mobile phones in Kenya

12Jun07

Last week’s The Economist had an excellent article offering a bird’s-eye view of current development trends in Kenya. Among these trends, I wanted to emphasize two of them here.

First, the growing pervasiveness of mobile phones in Kenya, how this is helping the efficiency of local farmers, and how this is occurring largely despite of, rather than supported by, government-sponsored communication infrastructure:

In 2000 some 300,000 people used mobile phones; now, in a country of 35m-plus, nearly 9m do. As a result, the lives of millions, especially the poor rural majority, have been sharply improved, because they can get round many of the obstacles posed by the decrepitude of the state-run infrastructure: of the 300,000-odd land-lines in the country, probably two-thirds are usually on the blink.

[. . .]

Poor Kenyan peasants wondering whether it is worth spending a day taking a bus to market to sell a sack of onions can find out the prices with just one call. Anyone with cash to transfer across the country can do so by text message [. . .]

Second, the rapid urbanization in Kenya, especially the emergence of large slums around Nairobi:

Equally striking is the new urban sprawl—and the spread of slums. Nairobi is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities: at independence it embraced a little over 500,000 people; now it may have more than 6m, three-quarters of whom are reckoned to be squashed into about 2% of its metropolitan area.

Kenya serves as an interesting test case to observe the interplay between mobile communications and urbanizing dynamics, currently showing that growing use of ICTs does not necessarily lead to the thinning of highly compact cities.

Finally, the BBC’s Paul Mason did an excellent two-part article and video report on the growing use of mobile phones in Kenya which I highly recommend reading/watching.

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Links:

Kenya: Going up or down, The Economist
From Matatu to the Masai via mobile, BBC [Part 1], [Part 2], [Video]

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