Mobile Phones Sound a Hollow Ring For Rural Ugandans

Excerpts from the article follow:

"'Wherever you go, you're just a call away'. That's how the mobile phone advertisements run in Uganda, a country heralded as a telephone success story after it opened its doors to mobile phone companies in 1996.

Since then Uganda has moved from being a country with one of the lowest teledensities in the world - the number of telephones per 100 people - to having the third largest mobile network among Least Developed Countries. Other LDCs are told to follow in its footsteps.

But although the number of phones has skyrocketed from 48,000 in 1996 to 682,000 in 2003 - 90% of them mobile phones - this still leaves 90% of the population without a telephone, mostly in Uganda's countryside.

The ads sound hollow even to those few rural dwellers wealthy enough to own a phone.

'Sorry, the number you have dialed is not available. Please try again later' is a commonly-heard message for urbanites calling their rural relatives.

...When the government liberalised its telecommunications sector in 1996, it believed that giving people - and particularly businesses - greater access to telephones would help develop the economy. The initial focus was on towns and cities, although rural areas form the backbone of the economy: agriculture accounts for 43% of the GDP, 85% of export earnings, 80% of employment and provides most of the raw materials to the mainly agro-based industrial sector.

The government appears to recognise this in its rural communications development policy...

John Nasasira, the communications minister, admits there has been minimal investment in rural areas, even though telecom operators are required under their licenses to extend services to rural areas...

Paul Nyangabyaki, editor of a Ugandan magazine DONOR News, says even if the network coverage is available, buying and maintaining a mobile phone is not a priority in rural Uganda where people's main concern is access to food...

The Uganda Communications Commission, an independent telecoms regulator, plans to have at least one public telephone per 5,000 people by 2005 and has set up a development fund to encourage companies to invest in rural areas by offering them subsidies...

But the government lacks the negotiating clout to force telephone companies to invest in areas deemed unprofitable, and improve their services to customers...

Despite the scarcity of phones in rural Uganda, the gap in the number of phones between the world's richest and poorest countries is slowly closing. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the difference in teledensity between the two has dropped by 65% to 112 since 1991."

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