October 14, 2005
It's good to talk - even better to sell
Africa is changing fast. Aid and debt relief may help, but mobile phones and trade with China are proving even more vital. A very interesting piece by Richard Dowden for New Statesman.
... " Driving those changes are mobile phones and radio stations and China's appetite for raw materials.
The G8's agenda of aid and debt relief may, if delivered, play a secondary role. The external driver is China's search for minerals, particularly oil, which pushes up Africa's mineral prices.
... The mobile phone revolution that has transformed business and politics in Africa in the past ten years. In 2001, only 3 per cent of Africans had telephones of any sort. Now there are 50 million mobile-phone users, with numbers growing by 35 per cent a year. The phone companies completely misjudged the market - they thought that only the super-rich would buy mobiles. But it turned out that the people who really needed them were small self-employed businessmen, market women, taxi drivers and the casual workers who keep Africa going.
In some areas, beer sales have plummeted as people have invested their meagre earnings in mobile phone cards instead. The pace of life has picked up hugely.
... Politically, too, mobile phones are having an immense effect
... A better-informed population that can listen to its own voices will put governments under pressure. Dowden even suggests that the Rwandan genocide could not have happened if mobile phones had existed.
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