The charging challenge and the entrepreneur

In “Mobile Telephony: Leveraging Strengths and Opportunities for Socio-Economic Transformation in Nigeria” (a book which I blogged about last year), Christiana Charles-Iyoha sheds some fascinating light on the barriers to mobile ownership among Nigerian market traders. Erratic power supply, and difficulty charging, came top with a staggering 87%.

Users in many African countries – and not just those in rural areas – face similar problems. In Uganda, this “charging challenge” is being met head-on by a growing band of local entrepreneurs and business people.

Rural users are able to charge their phones from a car battery (top image), charged up by a local entrepreneur when power is available, or charged in a nearby town with better supply and transported back. In urban areas, where grid power is generally more reliable, kiosks (bottom image) dotted around local markets provide charging services to passing customers.

The spread of mobile technology in developing countries has opened up income-generating opportunities on a massive scale. But what is most interesting is how local entrepreneurs have taken advantage of this growth using their own skills and ingenuity. According to the Uganda Communications Commission, the telecoms sector there provides direct employment to a little over 6,000 people. Indirect employment – which includes mobile charging entrepreneurs, airtime vendors, accessories sales-people and mobile repair shops – comes to a staggering 350,000.

Classic grassroots, bottom-up business development, and not a hand-out in sight.

(These, and other images of mobiles in use in developing countries, can be found in the Mobile Gallery. For further examples of African ingenuity at work, visit AfriGadget.com).

Stranger in their midst

From a handwritten note – quite literally on the back of an envelope – from my university anthropology days. It reads:

The reader must imagine to himself the privilege of making contact with primitive societies which were more or less intact and had never been studied seriously. Just how recently – as luck would have it – the whites had set out to destroy them will be clear from the following story.

The Californian tribes had still been quite wild at the time of their extermination, and it happened that one Indian escaped, as if by a miracle, from the holocaust. For years he lived unknown and unobserved only a dozen miles from the great centres of population, and kept himself alive with his bow and sharp-pointed arrows whose stone heads he carved himself.

Gradually there was less and less for him to shoot, and finally he was found, naked and starving on the outskirts of a city suburb. He ended his days in peace as a college porter at the University of California.

I can see why I wrote it down, why I wanted to keep a record of it. It quite wonderfully catches the whole essence of disappearing peoples and cultures, and does so beautifully and concisely. I don’t know who the tribe were, or who the porter was. Maybe I’d prefer to keep it that way.