Cellular Phones Answer Rural Areas’ Needs

For the first 40 years of her life, Nurjahan never had a chance to reach out and touch someone. Indeed, the sari-draped goatherd and grocer confessed recently that she had never even seen a telephone.

That’s not unusual in Bangladesh. Until last summer, the poverty-racked country of 120 million--nearly half the U.S. population squeezed into an area the size of Wisconsin--had only about 400,000 phones, or one for every 300 people.

Then, overnight, Nurjahan--who, like many Bangladeshi women, has no last name--literally became the telephone system in her little village. With a single cellular phone, she connected 8,000 peasant farmers and their families with the outside world, transforming a centuries-old lifestyle. For a small fee, villagers may use the cell phone at her food stall in the town market; for slightly more, she will bring the phone to them and let them use it in their mud-brick huts.

The scheme--to create a rural communications network by equipping one woman in each village with a cell phone--is the most imaginative of several new efforts to address one of the world’s most basic technology gaps. As President Clinton told the U.N. General Assembly in September: “More than half the world’s people are two days’ walk from a telephone.”

The issue is not just inconvenience. Too many people are “literally disconnected from the global economy,” Clinton warned, and their lack of access is producing “growing disparities between haves and have-nots.”

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At least 80% of the world lacks the most basic telecommunications, according to Human Rights Watch. Tiny Hong Kong has more telephones--cellular and land-line--than all of sub-Saharan Africa, experts estimate. So does New York City.

“Almost half the world has never made a call,” said James P. Bond, director of the World Bank’s telecommunications department. Billions have remained beyond reach because cumbersome land-line technology and high costs limited linkups to capitals and major cities.

But now the plummeting price and growing wizardry of microchips are beginning to convert the cell phone into more than a rich person’s toy. The telephone is moving into the boonies.

“We’re moving into a distance-less world,” said Mohammed Yunus, founder of Bangladesh’s innovative Grameen Bank, which is sponsoring the spread of cell phones to villages and plans to hook up 40,000 of the country’s 68,000 villages over the next four years.

Globally, areas known in telecommunications lingo as “tele-deserts” are beginning to blossom. Bedouin nomads in the Middle East negotiate deals for their sheep and goats on cell phones. Australian aborigines use satellite videoconferencing to sell their artwork.

In the West African countries of Ivory Coast and Ghana, shared cell phones are enabling rural coffee and cocoa farmers to call produce markets in the cities and negotiate their own prices. Some farmers even sell their produce directly, eliminating the cut that middlemen once took from their meager revenues.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re living well, but it’s the biggest single economic leap in rural farming ever,” Bond said.

In South Africa, “calling cabins”--banks of cell phones set up in portable shipping containers--are connecting long-neglected black enclaves to the cities. That has allowed small businesses to flourish in some underdeveloped areas and means that the rural poor no longer have to move to cities to find jobs.

Similarly, Indonesia now has thousands of neighborhood service outlets (called wartels) offering cell phones as their chief attraction, often with copiers, fax machines and soft drink machines as well. Comparable facilities have emerged in Tunisia.

“The two scarcest commodities in rural areas are cheap energy and information--for business, health, education and other fundamentals,” Bond said. “The cell phone is eliminating one of the two biggest limitations on human development.”

The potential is already evident in Bangladesh. “We’re no longer isolated. We’re becoming part of the country,” Nurjahan said as she fiddled with her small black phone, wrapped in plastic to protect it against Bangladesh’s notorious rains and humidity.

“So far, most people use the phone for business, to find out prices or make deals in the cities. The phone offers us lots of opportunities.”

And not only within Bangladesh. After the first two weeks, Baura villagers had already used Nurjahan’s phone to call business associates and relatives in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

“Telephones are a tool to take this country from subsistence to development,” Shahed Latif, managing director of Grameen Telecom, the nonprofit cell phone operation spawned by Grameen Bank, said in his Dhaka office.

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The overall spread of the telephone is influencing more than national economies. Politically, the rapid expansion of cellular and land-line phone service is undermining the world’s last holdouts against reform and liberalization.

“Democracy has always been built on information. In the 17th century, what created the kind of grass-roots democracy in Britain after Cromwell left and William of Orange came in was access to information through broad sheets,” Bond said.

“In the 20th century, that role is played by telephone technology. Most other flows of information can be controlled, but not the telephone. Its recent rapid expansion is a key reason for the explosion of political change.”

In China, the world’s largest state-controlled society, the number of land-line phones has increased sixfold since 1990. About 8% of subscribers have cell phones or pagers, according to the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva.

With about 100 million phone lines, China is now second only to the United States, which has 160 million. Just a dozen years ago, the major city of Nanjing had only four private lines not used for business or government.

Many of the 30 million Chinese with pagers have developed an independent communication network. Certain numbers have come to signify words. Political messages are passed underground from pager to pager.

“The genie is out of the bottle in China,” Bond said. “It’s one of the main reasons democratic change is inevitable.”

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In Iran, where service has more than doubled since 1990, the telephone was pivotal in the stunning upset victory in May of moderate President Mohammed Khatami over a hard-liner staunchly supported by the political and media establishment.

Enthusiasm generated by word of mouth during the 12-day campaign brought millions of Iranians to the polls who had never voted before--particularly women and young people who rely heavily on telephones because of limited public forums for communication.

The scramble to install or improve land-line and cellular telephone systems in the developing world has not, however, always proved successful.

In Mozambique, a European relief group recently installed satellite phone stations to connect 12 rural areas, particularly in the war-torn province of Zambezia, to the outside world. The lines are the best in the country.

But while Mozambicans in those areas can call abroad or to any of the satellite stations, they can’t reach the capital or any other area of the country not serviced by the up-to-date technology. When Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, the waiting list for a phone was nine years long. In most parts of the country, it still is.

In Brazil, cell phones are so popular that one in 10 phone customers now has one--and thousands of others use fakes to pretend they do. Because suppliers have been unable to keep up with demand, Brazilians have been known to walk down streets or ride in cars chatting into unconnected plastic imitations.

Egypt has increased phone lines sevenfold in 15 years as part of a sweeping modernization program. No longer is service so bad that companies employ workers whose only job is to hold phones until they get a dial tone. No longer do those who need to make international calls fly to Athens.

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Yet there still are only five telephones for every 100 Egyptians, according to the International Telecommunications Union’s annual survey. The wait is still five years.

Africa’s two neighboring Congos boast the world’s two closest capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, within sight of each other across the Congo River. But almost four decades after independence, calls between the two are still routed through the colonial powers--from Kinshasa thousands of miles to Brussels, from there to Paris and then thousands of miles back to Brazzaville.

On Kazakhstan’s common party lines, computer users with modems are bounced off the Internet whenever a neighbor picks up the phone. But the Internet service considers the line still in use and charges until the last user finally hangs up.

Many countries have made progress by privatizing their telephone service, or at least adopting some of the techniques of private owners.

Until 1990, the waiting list for a land-line phone from Argentina’s state monopoly was 15 years long. Today, two private companies have reduced it to 48 hours.

Russia’s wait is more than 10 years. But for up to $450, the regional government of Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow, sells certificates that guarantee buyers a phone line within six months--or the phone company will pay 1% back for every day it is late.

The most significant changes, however, stem from the spread of satellite and cellular phone technology. In Africa, where several countries still have less than one conventional phone per 1,000 people, some two dozen countries have introduced cellular systems.

Worldwide, mobile phones accounted for 4% of telephone service in 1990. By 2000, they could capture 21% of the market, according to IDATE, a French telecommunications coalition. A growing share of the market will be in the countryside, where rural hookups are already proving they can be profitable.

Bangladesh’s program, conceived by U.S.-educated Iqbal Quadir, centers on women such as Nurjahan, an abandoned wife who has long worked to provide for two sons. Each woman is granted a $430 loan to set up business with a single mobile phone.

Costs include repayment of the bank loan--$3.50 a week--and operating expenses of up to 60% of usage charges. The neat, handwritten columns in Nurjahan’s ledger show that she grossed $62 in her first two weeks.

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Nationwide, each phone operator stands to net an average of $2 a day--more than $700 a year--in a country with an average annual per-capita income of about $250, according to Tormod Hermansen, chief executive of Telenor, the Norwegian state-owned phone company that provides the cellular technology used in Bangladesh.

Telenor, one of Europe’s most successful phone companies, owns a 51% stake in Grameen Phones, a for-profit company that won a government license last year to provide cellular services to Bangladesh’s cities. Grameen Phones is the parent of Grameen Telecom, the not-for-profit enterprise that runs the rural cell phone operation.

“In only a few years, virtually everyone in Bangladesh will have access to a phone. Not their own, but one just a few minutes away,” Quadir said. His New York-based Gonophone, which in Bengali means “phones for the people,” has a 4.5% stake in Grameen Telecom.

“If that can be achieved in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries, then the rest of the world should be able to gain access to basic information technology within a decade,” Quadir said. “And that will help eliminate one of the greatest physical barriers for the poor.”

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Call Waiting

The scramble to install or improve telephone systems in developing countries has not always been successful. Here are countries where waiting lists for telephone service is more than 10 years.

Albania

Armenia

Azerbaijan

Bangladesh

Cambodia

Cameroon

Eritrea

Ethiopia

Gambia

Georgia

Guinea

Honduras

Kyrgyzstan

Madagascar

Malawi

Moldova

Mongolia

Nepal

Russia

Sao Tome & Principe

Saudi Arabia

Sri Lanka

Sudan

Syria

Tajikistan

Tanzania

Ukraine

Zambia

Zimbabwe

Where the Phones Are--and Aren’t

Telephone lines per 1,000 people:

The Most Lines:

Sweden 683

United States 602

Denmark 600

Switzerland 597

Canada 590

Iceland 557

Luxembourg 553

Finland 551

Norway 550

France 547

Hong Kong 540

Japan 480

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The Fewest Lines:

Burkina Faso 3

Burundi 3

Ethiopia 3

Ghana 3

Madagascar 3

Malawi 3

Mozambique 3

Myanmar 3

Nigeria 3

Sierra Leone 3

Tanzania 3

Bangladesh 2

Central African Republic 2

Mali 2

Rwanda 2

Sudan 2

Uganda 2

Cambodia 1

Chad 1

Niger 1

Zaire 1

Where Cellular Is Booming

Cellular telephone subscribers per 1,000 people:

Sweden 158

Norway 135

Finland 128

Denmark 97

United States 91

Iceland 81

Source: World Telecommunication Development Report, 1996; United Nations Human Development Report, 1997