ReadWriteWeb has been doing a series on social media in Africa. It’s a pretty important topic and it offers a different and interesting way to look at technology that. Even the Economist’s recent feature on Africa’s growth prospects cited the expansion of the Internet as an important factor in the continent’s evolving social structure.

The second in the RWW series discusses the deployment of mobile communication technology in Africa. It’s had a huge impact and it’s been an enabling development for a host of other technologies. It’s a “leap frog” situation–much of Africa is going ahead and implementing things that the rest of the world is just adopting, skipping many of the “steps” that places like the U.S. went through to get to the present:

Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world. This is not without reason, there are some incredible hurdles to over come. Displacing the poor, complying with
local governments, paying bribes, and the risk of civil unrest. Thus, most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren’t terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world. There is also limited terrestrial fiber for connecting to the internet. Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite.

There are a lot of problems with this arrangement, notably the creation of bottlenecks that are difficult to go around. However, as mobile broadband improves, so will Internet access. RWW provides some numbers on the mobile trend thus far:

  • At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%
  • Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country.
  • Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
  • Increased competition as more operators come online in each country (11 in Nigeria, 4 in Kenya and SA, 3 in Egypt and Morocco)
  • Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region.
  • The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers.
  • In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

That’s some serious progress. And it has some serious consequences. Increased access to communication makes possible a more integrated society–one where information and ideas travel much more quickly over a much smoother social terrain. That’s why the Economist’s hesitantly hopeful piece on Africa cites the Internet.

One of the most important consequences of both the Internet and just ordinary mobile phones is improving market efficiency. Information and communication have been so available for so long in much of the developed world that it’s easy to forget just how important they are for commerce. I’m not referring to those industries themselves, or even application in what is normally meant by “business”, but rather the extremely fundamental role information plays in the functioning of even the most basic market arrangements. Mark Pesce, in an excellent post that discusses this in a much broader context, puts it quite well:

Using wireless communications, the fishermen and fish sellers created their own market, practicing the time-honored principles of supply & demand – just like any electronic bourse in the industrialized world.  But this developed on its own, by itself.  It simply emerged, naturally, through the interaction of people and mobiles.

This was not predicted.  Nor was it predicted that farmers in Kenya would use mobiles to phone ahead to the various village and regional markets to learn the going prices for their maize and sorghum, so they too could make markets and maximize their profits.  Or that the spice traders of India and Arabia would use SMS to create far-flung auction networks, their own emergent eBay.  Yet all of these – and much, much more – are now happening.  When you add mobile communications to any culture, a now-recognizable pattern comes into play: some person, through their interaction with the handset, improves their economic fitness; this behavior is then widely copied through the
culture.

Certainly, mobile phones are serving a different function in the developing world than they are in wealthier countries. Or rather, their primary consequence is of much greater significance. Or, as Pesce puts it “Pervasive wireless communication is of far, far more value to the poor than the rich.”

This is a profound insight and potentially one that can be generalized a bit. New information and communication technologies, once they become widely available and affordable, are more valuable to the developing world than to the developed world. The industrialized West already has, for quite some time now, markets that function well (or at least, until they start functioning too well…). Other parts of the world that don’t may be able to catch-up much, much faster as a result of newly available technology. It might even mean that organizations in developing nations might do better at taking advantage of new technology because they are not as constrained by legacy practices.

That is, of course, still a rather optimistic hope. Nevertheless, it’s useful to think about the possibilities of technology from perspectives like these, if for no other reason than to be reminded that there is more to them than the latest industry fad.