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OCTOBER 14, 2003

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By Sarah Parkes

Bridging the Digital Divide
Developing nations are using cheap and flexible cellular technology to connect rural areas and boost their economic development


In the dusty village of Iyokango on Uganda's far eastern border, Zulia Adio prepares for the day by opening the shutters of her self-built Village Phone booth. Already customers are beginning to queue sociably; some buy a mug of Zulia's home-brewed morwa to pass the time. Since becoming one of Uganda's first Grameen Village Phone Ladies last June, Zulia has been reselling basic voice service over a latest-generation Samsung cellphone to local villagers. Demand has been buoyant -- so much so, that the phone she got to help grow her tailoring and brewing business has already become an important income generator in its own right.


Providing women like Zulia with micro-credit loan financing and the equipment to operate a public telephone kiosk is not only helping break the poverty cycle in one of the world's poorest regions, it's also brought easy access to modern communications to community members who, just a few months earlier, had to walk nine kilometres to the nearest public phone. Improbable though it may seem in an area where access to low-tech necessities like clean water and basic health care remains an urgent priority, high-tech mobile cellular technology is proving one of the most successful drivers of economic development ever deployed.

The potential of cellular to connect chronically underserved communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America was a scenario few of the principal development agencies anticipated when mobile uptake first began to soar in Europe and the US in the mid-nineties. As a result, most aid programmes continued to focus on funding the rollout of the woefully inadequate landline networks that characterise most developing regions -- and particularly much of sub-Saharan Africa, where average fixed teledensity is still under one line per 100 inhabitants, and where waiting time for a line in countries like Angola, Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe is upwards of ten years.

While the emergence of the Internet as a powerful communications tool has happily retrospectively vindicated development efforts in fixed services, for the moment it's the flexibility, cost-effectiveness and accessibility of mobile that's proving the greatest boon for improving access to simple voice and data communications in the developing world. Indeed, the number of mobile subscribers overtook their fixed line counterparts in most of Africa, Latin America and Asia back in 2000/2001, and combined annual growth rates from 1995-2002 exceeded 100 per cent per annum in a number of countries including India, Bangladesh, and much of Africa, where other means of access are poor or even non-existent.

The reasons behind mobile cellular's unprecedented success as a key technology for the developing world are simple: faster, cheaper network installation and an ability to overcome traditional geographical constraints like distance, dispersed island topography or rugged terrain. As soon as that was combined with prepaid pricing, which brought service within reach of millions who might otherwise have been disqualified through lack of 'credit worthiness', mobile became unstoppable as a solution to the chronic communications malaise affecting most of the world's poor.

"Mobile networks are quicker to provision for two simple reasons," explains ITU's Mike Minges, Head of the ITU's Telecommunications Data and Statistics Unit. "Technically, there are no lines to lay to subscriber premises - just a few base stations and backhaul networks to set up, and you've got a service. In addition, because mobile is more often the province of private companies than state-controlled institutions, providers have a strong incentive to get service up and running fast so they can start recouping their investment."

Simplified access via prepaid and over-the-counter handsets has also been crucial. "Empowering customers to connect themselves rather than waiting for the state to provide service has proved a highly successful paradigm in alleviating poor access to voice and limited data services," says Minges, noting that the number of SMS messages sent in the Philippines was already hovering at close to 160 per subscriber per month in 2002 - some four times higher than the world average.

"In terms of the potential of mobile cellular to bring access to ICTs to disadvantaged communities, affordability remains the key issue. Policies that stimulate competition will help, but innovative use of shared resources will remain the most important means of capitalising on the power of mobile in the short-to-medium term," adds Minges.

New Takes on Old Technologies
Of course, exploiting the power of ICTs as development catalysts is about much more than simply providing access to a cellphone. Some people living in isolated, tightly-knit communities might have little need to make a call even were a service available, but that doesn't mean infocommunications technologies can't offer enormous benefits.

One innovative scheme that's bringing a new take on high-speed communications to the tiny nation of Bhutan high in the Himalayas is an ITU-sponsored project called E-Post. Based around a new breed of low-cost hand-held PDA known as a Simputer, E-Post cuts the delivery time of snail-mail letters to outlying regions from four weeks to two days or less. ITU's Vishnu Mohan Calindi explains: "In remote parts of the country, mailmen from the nearest regional centre often walk two weeks or more through very challenging terrain to deliver the post. Our E-Post initiative allows the central post office to scan or re-type letters and deliver them electronically to the nearest local post office, where they can be downloaded onto a hand-held Simputer PDA. A postal worker then carries the PDA to the recipient, who can either read the letter onscreen, or have the Simputer read the text aloud through its text-to-speech capability". The system not only overcomes extremely long delivery delays, but represents a highly effective way of using advanced technology to bridge the Digital Divide by delivering information verbally to those with poor literacy, notes Calindi.

The brainchild of teams working under the auspices of the Bangalore Institute of Science, Simputers are now being evaluated as potential vehicles for everything from education and health to micro-credit services, as well as as electronic notebooks for daily agricultural journals, census collection devices or even transport reservation systems.

Costing around US$250 apiece, the Linux-based units feature an oversize screen, run on three AAA batteries, and use removable smart-card interfaces to deliver a range of applications in several Indian languages. Low power requirements, pen-based input, direct multilingual text-to-speech capabilities and the ability link to other devices like portable ultrasound monitors has seen the system already attract much interest from a number of development-focused organisations, including UNESCO and WorldSpace.
Continued on next page>>  | 1 | 2 | 3



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