Playing the SIM card

Mobiles in developing countries: bringers of new opportunities, or harbingers of a consumer society? Vodafone’s new research project hopes to come up with some answers. Hannah Bullock reports.

You might think getting the weather forecast sent to your mobile is yet another of those digital fripperies. But, for some, it’s not just a matter of whether to take an umbrella. For fishermen in Tanzania, getting the latest weather, fishing and market updates on their phones can make the difference between a hard day’s work for nothing and a rich catch.

Vodafone is keen to understand more about the effects of this powerful technology on our societies and economies. Which is why it has embarked on its SIM project. That’s ‘Socio-economic Impact of Mobile’, of course. The project involves researchers’ ‘before and after’ studies in a range of countries where Vodafone operates, covering groups as diverse as farmers in Kenya and homeless people in London.

These will be set against a range of social and economic data, in an effort to gauge the true effects of the mobile explosion. If you thought mobiles had altered the face of life here, the impact is even more dramatic in the developing world, where the number of mobiles has been growing twice as fast. In many countries in Africa, where much of SIM’s Southern fieldwork is taking place, mobiles far outnumber fixed lines.

Take Grace Maingi as an example - a Kenyan farmer whose nearest phone box is a morning’s bus ride away. Her mobile saves her sacrificing a day’s farmwork, and the risk of finding the phone booth out of order. Among its uses: finding out, via text, the day’s going price for cabbages or coffee in the region’s markets to calculate whether it’s worth paying the bus fare and lugging all those sacks to market.

There are around 2,000 farmers using this service from Safaricom, one of Vodafone’s associate companies. That’s a clear good news story. But Vodafone is interested in gathering the wider picture - warts and all - of mobile impacts. And it freely admits it’s not for purely philanthropic reasons. It’s also about reputation - of the company and the technology.

And it makes good business sense to understand the context in which you’re operating. The company hopes the study will reveal whether more mobiles really do mean more jobs, by investigating correlations between mobile penetration and employment rates. SIM will also be looking at relationships between mobiles, GDP and foreign direct investment.

The research should shed light on what works best in each country and how innovative distribution and pricing models can increase access to mobiles. Innovative doesn’t have to mean complicated, either. Simply reducing the minimum cost of a Safaricom top-up voucher from the equivalent of two beers to one increased their sales significantly - there were plenty more customers with a drink in one hand and a fully credited phone in the other.

The study is not just about measuring the benefits, though, admits Bruce Layzell, Vodafone’s corporate responsibility manager: “We want to measure the impacts, whether good or bad.” As in the developed world, mobiles may bring less positive things, like the invasion of personal space and the rise of mobile crime.

He’s aware, too, that the cost of mobile calls could divert people’s income away from more urgent needs, such as food. Perhaps we’re giving people ‘things’ they don’t need. But there’s nothing inessential about communication or huge gains in efficiency. Ask any Kenyan farmer.

Hannah Bullock is editorial assistant and researcher at Green Futures.

10 November 2004

Hannah Bullock