rss feedMobile adoption rate in the developing world
Source: Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty
Mobile phones started the decade as an elite toy and ended as something owned by everyone from taxi drivers in Bangladesh to fishermen in Ghana. In 1999, around 1 billion people worldwide had telephone subscriptions. Now that number is more like 4 billion.
According to the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union, in 2000 people in developing countries had one-quarter of the world’s mobile phones. But in 2009, people in developing countries held three-quarters of the world’s estimated 4 billion handsets.
Where philanthropy failed, the market succeeded. With Western mobile markets saturated, telecoms looked to the developing world. As economist Jeffrey Sachs has said, “The digital divide is ending not through a burst of civic responsibility, but mainly through market forces.”
And with those phone towers came benefits. A 2005 study by Leonard Waverman from the London Business School showed that a 10 percent rise in mobile-phone penetration in developing countries could raise GDP by 0.6 percentage points.
2G mobile phones have already made crucial differences for people living in isolated societies: fishermen receiving weather updates by SMS, farmers checking prices before taking their goods to market, and so on.
In Kenya, M-PESA, a phone-based banking service, now has over 5 million subscribers, mostly people who have never had bank accounts before.
