July 24, 2005
Mobile phones boom in Tanzania
In Tanzania, mobile phones have taken the country by storm, although only one in 10 houses has electricity, reports the BBC
"Some 97% of Tanzanians say they can access a mobile phone, and what is just as interesting, as in many African countries, is how those phones are being used.
... Many fishermen now carry mobile phones while they are at sea, and they use them to check market prices. Phones also serve another even more vital use, allowing fishermen in trouble to call for assistance.
Call centres make up a huge section of the Tanzanian economy. You can get a signal in places as remote as the smallest villages or even on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Call centres have sprung up all over Tanzania. Most people do not actually own phones, so this is how many people communicate.
Others have developed even simpler businesses based around mobiles, such as reselling their air time to others, or make a living sending and receiving text messages.
Mobile phones seem to have created a new sector of the economy, and some now wonder if the emphasis on the internet when looking at the digital divide was wrong-headed.
Len Waverman, an economics professor at London Business School, says: "Even in the more developed parts of Africa, where we thought the phone would just be a toy of the urban rich, it's not.
"It really is a tool for business development, and it's moving across population segments that we really did not before believe would be accessible by these companies."
Research has shown that increased mobile accessibility in Africa is boosting countries' economies in the same way that fixed-line installation in the west did in back in the 1970s."
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