Mobile phones — the cure for global poverty?

In last Sunday’s New York Times Mag­a­zine, Sara Cor­bett has a long arti­cle about the mobile phone’s grow­ing impor­tance in global and local eco­nom­ics. The arti­cle is also a great exam­ple of how qual­i­ta­tive research and ethnog­ra­phy can be used by larger cor­po­ra­tions. When I teach research meth­ods courses and super­vise pro­fes­sional papers, I often rec­om­mend that grad­u­ate stu­dents inves­ti­gate these methods.

The arti­cle fol­lows a Nokia researcher named Jan Chipchase as he col­lects field notes and pho­tographs from around the world. His research data is sent back to Nokia’s design­ers, so they can deter­mine how to add fea­tures that will stim­u­late mobile phone adop­tion in lesser devel­oped countries.

Can you see me now?

Some of these fea­tures have noth­ing to do with soft­ware or hard­ware. In rainy regions, a mobile phone might require a hook to keep it off the wet floor. Inex­pen­sive phones must be durable.

Cor­bett also dis­cusses some­thing I’ve seen more fre­quently over the years: mobile phone users who arrange their meet­ing place by phone in real time. Instead of meet­ing at a set hour in a spe­cific spot, an appoint­ment becomes a game of tag, as the two peo­ple give each other land­marks until they actu­ally see each other.

Mobile micro­fi­nance

There’s a long dis­cus­sion of how mobile phones might be used to help micro­fi­nance schemes become scal­able. Micro­fi­nance involves loans of rel­a­tively small amounts of money, usu­ally arranged by face-to-face meet­ings. Mobile phone appli­ca­tions such as text-messaging could be used to make the loan and repay­ment processes eas­ier and faster. Swift repay­ment is a key suc­cess fac­tor for these plans, and Voda­phone has been imple­ment­ing mobile bank­ing sys­tems that would work well with micro­fi­nance ventures.

Once con­cern that I have is the cost of these microloans. Eight days ear­lier, this New York Times arti­cle dis­cussed the back­lash against Mexico’s lead­ing micro­fi­nance firm, Com­par­ta­mos. Econ­o­mist Muham­mad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel peace Prize for propos­ing the microloan con­cept, wants non-profit groups to arrange microloans.

Com­par­ta­mos is a for-profit com­pany that is launch­ing an IPO, based upon the mas­sive inter­est rev­enues the com­pany has gen­er­ated. The IPO keeps microloan cus­tomers from par­tic­i­pat­ing in the group’s suc­cess. This Busi­ness Week arti­cle from Decem­ber 2007 has some more infor­ma­tion about the IPO.

Mobile tele­com firms are likely to use microloans as a way to sub­si­dize inex­pen­sive mobile hand­sets for their cus­tomers, which as only an indi­rect ben­e­fit to the micro­fi­nance community.

Phones or food?

Today’s New York Times pub­lished a long arti­cle about global hunger. There are some heart­break­ing sto­ries in this arti­cle, includ­ing the grow­ing mar­ket in Haiti for fla­vored dirt. One quote from the arti­cle really caught my attention:

Pres­i­dent René Pré­val of Haiti appeared to taunt the pop­u­lace as the cho­rus of com­plaints about la vie chère — the expen­sive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cell­phones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families.

Are the world’s poor being asked to choose between mobile phones and food? It seem far­fetched, but the surg­ing cost of basic sta­ples in some coun­tries has forced the question.

Tagged as: economy, haiti, hunger, Mexico, microfinance, microloan, mobile, Nokia, poverty, research