Luarnet

En It’s good to talk - even better to sell se apuntan a dos factores importantes para el desarrollo actual del contienente africano, uno interno y otro externo. El externo es China, con su insaciable necesidad de minerales. El interno es la revolución de los teléfonos móviles, que ha transformado la economía y la política del continente:

The internal driver is the mobile phone revolution that has transformed business and politics in Africa in the past ten years. In 2001, only 3 per cent of Africans had telephones of any sort. Now there are 50 million mobile-phone users, with numbers growing by 35 per cent a year. The phone companies completely misjudged the market - they thought that only the super-rich would buy mobiles. But it turned out that the people who really needed them were small self-employed businessmen, market women, taxi drivers and the casual workers who keep Africa going. In some areas, beer sales have plummeted as people have invested their meagre earnings in mobile phone cards instead. The pace of life has picked up hugely.

Politically, too, mobile phones are having an immense effect. People no longer have to walk miles to talk to a friend or colleague or to make a business deal (there was no public phone system in Africa before mobile phones and the postal service, where it existed, took days or weeks). The chat programmes on radio stations in most African countries are also enabling ordinary people to express their frustrations and to know that others share their anger about the failures and corruption of their governments. A better-informed population that can listen to its own voices will put governments under pressure. I would even suggest that the Rwandan genocide could not have happened if mobile phones had existed.

En otro artículo ya se comentaba que en África un móvil puede ser vital para sobrevivir.

(vía Smart Mobs)