The INFO Project Blog

“Can the cellphone end global poverty?” Sara Corbett’s article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine points to new ways Nokia and other mobile phone manufacturers are getting their product to remote rural areas, way off the land line grid.

At the moment, Africa makes up just 7.2% of the 2.7 billion mobile phone users worldwide. But the numbers are growing fast:  in 2006, 55.3 million more mobile phone subscribers were added, and already, 45% of African villages are covered.

To expand access, Corbett writes that Nokia asks its developers to think about how the other half lives:

How do you make a phone that can be repaired by a streetside repairman who may not have access to new parts? How do you build a phone that won’t die a quick death in a monsoon or by falling off the back of a motorbike on a dusty road?

Other manufacturers are, so to speak, dreaming of Africa (or at least, Africans’ growing buying power). Corbett writes that, since access to reliable electricity is a major barrier, Motorola now provides free solar-powered charging kiosks to female entrepreneurs in Uganda.

Nokia, the pioneering Finnish company that, according to Corbett, is designing phones to be sold as cheaply as $5, has also designed a seamless dust-free keyboard for rural users. In Ethiopia, they created Amharic language keypads to troubleshoot the text messaging quandary: 300 Ge’ez characters opposed to 26 Roman characters.

INFO is exploring ways to utilize growing mobile phone networks to disseminate evidence-based health information.

That’s why we are asking new users of our FP Success social networking Web site to give us their mobile number when they register (of course, this is optional). The plan is to use a small group of community members who have registered and are based in Ethiopia–where FP Success project leader Katie Richey is now residing–to send questions, vote in polls, and communicate in other ways over text message when not at their computers.

We’d love to hear what you think about mobile phones as a pathway to improve health programs. Would this work in your region?

Watch this space for further developments on mobile phone outreach!