often out of service because of poor maintenance and theft of copper cables.

Cellular subscribers accounted for 74.6 percent of all telephone subscribers in Africa in 2004, according to the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union, which is responsible for standardization, coordination and development of international telecommunications.

Africa now has the fastest growing mobile phone industry in the world -- with some 100 million of its estimated 870 million people listed as subscribers, Celtel's Chairman Mo Ibrahim said.

Last year, the number of subscribers in Africa south of the Sahara increased by 67 percent, compared to 10 percent in Western Europe. There were more new mobile phone customers in Africa than in North America, Ibrahim said.

The growth is being realized even as African governments seek to reap huge revenues from subscribers and service providers in the form of high license fees, customs duties, special mobile call taxes and other charges.

In Africa, mobile communications have created a $25 billion industry that did not exist 10 years ago. Of this, some $2 billion from hundreds of thousands of indigenous entrepreneurs selling calling credit, Celtel's Ibrahim said.

The uses to which Africans have put all those phones offer insight into life on their continent.
Cash-strapped wildlife researchers in Kenya and South Africa have put no-frills cell phones in weatherproof cases with a GPS receiver, memory card and software to operate the system. The unit, placed on a collar, is then tied around the neck of an elephant.

As the elephants roam, "the GPS receives coordinates, downloads them on to the memory chip -- and then every hour, the phone wakes up and sends a (short text message) of the last hour's coordinates to a central server," said Safaricom Joseph. Then the phone goes to sleep until it's needed again, preserving battery power.

The technology has enabled South Africa's researchers to save up to 60 percent in costs for tracking wildlife, said Professor Wouter van Hoven of the University of Pretoria's Center for Wildlife Management.

Fisherman Omar Abdulla Saidi, standing beside a fishing boat propelled by a triangular sail in Zanzibar, an Indian Ocean archipelago off Tanzania, uses his cell phone to track markets.

The same is true for farmers, said Amina Harun, 45, who has grown and sold mangoes, oranges and other fresh fruits for 18 years in neighboring Kenya's port city of Mombasa.

Harun said cell phones ended the days when she had to walk for hours, searching for a working public phone to call traders in various markets to find the best prices for produce from her six-acre (2.43-hectare) farm.

Thanks to cell phones, "we can easily link up with customers, brokers and the market," Harun said, seated between two piles of watermelons at Kenya's largest fresh fruit and vegetable trading center, the Wakulima Market.

Wilson Kuria Macharia, head of the traders' association at the market, said he no longer has to spend between two weeks and a month traveling across Kenya and neighboring Tanzania in search of fresh vegetables.

"A few mobile phone calls take care of what used to be the most grueling part of the business," Macharia, 61, said as workers offloaded a truckload of carrots.

Good communications have also brought stiffer competition between traders -- translating to better prices for farmers, said Macharia who has been in the business for 41 years.

People have opened public telephone centers linked to cell phone networks across Africa, creating much-needed employment.

One service allows subscribers to transfer prepaid call credit, or airtime, from one phone to another through short text messages.

"Airtime is a currency of sorts. You can sell airtime and you can get real money. Or you can trade that airtime for something else to somebody else, who can then sell that airtime again," Safaricom's Joseph said.

The ability to trade in airtime is useful in Africa, where the costs of transferring small amounts of money through banks or other financial institutions are relatively high, he said.

"We are developing unique ways to use the phone, which has not been done anywhere else or is unique in Africa," Joseph said. "I always think that (cell phone technology) was designed for Africa, not for Europe -- because it is such a perfect fit" for the impoverished continent.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Find this article at: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/09/21/africa.cell.phones.ap