Briefing: Citizens and cell phones in Africa

This briefing explores some political implications of the current boom in information and communications technology (ICT) in sub-Saharan Africa. As a striking manifestation of globalization, perhaps half of Africa's one billion people are now signed up as subscribers to cellular telephone networks.1 Africans are enthusiastically adopting mobile phone technology, here called ‘cell’ phones. By foregoing landlines in favour of advanced telecom systems, their choices of technology are leapfrogging over other parts of the world. Evidence is mounting that this modern communications revolution is beginning to have promising economic consequences.2 In Uganda, for example, small farmers are able to check crop prices and order agricultural inputs by making phone calls or sending text messages over cellular networks. In certain pilot projects they are able to obtain customized extension advice and even gain access to microfinance loans.3 Inevitably, social and cultural changes follow, not all of them positive. It seems likely, for instance, that an opportunity gap might emerge between those who possess cell phones and those who do not.4 Household expenditures on communications might also crowd out other, more urgent social needs.5 Moreover, as smart phones with Internet capability catch on in places like South Africa and Kenya, users are exposed to a diverse array of cosmopolitan fashions and ideas, whose cumulative effect is to challenge traditional social values, sometimes provoking a backlash. In Ethiopia, for example, cell-phone communications have stimulated monitoring and controlling behaviours on the part of husbands and wives, straining marital relations.6