Welcome to the new term, everyone! For those of you who weren’t reading last term, T Cubed is a column which started in September where I spend time (sometimes far too long) ranting about or dissecting new gadgets or technologies that look interesting or that seem significant enough to relay to the student body. This week’s article is being written while I’m attending the Engineers Without Borders National Conference 2012, so with all the sessions I’ve been attending and participating in, this week’s topic has more of a personal, societal and global focus than my typical columns.
An interesting concept that I’ve heard many times, not just at the conference but from learning about African development in general, is the incredible rise in mobile phone penetration across the continent. By the end of 2011, Africa reached 649 million mobile subscribers, making it the second-largest continent by subscriptions next to Asia. The continent shows no signs of slowing down either, with the total number of subscribers in Africa expected to rise to 735 million by the end of 2012. A primary component which has led to this dramatic rise in subscriptions is the increased competition between companies like MTN, Glo Mobile and Virgin Mobile in the market, who drive down their prices to stay competitive.
The primary difference between North American and African mobile phone plans is that while a majority of North Americans subscribe to postpaid plans (where you are billed at the end of the month an often flat, repeating fee), Africans overwhelmingly subscribe using prepaid plans, with 96% of the mobile subscribers opting for prepaid cards. This trend towards prepaid plans is popular in most regions except North America, where we are one of the only areas to have a majority of postpaid subscriptions. The boom in prepaid plans that’s occurring in other countries, due to their typically cheaper and more manageable payment structure, could foreshadow a shift in plans that North Americans subscribe to, and we could see such a change within a decade or two.
The coolest thing that African mobile phone users do differently from their North American counterparts is their innovative methods of mobile banking. A service called M-Pesa in Kenya lets users store money on their phones and transfer their money via text to friends or companies, who can pick it up as cash at the nearest M-Pesa office. Other established banks, who initially showed resistance to this form of banking, are now preparing to embrace it. Services in other African countries such as Uganda are popping up with similar aims that make it easier for citizens to make transactions without opening a formal bank account. While this is hardly unique to African nations, the situation in these countries has brought this form of money management into the forefront as a quick, simple and cheap method.
Extended from the wide usage of phones in these nations, African presence online is much stronger than it has been ever before. One of the most significant projects launched from this region was a Kenyan project called Ushahidi, a platform that collects and plots reports on a map that can be sent in from texts, emails or social networking platforms. Initially designed to help Kenyans organize themselves after post-election violence in late 2007, the platform has become used to map all sorts of crises and disasters around the world, including the Japanese earthquake in Fukushima last year or the many protests and revolutionary events taking place in the Arabian countries over the last year. Ushahidi comes at a time when the Internet in Africa is also starting to transition from a luxury resource to a more common, yet still expensive, resource. Internet cost has gone from $4,000 to $200 per month for 1 Mbps speeds over the last four years, according to data-centre operator Teraco.
The lowering of Internet prices, combined with a rise in users with data plans (which are also fairly cheap by Canadian standards), has brought Africans into a more connected world than they probably could have imagined ten or twenty years ago. The impact phones and other Internet-connected devices could have to simplify and improve the lives of the poor and the middle class in African countries is immense and still, in my opinion, largely untapped. If more are given the ability to use these devices and companies come up with more innovative services to make lives simpler in the same vein as the mobile banking systems in place, then technology could prove to be a primary pillar in the solution to the development of African nations.
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