My good friend Rob Fisher recently wrote the following on his own blog.
I listen to Radio One in the morning. Chris Moyles and a bunch of other celebrities walked up Kilamanjaro to raise money for charity. Now Moyles has just got back from a trip to Uganda to give out malaria nets with the money raised.
He said that two things surprised him about Uganda. It’s very green and lush; and everyone has mobile phones.
I think part of the reason everyone thinks Africa is brown and dry is Live Aid. “Where nothing ever grows; no rain or rivers flow.” Never mind forced relocation. Looking around on loc.alize.us, Uganda is a bit greener than Ethiopia.
Yes, but Bob Geldof and Midge Ure wrote those lyrics, and they had this British preconception already. Another factor might be that the places in Africa that British people are most likely to visit are Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and South Africa: the Sahara, and the arid south. There is plenty of fertile land in the middle. A tragedy is that some of the most fertile parts of Africa tend to be some of the most troubled: the vast Congo basin is prime land, essentially, and yet its history has been unspeakable, at least since the arrival of King Leopold’s privateers in 1877. As Chris Moyles discovered, Uganda is green and fertile, but its history is not the happiest either.
People who attempt to raise awareness of malaria in Africa and elsewhere, and to raise money for its prevention deserve praise, of course, but what I am struck by is that the story about mobile phones becoming ubiquitous in poor countries has only just reached these people. This story is at least five years old now in the sense that most people have access to one and probably closer to ten in the sense that mobile phones existed in these countries and networks have been quite comprehensive, in many cases as comprehensive or more so than in rich countries.
A related story: about three years ago I was walking along the Thames path on a Sunday afternoon. and I passed City Hall. Outside the building was some kind of “Here is how bad things are in the third world and why we should fell guilty” kind of exhibition provided for us by Ken Livingstone’s lackeys using our money. Amongst the factoids of information in this display was the statement that “90% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”.
The “x% of the world’s population have never made a phone call” meme has been around for a while. 90% is obviously ridiculous and shows intense innumeracy from whoever made it up. (About 15% of the world’s population lives in rich countries, and if you add “rich parts of middle income countries, you can increase this number to 20 or 25%). The meme seems to usually be stated as “50% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”. Clay Shirky attempted to investigate where the meme came from, and the first recorded statement of it appears to be from engineer Greg LeVert of telephone company MCI in 1994. However, he said it in the context of “.. but oh boy is this going to change with all the great new technology that’s in the pipeline”. Nobody knows where he got the factoid from though: he may have just made it up. However, the Al Gores and Michael Moores and Kofi Annans and the like (and even people like Melinda Gates and Carly Fiorina who should know better) have repeated it endlessly since – or at least were doing so until only a few years ago.
It is, of course, just not true. It is extraordinary that people should repeat out of context a ten year old view of what the poor world is like, as if the ten years between 1995 and 2005 were static in the development of telecommunications.
At the time I encountered that exhibition outside City Hall, there were around 3 billion active mobile phones in the world: so therefore, although 90% of the world’s population had never made a phone call, about 50% of the world’s population owned a mobile phone. (They were all big texters, apparently). Since then, the number of mobiles in the world has increased by a further 50% to around 4.5 billion. The number of people with multiple phones per person or separate voice and data accounts and such has now reached the point where you cannot go directly from this to “4.5 billion people have mobile phones”, but the number of people who do is clearly greater than 50% of the world’s population. Given phones shared between families and friends, and the interesting third world concept of the cellular payphone, the percentage of the world’s population that is old enough to have made a phone call and has never done so must be in the low single figures.
The use of this meme by the internationally prominent seems to have finally died over the last couple of years: even someone as dim as Al Gore can figure out from his occasional views out of windows of five star hotels or between the gaps between members of his entourage on his occasional trips to the third world that something has changed, I suspect. Finance and business folk get this completely and got it long ago: fortunes have already been made selling mobile phones to people in poor countries.
But the well intentioned who seldom leave rich cities other than to visit Mediterranean beaches still don’t generally get it. At best, people who see Africa as a problem to be addressed through benevolence, charity and aid have made small differences in a few places. The capitalists who have built mobile phone networks have transformed the continent utterly. The logistical networks that go with them have facilitated all kinds of other changes, too, in terms of logistics and markets. All kinds of consumer goods are available that were not before. (Many people cannot afford them on an everyday basis, but they are there, and this matters). Just as in the west, food is better, and there is more variety. There are lots of under the radar small businesses that were not there before either. Access to information and to the outside world is much greater.
As it happens, my first trip to Africa was to Kenya and Tanzania, and a main aim of that trip was to climb Kilimanjaro, too. I attempted the climb in 1992. The way most people attempt to climb it is simply insane. Kilimanjaro is a spectacular mountain, as it is a freestanding mountain in the middle of a plain. Climbers usually take about three days to go from sea level to an altitude of 6000 metres. It is perfectly possible to survive for long periods of time at 6000 metres, but to get there safely requires lengthy acclimatisation, of at least a couple of weeks. The Kilimanjaro climb involves essentially climbing for two or three days and acclimatising a little, then making a sudden ascent from about 4000 metres to 6000 metres and coming back down again before being overwhelmed by altitude sickness. Many people – perhaps most – become overwhelmed by altitude sickness well before getting to the top and turn back. This is extremely dangerous, and people die in the attempt every year. Myself, I did not die, but after a lengthy session of intense headaches, dehydration and vomiting, I had to turn back some distance from the summit.
Tanzania was perhaps at its nadir at about that time. Julius Nyerere had been president of Tanzania from its independence in 1961 until 1985. He was not a venal or corrupt leader, but although his collectivist agricultural policies did not lead to starvation, they did lead to backbreaking poverty. Tanzania in 1991, even the tourist town of Moshi from which Kilimanjaro is approached, remains the poorest place I have ever been. The place was bleak and dusty. It was possible to place an international phone call with a lot of effort and expense. Trade did of course occur, but there was a sense of isolation from the outside world. Some postcards I sent home took more than three months to get to Australia. In order to obtain local money, I had to wait for hours to cash travellers cheques in bank branches where local customers’ account records were stored on paper records in filing cabinets. Satellite television was just starting to penetrate African capitals, but in general, international news and information was scarce. When I was in Nairobi, the (venal and corrupt) dictator of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, decided to suspend currency trading to make some sort of point to the IMF, and as a consequence I was unable to easily change money. Of course, there was a parallel economy that existed for such situations, but using this was awkward and inconvenient.
These days, though, I can pull a communications device out of my pocket and call my mother in Australia. I can go to a cafe and pull out my laptop and get live prices from the New York Stock Exchange streamed to me. For free. I can get money out of an ATM, and the sort of shenanigans that Mr Moi was fond of pulling off is no longer possible without pulling a country in the extreme direction taken by Zimbabwe. I have access to much of the information of the world. So do many of the locals. Educated people with services to sell (and they exist) can sell their services outside Africa. People can buy and sell things, finding ways around attempts to regulate and control what they do. Go into a store in any African city. Tell the shopkeeper that you need a taxi. She will make a phone call, and five minutes later someone will pull up outside with an old but serviceable car. At the end of your journey, they driver will hand you a card with his phone number on it, and tell you to call him or get someone else to call him when you next need a cab. Thus are small businesses created.
Largely due to modern communications services, globalisation is changing Africa. In the poor world. Africa s now plugged into the world. Great technological change – be it the invention of electricity, the railways, electricity, the PC, the internet – seems to go through an initial stage when everyone initially recognises that the technology is important, but during which its importance is underestimated in productivity statistics and people don’t always understand its true importance. Then there is a stage in which the changes due to it are profound. I think Africa is about to go through the second stage, driven by both growth of the internet and the mobile phone simultaneously. I think the effects are going to be profound, overwhelmingly good, and the continent will be barely recognisable in two decades time.
As for why people in Uganda have mobile phones, and not mosquito nets, I would suggest that it is because mobile phones are cheaper. Such are the benefits of mass production and massive economies of scale. Also, second hand phones from the rich world end up in the poor countries in huge numbers – no such markets exist in mosquito nets. Also, I suspect that more people actually do have mosquito nets than Chris Moyles thinks – it’s just that nets provided by informal networks do not show up in his sort of statistics.
Anothe interesting aspect of mobile telcoms has been the development of mobile banking. Admittedly, one issue that needs to be nailed down is secrecy, so that clients don’t fear their details being nicked. But in Africa, and in other places where there are big distances involved, mobile banking will be a big growth issue in driving financial services over the next few years.
Once again, nice article Mike, with lots of good detail and personal anecdotes. You should collect some of these essays together and publish them as a book!
Is that 4.5 billion phones number active telephones, or just phones that have been manufactured?
I mean, I go through cell phones at a rate of about 1 every two to three years. So I’m just one person, but I’ve had at least 6 cellular telephones (including the one I’ve got that’s active now).
Which isn’t to dispute the finding that the “90%” number is complete hooey.
That is 4.5 billion active cellular accounts in the world. Stats are from the International Telecommunications Union. (See here, for instance.
In the developed world, many people now have more than one account. For instance, if you have a personal phone, a broadband dongle, and a work Blackberry, then you count as three of that 4.5 billion.
Even more dramatically in the long term, we are getting to a situation where some of these subscribers are machines. An automated weather station might send its data in via a cellular connection. More commonly, a credit card terminal in a shop may do its verification over a cellular network. In the long term, these sorts of connections are going to outnumber the ones that are actual people.
It is still an astonishing statistic, however. The long term consequences will be gigantic.
I had a co-worker from India reveal to me the reason that mobile phones are so ubiquitous there. This was about ten years ago.
He said that land lines are owned by the government. They are rarely reliable, and there aren’t enough of them to go around. So your phone might work for awhile, then just stop working. The repair guy shows up, you slip him an extra “incentive” to get the job done right. Your phone starts working again, for six months. Then the repair guy shows up, repeat…
Contrast this to mobile phones, which are all commercial enterprises competing with each other. The prices are reasonable and they always work, because the companies would go out of business if they didn’t sell a competitive reliable product.
Yay for free markets!
Not only are the mobile phones in India more reliable, they’re being used in far more creative, ingenious and… well, unique ways than you might think.
Indians use prepaid mobile phone reloads the way we would use Western Union, for instance. They use them to pay bills, they share minutes with each other, and the penetration rate is damn near 70% or more. Which, for a place with 1 billion plus people, most of whom are dirt poor, is really something…
Regarding the English opinion of Africa, in the US you usually have 1 of 2 opinions of Africa.
If you’re older the stereotypical view of Africa is as a jungle (a la Tarzan). If you’re younger, your view is one large savanna (a la Animal Planet TV channel)
Mobile telephone use in Africa is still heavily tilted towards voice and not data. So even barely literate people may have phones and can talk without having to write messages. Indeed, the bulk of the profits of the corporations in Africa is explained by voice and not data. sadly, there are only two types of Africans that people encounter outside the continent. The first is the charity seeker and the other is a politician. As for business people, they tend to be monopolists with political connections or related to the politicians. They talk glibly but are often just fronts for their corrupt relatives.
“And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas….”
Er, well, except on Kilimonjaro, Mount Kenya, the Atlas mountains etc. etc.
There’s a semi-serious point here; much of my generation’s understanding of the Third World was formed by this, plus Blue Peter campaigns which presented famines in Cambodia and Ethiopia as natural catastrophes exacerbated by Western selfishness in hogging all the grain, while scarcely mentioning the Marxist civil wars, Khmer Rouge, Eritrean separatists etc. that were actually causing famines in some of the world’s best agricultural land.
Mobile telephone use in Africa is still heavily tilted towards voice and not data. So even barely literate people may have phones and can talk without having to write messages. Indeed, the bulk of the profits of the corporations in Africa is explained by voice and not data.
If you exclude SMS from “data”, that heavy tilt was pretty much true in the developed world five years ago too. And I think voice revenue still accounts for the bulk of the profits in the rich world too, although this situation is obviously changing.
There is a huge shift underway towards data in the rich world, and I think it will follow in the poor world in a small number of years. Lower levels of literacy are an issue, but not in my mind an insurmountable one – people become more literate when there are strong economic reasons to do so. At the moment in most of Africa you have wired internet available in towns and cities to literate and educated people where the infrastructure is good enough. Usually it’s not in many homes, but finding an internet cafe is easy enough. There is a point, soon, where the cost of wireless comes down (a lot of this is hardware costs – 3G handsets are simply more expensive than 2G) and data access becomes more widespread. At that point things get interesting.
sadly, there are only two types of Africans that people encounter outside the continent. The first is the charity seeker and the other is a politician.
If you instead talk about “people outside the continent encounter” the third might be the Nigerian scammer. Which only emphasises your point, I suppose.
As for business people, they tend to be monopolists with political connections or related to the politicians. They talk glibly but are often just fronts for their corrupt relatives.
Yes, but the new technology has weakened their ability to be monopolists. Many of the new phone networks in African countries have been built by western companies or western style companies. (MTN is a South African, fairly normal, shareholder controlled country. Vodacom is now a fairly boring subsidiary of Vodafone, since the South African government deliberately moved away from it last year. Venal, well connected people still of course exert far too much influence, but the question is “Does new technology weaken this?”. My optimistic side (seen in the article) believes yes. Africans are as good at starting small businesses as people anywhere else. However, institutional and political factors prevent them from turning into bigger businesses. Are these factors being weakened? That is the big question. I think they may be.
Michael,
Seriously, what sort of understanding of the world do you expect from people who think that an honours degree in Media Studies is some sort of achievement?
It sounds like he was channeling Homer Simpson:
“there are only two types of Africans that people encounter outside the continent.”
There are other kinds of Africans that people meet. African musicians like King Sunny Ade sometimes tour the U.S. or Europe. There are also African immigrants. Chicago has thousands of African immigrants. Many of them drive cabs or start restaurants. (Like Cafe Senegal, just around the corner from me.)
Lovely article. I’m an African electronics undergraduate in Zimbabwe and I have to admit that a lot tof this article and the comments I’ve read are painfuly true. However, I want to emphasize that the winds of change are blowing, the major hurdle however is changing people’s perspectives.
I remember when I was a bit younger (in primary school) we managed to correspond with some kids from USA and some children from Brighton college (UK) and found it so amusing how so many of them where asking about lions in our backyard and couldn’t hold back our laughter when another went to great lengths describing a television set. At this time we were already acquainted with digital television and watching international channels like cartoon network. My point is no one makes much of an effort to change these perceptions and they are further fueled by the misinformation taught by hollywood.
I think we stand at the brink of a technological revolution, one that is going to include Africa, and the Chinafone (Chineese phones with obscure brands) is going to harvest this and soon we will have Chineese phones having a large footprint in the world because of Africa.
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