Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

This article follows Jan Chipchase in his anthropological/industrial design research as he travels the world to profile cellphone use and users and observe what features private industry might add to cellphone design to attract customers. The article suggests that those potential customers are people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less, and have no easy access to electricity. Using the story of this researcher's work in developing countries as its lens, the article discusses the potential for cell phone proliferation and for cellphone use as an economic stimulus.


According to statistics, 80 percent of the world population lives in cellular network range, which is double the level in 2000; and 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions by the end of 2006 were in developing countries, according to figures from the International Telecommunications Union. This reflects the demand, served by various network proliferation strategies. According to the article, "...more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors." The pressure to increase networks comes from the more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide. "According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two." However, as stated here, there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia.


Barriers to cellphone proliferation still exist, particularly lack of network towers and limitations of power supplies in remote areas. The need for reliable electricity has brought some cellphone companies into the power business. In Uganda and Namibia companies are providing solar-powered phone charging kiosks. Solar- and wind-powered base stations are in the testing phase of development.


The World Resources Institute reported last year that even very [economically] poor families invested a significant amount of money in the information and communication technology (ICT) category. The reason, according to the article, is the economic advantage offered by cellphones, compared in the article to the economic advantage of a manufacturing concept of Toyota called the “just in time” moment. For Toyota, this means making or purchasing parts as close to the moment they are needed as possible. The article theorises that the effect of cellphone usage on economies of developing countries will be like the "just in time" effect on Toyota: incremental time saving, less waste, better access, and improved efficiency. "There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries in a similar way." The economising effect of cellphones is already found in Africa and Asia where, as stated here, even the smallest improvements in efficiency could "reshape the global economy."


Economists and development specialists have noted and studied the economic potential of cellphone usage. Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, found that the profits of fishermen marketing with cellphones in Kerala, India, increased by 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent. A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) rises 0.5 percent.


The economic advantage stems from various kinds of cellphone usage from marketing to meeting to banking. Having a call-back number, according to anthropologist Chipchase, "is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move - displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies - can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business - rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day labourers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone."


This "bottom-up" economic development through cellphone access is the basis of Grameen Phone Ltd., which sells cellphone kits equipped with a long-lasting battery to women in Bangladesh who wish to set up a phone shop in a village, usually through microcredit. An indicator of the programme's success is that Grameen Phone is now Bangladesh’s largest telecom provider, with annual revenues of about US$1 billion.


Movement of money, formerly limited to traditional banking, is now accomplished in a number of African countries through cellphones. In Uganda, the practice is called sente, meaning money moves from urban workers to villages via airtime card purchase. A worker purchases US$5.00 worth of airtime, for example, calls the kiosk owner in the family's village and "sells" her the code on the card so that she can sell that airtime to her customers. She, in turn, pays that family the US$5.00 minus a small commission for the transaction. This is the precursor to formalised mobile banking, already begun in South Africa and the Philippines, where cash credits can be transferred via cellphone to stores or post offices for purchase credits or cash withdrawals. The system has potential for accelerating microfinance and for providing a rapid payment system for the rural to urban exchange of goods through local markets.


The trend of movement to urban centres, now more populated than the combined rural area of the planet, is predicted to fill the crowded and economically poor sections of cities with one quarter of the world's population by 2020. These areas, as stated here, hold the highest marketing potential for cellphone companies and are receiving attention from anthropologist/industrial designers like Chipchase. The research includes searching for answers on how to build a phone that can be repaired on the street, or charged with a car battery, or one that can double as a flashlight or pick up distant signals. The research looks for new design elements, such as multiple address books, that can facilitate phone sharing. Already, the use of icons facilitates phone access by illiterate users. Price and durability are now market considerations among international competitor companies based in India, Finland, and South Africa.

When given an opportunity by cellphone researchers like Chipchase, the residents of economically poor sections of cities express their ideas of dream phones - a bottom-up approach to design. Their ideas reflect their needs, from add-on air quality monitors to land mine detectors to weather predictors to a global positioning device (GPS) that will point to Mecca. (Even now, add-ons to full-featured cellphones have reduced the market for other products such as watches, cameras, and, to a degree, newspapers, among others.) And, in a top-down approach, futuristic cellphone prototypes are being tested in this same socio-economic category - from phones that can recharge by being swung around for 15 minutes to those that have photos rather than numbers in their address book. Though the design focus may not appear to be directed towards ending global poverty, the connectivity of cellphones, according to designer Chipchase, may increase people’s productivity and well-being because they can be reached.