Decentralizing the Mobile Phone: A Second ICT4D Revolution?

If we imagine Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in a developing nation in 1998 and awakening today, it’s likely that he’d be fascinated with and surprised by mobile phones. When Rip went to sleep, only a few hundred million people had access to mobile phones, and most of them lived in wealthy nations. A decade later, the ITU (Touré, 2008) sees 4.1 billion mobile phone accounts, with two-thirds of them in the developing world. The changes they’ve helped bring about are subtle and omnipresent—mobile phone numbers painted above shop doors allow merchants to untether from their stalls; ads for carpenters scrawled on road signs turn a craftsman with a phone into an independent, mobile business; and money transferred securely from the city to the village pays a child’s school fees. Mobile phones are also emerging as powerful tools for political change—the People Power II movement that unseated President Estrada in the Philippines was coordinated primarily via mobile phones. Development researchers are starting to back compelling anecdotes of the mobile phones’ impact on development with estimates of the economic impact of widespread voice and data communication. Jensen (2007) was able to document a small, but signiacant, increase in ashermen’s incomes after mobile phone service came to communities in Kerala, India, as well as positive health and educational impacts and less waste of resources. Waverman (2005) of the London Business School sees a strong correlation between mobile phone penetration and economic growth, suggesting that a developing nation with 20% teledensity would see an annual GDP per capita growth rate 0.6% higher than a comparable nation with 10% teledensity. The rise of the mobile phone has challenged the predictions that many information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) specialists offered about information in the developing world. Instead of embracing community solutions that offered shared access to information, many poor people have been willing to pay large sums (as Song [2009] and others have documented, sometimes more than 50% of their disposable income) for personal access to communication tools. Presented with a model that extends connectivity into many poor communities without government subsidy, often turning a proat (and thus being sustainable), the development community is rightly looking for ways to build tools that leverage these platforms to promote economic and community development. The rise of mobile telephony in the developing world is the most believable sort of revolution: one that pays for itself. Previous attempts to put communication tools in the hands of the poor, through community radio stations and subsidized telecenters, required large, ongoing investments by government or aid agencies simply to maintain operation.