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Cellphones Leapfrog Poor Infrastructure in Mali
Hugh Pickens writes "CBC News has up an article by Peace Corps volunteer Heidi Vogt, a woman who served in the small village of Gono in Mali five years ago and remembers letters dictated and hand-carried by donkey cart or bicycle to the next town. Vogt recently returned to see the changes that cellphone communications have made in a village that still doesn't have electricity or decent drinking water. 'Gono's elders say the phones can keep them in touch with their village diaspora,' writes Vogt. 'Villagers depend on far-off relatives to send money in time of crisis — if someone is sick, if a house has caught fire, if there's been too little or too much rain and the harvest is poor. There's a new sense of connection to a larger world. In a village where most people can't read or write, they can now communicate directly with far-off relatives.'"
Doutenze (at 25,000 people) ranks in Mali's top 20 cities
Mali is one of the 3rd poorest country in the world according to the UN*
The median age is 16
Here are the coverage maps for Mali:
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=ml&net=ik
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=ml&net=mt
Notice how little of the country is covered? This "news" is just a human interest story, a fluff piece designed to give you the warm fuzzies. That small village is not representative of Mali as a whole and anyone trying to extrapolate anything from such an example is making a mistake.
*2006 Human Development Index
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural part of Tanzania from 1999-2002 and I went back to visit this last summer. When I arrived in 1999 there was one cell network in the country. It was in the (then) capital and most populous city of 2 million people, it had a capacity of 50,000 and was maxed out. A couple of competing companies starting setting up towers and by the time I left they had covered the major cities and arteries of the entire country. When I went back this last July the companies had moved out into the villages and most people in the country had local cell coverage. The area where I had lived was very hilly and somewhat remote so I thought that they would never get coverage out there but they had it.
You don't buy a plan like in the US, you buy a phone ($30 for a cheap model) and then you buy minutes (leading to some of the shortest phone conversations I have ever heard). People who live in areas without electricity find ways to charge them. Someone might buy a generator and set up a side business charging phones. Some people have to bike hours to the nearest town with electricity.
The difference in how people communicate was astounding. Kids away studying could keep in contact with their families back in the villages. Kids who had met in school but lived in different places kept in touch (I reunited a number of my former students by passing cell phone numbers around). Farmers could keep in touch with people in the markets. It was an amazing change.
As much as I like to blame America for what's wrong in the world these days (And they are to blame 99 % of the time).
Where I'm from (Somalia), weapons are probably where you see the least American influence. The most common weapons you find are Chinese, Libyan, Russian made AK-47's. Although the M-16 was becoming popular when i was there last time. especially for it's light weight.
And similar to what the Original poster noted, our Telecommunication infrastructure is one of the top in East Africa, it is a True free market, absolutely no regulation, no taxes.
But aside from Telecom everything else in the whole, completely unstable, 17 year civil year, puppet interim governments (we have our version of Hamid Karzai).