-- A little over a decade ago
there were about 100,000 phone lines in Nigeria, mostly landlines run by
the state-owned telecoms behemoth, NITEL. Today NITEL is dead, and
Nigeria has close to 100 million mobile phone lines, making it Africa's
largest telecoms market, according to statistics by the Nigerian
Communications Commission.
Across the rest of the
continent the trends are similar: between 2000 and 2010, Kenyan mobile
phone firm Safaricom saw its subscriber base increase in excess of
500-fold. In 2010 alone the number of mobile phone users in Rwanda grew
by 50%, figures from the country's regulatory agency show.
During the early years of
mobile in Africa, the Short Messaging Service (SMS) was at the heart of
the revolution. Today the next frontier for mobile use in Africa is the
internet.
"Mobile is fast becoming
the PC of Africa," says Osibo Imhoitsike, market coordinator for
Sub-Saharan Africa at Norwegian firm Opera, whose mobile browser is
enjoying an impressive uptake on the continent. "In fact there isn't
really anything more personal than a mobile phone nowadays."
The trend has continued
since then. Most of those devices will be low-end Nokia phones, tens of
millions of which have already been sold on the continent. The more
expensive "smartphones" are however also increasing in popularity, as
prices drop. Blackberry's market share has been rising in the developing
world, bucking the trend in Europe and North America.
Google, for its part,
plans to sell 200 million of its Android phones in Africa and it is
estimated that by 2016 there will be a billion mobile phones on the
continent.
In 2007, President of
Rwanda, Paul Kagame, said: "In 10 short years, what was once an object
of luxury and privilege, the mobile phone, has become a basic necessity
in Africa."
BANKING
M-PESA is a mobile money
transfer service launched by Safaricom, Kenya's largest mobile operator
and Vodafone, in 2007. Five years later M-PESA provides services to 15
million Kenyans (more than a third of the population) and serves as
conduit for a fifth of the country's GDP.
In Kenya, Sudan and
Gabon half or more of adults used mobile money, according to a survey by
the Gates Foundation and the World Bank.
How have mobile phones changed Africa?
The runaway success of
M-PESA in Kenya is inspiring similar initiatives across the continent,
from South Africa to Nigeria to Tunisia, as governments struggle to
extend banking services to large numbers of the population -- across
sub-Saharan Africa only one in five adults own bank accounts.
Many Africans now use
mobile money to pay their bills and airtime, buy goods and make payments
to individuals, remittances from relatives living abroad are also
largely done via mobile banking.
ACTIVISM
One lesson from the 2011
uprisings across North Africa was that mobile phones, with the infinite
opportunities they offer for connection and communication, are able to
transform ordinary citizens disenchanted by their governments, into
resistance fighters.
Realizing this, the
beleaguered Mubarak regime successfully put pressure on Egypt's mobile
phone networks to pull the plugs, in a bid to slow down the tempo of
opposition activity. And so on January 28, 2011 mobile phone networks in
Egypt went dead.
Three years earlier, in
the aftermath of bloody elections in Kenya, citizens were able to report
violent occurrences via text messages to a server (via the Ushaidi
platform) that was viewable by the rest of the world as they happened.
Across the continent
mobile phones are also bringing unprecedented levels of openness and
transparency to the electoral process, empowering citizens from Cairo to
Khartoum to Dakar to Lagos.
EDUCATION
An NGO in Uganda has teamed up with mobile phone companies to create a database for refugees to register their personal details.
Nokia capitalized on the
growing popularity of social networking in South Africa to launch
MoMath, a mathematics teaching tool that targets users of the instant
messaging platform
Mxit.
Mxit is South Africa's most popular social media platform, with more
than 10 million active users in the country, the company says.
The potential for
transforming the continent's dysfunctional educational system is
immense, as mobile phones -- cheaper to own and easier to run than PCs
-- gain ground as tools for delivering teaching content.
It is hoped that
mediating education through social networking will help reduce the
significant numbers of school-age African children who are not receiving
any formal education.
ENTERTAINMENT
A 2009 survey found that
"entertainment and information" were the most popular activities for
which mobile phones are used in Nigeria, in particular for dialing into
favorite radio shows, voting in reality shows, downloading and sharing
songs, photos and videos, as well as tweeting.
However companies are
creating mobile-only platforms targeted for this market. Africa now
teems with online platforms like Kulahappy (a popular online Kenyan
"entertainment channel" developed for the mobile screen) and AfriNolly,
which bills itself as "African movies in your pocket."
Nigeria's mobile music
industry (covering everything from mobile downloads to ringtone and
caller-tune subscriptions) is now a multimillion-dollar industry.
Interestingly,
Lithuanian mobile social networking site, Eskimi, recently became the
second most visited site in Nigeria, after Facebook, and is in the top
10 bracket in several other African countries. Half of the site's seven
million-plus active users are Nigerian.
DISASTER MANAGEMENT
Mobiles have been finding innovative uses in refugee camps, allowing displaced persons to reconnect with family and loved ones.
An NGO,
Refugees United, has teamed up with mobile phone companies to create a database for refugees to register their personal details.
The information available on the database allows them to search for people they've lost contact with.
South Africa's 2008 xenophobic attacks inspired the launch of
SMS emergency reporting and relief systems.
AGRICULTURE
Mobile phones have made a
huge difference in the lives of farmers in a continent where the
agriculture sector sis one of the largest employers. Most of these
people will be "smallholder farmers," without access to financing or
technology.
By serving as platforms
for sharing weather information, market prices, and micro-insurance
schemes, mobile phones are allowing Africa's farmers to make better
decisions, translating into higher-earning potentials.
Farmers are able
to send a text message to find out crop prices in places thousands of
kilometers away.
As far back as 2003,
Kenya's Agricultural Commodities Exchange partnered with mobile operator
Safaricom to launch SokoniSMS64, a text-messaging platform to provide
pricing information to farmers.
M-Farm also offers a
similar service, while the iCow is a mobile app billed as "the world's
first mobile phone cow calendar." It's an SMS and voice service that
allows dairy farmers to track their cows gestation, acting in effect as a
veterinary midwife. Farmers are also given tips on breeding and
nutrition.
HEALTH
A simple text-messaging
solution was all 28-year-old Ghanaian doctoral student, Bright Simons
needed for his innovative plan to tackle counterfeit medicine in African
countries. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 30% of
drugs supplied in developing countries are fake. In 2009, nearly 100
Nigerian babies died after they were given teething medicine that
contained a solvent usually found in antifreeze.
Simons' pioneering idea
was to put unique codes within scratch cards on medicine packaging that
buyers can send via SMS to a designated number to find out if the drug
is genuine or not.
The system is now being
used by several countries in Africa and rolled out to places such as
Asia where there are similar problems with counterfeit drugs.
In South Africa there's
Impilo, a service that allows people to find healthcare providers
anywhere in the country 24 hours a day, using their mobile phones.
Mobile phones are going
to play an increasingly important role in mediating the provision of
better healthcare to the citizens of African countries. Phone companies
are realizing that mobiles are highly effective -- and potentially
lucrative -- for the dissemination of health and lifestyle tips, and
reminders for doctors' appointments.
In June 2011 a
consortium known as the mHealth Alliance organized a Mobile Health
Summit -- touted as Africa's first -- in Cape Town. The Alliance
describes itself as a "[champion of] the use of mobile technologies to
improve health throughout the world."
Stina Backer contributed to this report
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/13/world/africa/mobile-phones-change-africa/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
