August 25, 2005
Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
YANGUYE, South Africa - On this dry mountaintop, 36-year-old Bekowe
Skhakhane does even the simplest tasks the hard way.
Fetching water from the river takes four hours a day. To cook, she
gathers sticks and musters a fire. Light comes from candles.
But when Ms. Skhakhane wants to talk to her husband, who works in a
steel factory 250 miles away in Johannesburg, she does what many in
more developed regions do: she takes out her mobile phone.
People like Ms. Skhakhane have made Africa the world's fastest-
growing cellphone market. From 1999 through 2004, the number of
mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5
million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the
continent's richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth.
Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of
just 34 percent in that period.
"It is a necessity," said Ms. Skhakhane, pausing from washing laundry
in a plastic bucket on the dirt ground to fish her blue Nokia out of
the pocket of her flowered apron. "Buying air time is part of my
regular grocery list."
She spends the equivalent of $1.90 a month for five minutes of
telephone time.
Africa's cellphone boom has taken the industry by surprise. Africans
have never been rabid telephone users; even Mongolians have twice as
many land lines per person. And with most Africans living on $2 a day
or less, they were supposed to be too poor to justify corporate
investments in cellular networks far outside the more prosperous
cities and towns.
But when African nations began to privatize their telephone
monopolies in the mid-1990's, and fiercely competitive operators
began to sell air time in smaller, cheaper units, cellphone use
exploded.
Used handsets are available for $50 or less in South Africa, an
amount even Ms. Skhakhane's husband was able to finance with the
little he saves from his factory job.
It turned out that Africans had never been big phone users because
nobody had given them the chance.
One in 11 Africans is now a mobile subscriber.
Demand for air time was so strong in Nigeria that from late 2002 to
early 2003 operators there were forced to suspend the sale of
subscriber identity module cards, or SIM cards, which activate
handsets, while they strengthened their networks.
Villagers in the two jungle provinces of Congo are so eager for
service that they have built 50-foot-high treehouses to catch signals
from distant cellphone towers.
"One man uses it as a public pay phone," said Gilbert Nkuli, deputy
managing director of Congo operations for Vodacom Group, one of
Africa's biggest mobile operators. Those who want to climb to his
platform and use his phone pay him for the privilege.
On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by
beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to
television in the 1940's in the United States.
Africa has an average of just one land line for every 33 people, but
cellphones are enabling millions of people to skip a technological
generation and bound straight from letter-writing to instant messaging.
Although only about 60 percent of Africans are within reach of a
signal, the lowest level of penetration in the world, the technology
is for many a social and economic godsend.
One pilot program allows about 100 farmers in South Africa's
northeast to learn the prevailing prices for produce in major
markets, crucial information in negotiations with middlemen.
Health-care workers in the rural southeast summon ambulances to
distant clinics via cellphone.
One woman living on the Congo River, unable even to write her last
name, tells customers to call her cellphone if they want to buy the
fresh fish she sells.
"She doesn't have electricity, she can't put the fish in the
freezer," said Mr. Nkuli of Vodacom. "So she keeps them in the
river," tethered live on a string, until a call comes in. Then she
retrieves them and readies them for sale.
William Pedro, 51, who deals in farm and garden plants, said he tried
for eight years to lure customers to his nursery in a ragtag township
near George, a resort town on South Africa's southern coast. Only
when he got a cellphone two years ago, he said, did his business take
off.
"White people are afraid to come here to my place in the township to
buy plants," Mr. Pedro, who is of mixed race, said as he stood
outside his makeshift greenhouses. "So now they can phone me for
orders and I can deliver them the same day."
Hamadoun Touré, development director for the International
Telecommunication Union, said the economic blessings of cellphones
were magnified in the developing world.
"What is the alternative?" asked Mr. Touré, whose agency was founded
in the days of the telegraph and is now part of the United Nations.
"Somebody may have to leave work, travel for days, spending much more
money" just to pass on a message.
Initially, he said, mobile operators based their predictions of
cellphone use on the typical land-line user, someone with a bank
account, a job and a fixed address.
"The woman selling vegetables in the market, with the baby and the
umbrella, they weren't in the profile of the normal subscriber," Mr.
Touré said. "But they use them."
Mobile operators cannot put up towers fast enough, not just in
established markets like South Africa, which is already home to about
one in four African mobile subscribers, but also in nations that
barely have electricity, much less existing cellular networks ready
for expansion.
Five years ago, for example, sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South
Africa) accounted for one of every five mobile subscribers on the
continent. That ratio has now doubled.
Executives of the MTN Group, another major African mobile operator,
say the company's Nigerian network cost two and a half times as much
as its South African network because of lack of infrastructure. But
demand is so intense that MTN is adding hundreds of new base stations.
Congo was in the midst of a civil war when Alieu Conteh, a
telecommunications entrepreneur, began building a cellular network
there in the 1990's. No foreign manufacturer would ship a cellphone
tower to the airport with rebels nearby, so Mr. Conteh hired local
men to collect scrap and weld a tower together.
Now Vodacom, which formed a joint venture with him in 2001, is
grappling with other problems. Its trucks get stuck in the mud. A
crane is out of the question; it takes 15 to 20 men to haul each
satellite dish into place with ropes. Base stations must be powered
by generators. Each morning, executives send instant messages to
employees containing the latest rate for the plunging local currency.
Despite all that, Vodacom Congo has 1.1 million subscribers and is
adding more than 1,000 daily.
There are no current plans to extend land-line service to the
surrounding steep mountains where Ms. Skhakhane lives, government
officials here say. But that may not matter: six months ago, Vodacom
erected a cellular tower whose signal can be picked up in the hills.
Now it logs 10,000 calls a day.
Before the tower went up, Ms. Skhakhane communicated with her husband
by letter. She waited weeks for a response. The nearest public
telephone, outside a little shop more than 10 miles away, has been
broken since March.
Ms. Skhakhane said she considered the $1.90 a month for a phone card
to be money well spent. "I don't use the phone very often," she said,
"but whenever there is something I really need to discuss, I do."
One problem remains even in the age of cutting-edge cellular
technology: How does an African family in a hut lighted by candles
charge a mobile phone? A bicycle-driven charger is said to be on the
horizon. But that would require a bicycle, a rare possession in much
of rural Africa.
In Yanguye, as in other regions, the solution is often a car battery
owned by someone who does not have a prayer of acquiring a car.
Ntombenhle Nsele keeps one in her home a few miles down the road from
Ms. Skhakhane's. She takes it by bus 20 miles to the nearest town to
recharge it in a gas station.
For 80 cents each, Ms. Nsele, 25, lets neighbors charge their mobiles
from the battery. She gets at least five customers a week.
"Oooh, a lot of people," she said, smiling. "Too many."
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