Mobile telecommunications have been heralded by many as a way for improvised nations to escape the clutches of their poverty by improving many aspects of daily life for the people who don’t know what YouTube or Facebook are. The question Isaac Mbiti from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and Jenny Aker from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts wanted to answer is whether mobile phones alone could help bring Africa into the future.
Spoiler: No.
Africa’s infrastructure, and I’m talking basic things here like water, electricity, and roads, things we all take for granted in well off countries, is in such deplorable shape that even giving everyone a basic low end Nokia isn’t going to fix things. For starters, an unnamed operatore in Nigeria is learning the lesson first hand of what it’s like to not have electricity. Said operator has 3,600 base stations and in order to keep them up they need to be powered by generators which are consuming roughly 450 liters of diesel fuel per second just to enable basic communication.
“It’s really great for a farmer to find out the price of beans in the market, but if a farmer can’t get the beans to market because there is no road, the information doesn’t really help. Cell phones can’t replace things you need from development, like roads and running water.” — Isaac Mbiti
In subsaharan Africa only 1 in 4 people have access to electricity and less than 30% of the roads are paved. This presents a challenge to the people who can take advantage of what a text message can deliver. Another fun stat from Nigeria: a single 1 minute phone call runs about 38 cents, and that’s 40% of an average Nigerian’s daily income. The cheapest phones on the market can feed a family of 5 people for a week.
As for Africa in general, about 300 million people live on less than $1.00 per day, and 120 million live on less than half that.
Maybe you should stop complaining about your bill?