Mobile Phones in Mozambique

ACCORDING TO THE United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 2006), Mozambique is one of the ten least developed countries of the world. Yet, cellular phones have washed over the country as a tsunami. About 17 per cent of its 20.5 million inhabitants have now access to this technology (Brouwer and Brito 2008; National Bureau of Statistics 2008). The speed with which mobile phones has been adopted—from a mere 7500 in 1997 to about 3.5 million clients in 2007—points at the extraordinary capacity of these companies to penetrate deeply in a country that is characterised by a weak physical and commercial infrastructure. Mozambique is not the only poor nation where mobile phones apparently close the digital divide. The number of users has grown worldwide but the least developed countries show the highest growth rates (Scott et al. 2004). The rapid growth of the number of users has spurred a fl ow of