The mobile internet revolution in Africa

Earlier this month, I decided to conduct an informal survey on a bus crossing the city of Kampala. After the rich and chaotic streets of the Ugandan capital, I tried to keep track of people using mobile phones around them. This includes mobile phone stores and kiosks, street-top retailers and mega billboards, and people who actually use the phone: a girl in a school uniform is writing a text message, and the businessman in the back seat of the shuttle in the rush hour dials the phone.

Not only half of the passengers on the bus have a cell phone, our driver also has, he parked the car to the terminal, while constantly tapping on the mobile phone keyboard. Five minutes later, I forgot this count, end neck ache and forget. But I have a better example than the numbers.

My survey draws a simple fact: over the past decade, Africa has experienced an incredible mobile boom. The number of mobile phones in the mainland was no more than 4 million in 1998. And now this is over 500 million. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% per cent of the population of the country, have mobile phones, and this figure is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, this ubiquitous device is not just a convenient means of communication: it is also a way of life.

Given its feeble achievements in technological development, it seems unlikely, but Africa is now at the centre of the mobile revolution. In the west, we have phones as computers: Smartphones can be used as a pocket computer. In Africa, where 1 billion of the population consumes only 4% of the world's electricity, many people can't even afford to pay for computers, let alone buy one. This makes telephony users and developers a rich resource, and what Africans are doing with their mobile phones is just the rise of people in the first world.

The most vivid example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighboring Kenya, mobile phone network provider Safaricom launched a service called Pesa, which allows users to save money on their mobile phones. If you want to pay for utilities or transfer money to a friend, you simply send it by SMS, and the recipient converts it to cash at the local Pesa network. The service is cheap, simple and practical, a revolution for millions of of Africans who cannot access bank accounts or can afford high fees.

Safaricom itself did not invent mobile banking: it had long existed in countries such as Norway and Japan, but it was small and did not produce a huge effect like in Kenya. Traditional banks initially did not welcome this-they tried to close m-pesa--in the first place but now they are reaping a lot in the game, which is estimated to be more than $1 trillion trillion in global handset trading by 2015. "Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking, and the future of banking will be defined here," said Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay's mobile banking development in California State. And will change the world. ”

Mobile banking has also spread rapidly to other developing countries. --mtn Uganda, Uganda's biggest telecoms company, opened its own mobile banking service--mobilemoney in March 2009. Within a year, 600,000 Ugandans were registered. Now, thanks to aggressive expansionary policies, it has won more users--and MTN agents, known as "Infantry", have moved to the streets to pull new customers, who now outnumber 1.6 million.

2011, the Mobilemoney network has been all over the country: eye-catching yellow building and selling kiosks not only in Kampala everywhere, other places are dotted. MTN's network coverage reaches 85% of Uganda, and there are Mobilemoney in Mtn. I traveled through many villages, but far or small, where there was a yellow.

Mobile phones have huge economic potential in less-developed parts of Africa. A 2005-year London Business School study found that 100 people in developing countries increased their 10 handsets, and their gross domestic product rose by 0.5%. Mobile networks can not only promote communication and financial development, can also be used to disseminate important information on agriculture and health care to remote rural areas susceptible to drought and disease.

Despite the rapid spread of mobile phones in Uganda, the digital divide persists. When more than One-third of the adult population in a country cannot read or write, how can information be understood and used? Smartphones are far more remote for most Ugandans, but how can not smart phones handle complex and detailed information?

The Microfinance organization Grameen Foundation has explored an interesting solution. To establish a reliable interactive pipeline in rural Uganda, Grameen began renting smartphones to local farmers so they could receive information about seasonal weather reports, planting advice, disease diagnoses, market prices-and pass them on to neighbors. They also collected information about the registered farmers and fed them to the headquarters of Kampala, which was transferred to FAO and WFP.

These participants, often referred to as community knowledge workers (Community knowledge WORKERS,CKWS), are often selected by examining English mastery, status, entrepreneurship, and skill level in the community. After training CKWS to use smartphones, Grameen paid them an average of 20 dollars a month for performance pay--or, of course, through Mobilemoney. Of course the rent is deducted from this payroll, and the outstanding farmers can eventually have their own mobile phone and charging solution in two years.

To date, Grameen has trained 500 CKWS in 32 districts in Uganda, covering 20,000 households and a population of 100,000. "Our goal is 1 million," said Sean Krepp, Grameen's Uganda project director. "We will also promote the project in several other countries." ”

Prior to this, the project's technical needs have been developed and perfected. At present, most of the information is transmitted by means of SMS. Various reports from the Ministry of Meteorology (Department of meteorology), including Uganda, and the National Agricultural Advisory Service (Nation Agricultural advisory services) have been rewritten as clear English, It is then sent to CKWS's cell phone. Grameen has begun sending images to its resident representatives, so that, for example, coffee plant diseases can be diagnosed by visual means. According to Krepp, the next step is video. Philip Parker, an economist with Grameen, is currently developing a series of educational videos, presented in gameshow style, that can be played to villagers using CKW's mobile phone when opportunities are available in the village.

There are, of course, many more fundamental challenges. The less-than-reliable network coverage in remote areas of Uganda is a big problem. Recharging smartphones in villages without electricity is another big problem. Some ingenious solutions have been developed (see below), but low battery power is still a common headache problem.

Despite these obstacles, the plan still has an important role to play-and its development potential has gone beyond Uganda's borders, and it has entered other areas, such as health care and education, and the prospects are becoming clearer. Once the digital divide in Africa's poorest regions is filled, information will be in the way, and why only in agriculture?

Case ONE: Mobile wallet micro-economy

africa-mobile-phone-boat--007 shipowners Allan Mukasa use mobile phones to resolve billing problems and to settle for local traders.

Photograph: Yousef Eldin

Kasensero:rakai Area

Kasensero is a small fishing village on the shore of Victoria, L. Lake Victoria, a 200 km drive from Kampala to the southwest to the Tanzanian border. The last 40 kilometers are a bumpy red road, and rainy days will turn into muddy field training fields. When you get to the village, you will be blocked by roadblocks until the old guard confirms it.

At the end of the town's main street is the largest lake in Africa and the town's main economic source. The lake was lined with hundreds of long, narrow fishing boats full of nets. When I arrived at Kasensero, the morning fishing was underway, and the last giant Nile perch was being transported to the shore of the factory where the fresh fish would be processed and packaged and sent to Kampala for export.

A row of houses overlooking the shore has a bright yellow façade: One of two Mobilemoney agents in the village of 5,000 people. Inside, Ben Nsubuga, the fisherman, is preparing to save his weekly salary.

He handed a stack of cash to the woman across the table, who recorded the deposit in the ledger and handed him a code that he would enter into the phone. Only a small fee was charged and the deal was completed within minutes.

"Before this service comes here, I must always carry all the cash," he said. There was no bank nearby, and in the past, whenever Nsubuga came home to bring money to his family, he was worried about being robbed on this long road out of Kasensero. "Now I need to remit money in this way," he motioned, holding his cell phone. The money is transmitted by SMS, and he can withdraw cash from any Mobilemoney agency.

The biggest problem, he says, is the network, which is so unstable that customers are often not able to get their hard-earned cash at any time.

The next example is Allan Mukasa, a shipowner and vice president of the village. "Somehow it makes life better here," he said. Kasensero residents not only can make long-distance remittances, they can also transfer money from banks to each other on their phones, creating a micro-economy in an isolated town. "We also use it to pay for water, electricity and tuition," Mukasa added. But he thinks there is room for improvement. "Before, we didn't know how to save, now, we want to have a better banking system, there is the possibility of interest-bearing." ”

It was not long before I left Kasensero that I learned of its history of hardship. In the early 1980s, the town was the world's first region-wide AIDS epidemic, and in 1986, one-fifth of its population died from the disease. Nearly a decade later, thousands of of corpses from the Rwandan massacre were brought into the lake by the Kagera River. A large cemetery a few kilometres away often reminds people of their horror memories.

Today, the town is trying to get rid of the traumatic past, and if there is any revelation to the queues outside this yellow office, it is the future of prosperity. Now, the Kasensero Villager's money no longer hides under the mattress, it lingers in the electric wave, wants to withdraw or remit out. Just touch a button and pay a little fee. Of course. Signal permitting.

Case two: Use a smartphone to cultivate

africa-mobile-phone-ugand-007 farmer Simon Obwoya uses his cell phone to mark crops to see market prices

Photograph: Yousef Eldin

Lagude:gulu Area

I arrived at lagude--, a small village of mud huts in northern Uganda, and soon my master, Simon Obwoya, regretted that he could not show his cell phone: because it was taken to Kampala for repairs two weeks ago. Without it, he could not gain valuable information and would not be able to cultivate in this unusually difficult and drought-ridden land.

Last December, 43-Year-old Obwoya, married and having eight children, was recruited by the Grameen Foundation as a ckw and trained in smartphone use, and now he is able to receive advice on weather, animal and plant health and market prices and send it to local villagers, He could also collect information about the farmers he had registered and send them back to Grameen.

Gulu is the most problematic of all the areas in which the foundation is operating in Uganda. For more than more than 20 years, much of northern Uganda has been a war zone. The notorious Lord's Resistance Army (resistance Army) has long been entrenched, and a large number of refugees have been forced to flee to difficult camps for displaced persons. In the years following the expulsion of the Lord's Resistance Army in 2005, people have slowly returned to their homes, returning to normal. But 20 years of conflict have paid a heavy price-trust in society, motivation for work, and life and material wealth. The wealth of agricultural knowledge is also lost, and Simon is trying to restore it and modernize it.

Just before sunset, Grameen, who rode a motorcycle from Gulu town to bring back HTC smartphones, has been repaired and refreshed. Simon was happy and ready to recharge it: It was a feat in a village without electricity. As part of the Charter package, Simon obtained a lithium-ion "smart battery" called "Readyset" (designed by the US Fenix Analysys). It also provides power to LCD lights and radios, But Simon's readyset had little power, so he charged us in the car.

Early the next morning, Simon was ready to solve the readyset problem. He connected the battery to the kinetic energy generator attached to the rear wheel of the bicycle. Then he stepped on the bicycle with a standing foot and began to pedal the car. The village is accustomed to the spectacle of Simon riding a bicycle, and he often needs to ride for several hours to recharge the readyset.

Unfortunately, it's not as useful as it seems. Sometimes he has to take the battery to the local trading station to recharge it, which is paid for.

Simon bravely took me to his field, where he planted corn, cassava, peanuts, and various legumes, and toured the wider fields he had managed as ckw. This includes 5 villages, and Simon has registered more than 300 farmers in the past six months to join the program.

To register, farmers must provide detailed details on farm, family and income, as well as the required improvements. Many in the region still do not know why Grameen does not provide actual material assistance, but Simon tells me he is trying to change that mind-set. "I told the Peasant brothers, let people give you knowledge, so that you can be rich and powerful." ”

Did the knowledge he learned from Grameen really make a difference? Simon nodded. "Especially this year, they warned us that there would be a long drought this year, so many of our farmers postponed sowing time," he said. As expected, the farmers were at least able to preserve the seeds. ”

With the help of Grameen, Simon has also set up a farming community that is expanding its products and selling it to the World Food Programme (Food programme) at a good price, which will also be used for relief work in the region. The CKW plan, which started hard in Gulu, was also a thorn in the front, but it has begun to make real progress in the fields that Simon Obwoya cared for with his precious smartphone.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)