MobileActive.org

Mobile phones are revolutionising the lives of millions of people in East Africa and will continue to be the primary means for the great majority to access voice, data and Internet services. But mobile consumers in East Africa are taxed at some of the highest levels world-wide. In addition to VAT, an excise duty, or luxury tax, is levied on mobile services.

Recognizing that this tax hits the poor hardest, the GSM Association, the global trade association representing the interests of over 850 GSM mobile phone operators and over 180 manufacturers and suppliers worldwide, in collaboration with GSM Africa, commissioned Deloitte to analyze the effect that lowering excise duties would have on the industry and total government receipts.

The findings are very encouraging. By lowering the excise duty on mobile services, governments can expect higher level of tax and extend the essential mobile franchise to poorer sections of society. Today mobile phones are a basic need and not a luxury. All stakeholders will benefit if mobile services are taxed accordingly. As the governments in East Africa go into their budgeting rounds, we call for an urgent review of mobile taxation policies. Restructuring mobile taxes can be a win win-win solution for government, business and consumers.

While the role of the informal sector in promoting economic growth in Africa is increasingly acknowledged, access to capital remains one of the biggest obstacles hindering the development and growth of the sector (Stork & Esselaar, 2006). Africa is struggling with access to formal financial services for its citizens and the informal sector. In addition to the underlying structural limitations of poverty; risk-averse bankers, unsuitable financial products and high bank charges have also been blamed for this state of affairs.

Poor people with irregular income and informal businesses often have no choice but to make use of informal financial services, which are many times more expensive than formal ones. Formal financial services are usually only extended to those with regular income or collateral (Firpo, 2008). Informal businesses also often lack the required accounting skills and systems to generate necessary data to convince a bank to extend loans to them.

Other obstacles include the bureaucratic and educational bottlenecks that prevent many Africans from having identity documents. This fosters corruption around documents such as birth certificates, IDs and passports, increasing the risk for banks in dealing with new customers.

A critical issue to overcome is that of asymmetrical information. Someone without a bank account approaching a bank for a loan is likely to be rejected unless collateral is at hand. The bank has no transaction history for this person or informal business and hence does not know anything about the applicant’s creditworthiness. Transaction patterns can be used to predict whether or not a customer will be able to repay a loan. Absence of a transaction history means that the ability to repay loans is unknown to banks, making it risky for banks to serve such a person unless the loan is fully collateralised.

Few individuals in the informal sector have access to collateral. They either have their own informal small businesses (such as street vendors) or work on an ad hoc basis. Mobile banking (m-banking) can be seen as one solution to these problems. Despite having been around for some time in several African countries, the existing offerings are mostly value-added services – where the mobile phone is a complimentary channel to operating an existing bank account. Such services are not geared towards the inclusion of the poor and unbanked, and while they are growing in popularity, they have yet to shift the access frontier in order to become “transformational” (Porteus, 2007).

To become transformational, m-banking must progress towards bringing more informal businesses and the poor into the formal economy so that they are better able to access micro-loans and other financial services. Transacting on a mobile payment platform can also generate a transaction history that can act as a basis to evaluate creditworthiness. This would address the inadequate access to finance that restricts the entrepreneurial potential of Africa's informal sector and the poor.

This paper seeks to explore how the ubiquitous mobile platform may be leveraged to move beyond simple transactions and provide an alternative banking system that provides access to formal financial services to the unbanked. This can be achieved by using applications that facilitate transactions over mobiles, which go beyond the& usual voice communications, and the money or airtime transfers.

Liberia is a country emerging from years of protracted and devastating civil conflict. Left without any fixed line telephone infrastructure, it relies solely on the mobile phone for telephony. This study investigates the usage of mobile phones in this immediate post-conflict setting. In particular, the authors adopt the uses and gratification approach to media research, giving focus to both instrumental and intrinsic motivations for use. Mobile phone users in both the capital city of Monrovia and in various rural areas were surveyed using the Q methodology, which identified distinct perspectives within these urban and rural groups. Participants were then sorted into groups where each group contained users with similar perspectives on their mobile phones. These identified groups included sets of users who saw their phones as productivity enhancers, means of connectivity to family and friends, essential business tools, technological curiosities, and sources of personal security. The idea of a phone as a stylish object was markedly rejected, especially in rural areas. We contrast these Q-sort results from Liberia with previous work from Kigali, Rwanda, finding differences especially as related to security.

The authors study the economic effects of the roll-out of mobile phone network coverage in rural South Africa, addressing identification issues which arise from the fact that network roll-out cannot be viewed as an exogenous process to local economic development.

The authors combine spatially coded data from South Africa's leading network provider with annual labor force surveys, and use terrain properties to construct an instrumental variable that allows us to identify the causal effect of network coverage on economic outcomes under plausible assumptions. 

The study finds substantial effects of cell phone network roll-out on labor market outcomes with remarkable gender-specific differences. Employment increases by 15 percentage points when a locality receives network coverage. A gender-differentiated analysis shows that most of this effect is due to increased employment by women. Household income increases in a pro-poor way when cellular infrastructure is provided.

The authors explore the impact of access to information on poor farmers' consumption. The analysis combines spatially coded data on mobile phone coverage with household panel data on farmers from some of the poorest areas of the Philippines.

Both the ordinary least squares and instrumental variable estimates indicate that purchasing a mobile phone has a large, positive impact on the household-level growth rate of per capita consumption. Estimates range from 11 to 17 percent, depending on the sample and the specification chosen.

The authors perform a range of reliability tests, the results of which all suggest that the instruments are valid. They also present evidence consistent with the argument that easier access to information allows farmers to strike better price deals within their existing trading relationships and to make better choices in terms of where they choose to sell their goods.

With globalization, small rural producers must compete in a competitive economic market. Due to their small size and limited financial capacity, they face significant challenges in doing so. We discuss the design and evaluation of two mobile phone based tools to help small producers achieve economies of scale and a quality premium.

These tools were developed using CAM, a camera-based mobile phone application framework specifically designed for the rural developing world. CAM DPS (Delivery Processing System) efficiently captures transactions between producers and cooperatives, in order to monitor remote inventory levels, and document the price paid to the producer. CAM RANDI (Representation AND Inspection tool) allows local inspectors to digitally capture the condition of farm parcels, using a combination of paper, text, audio and images. Using this data, rural producer cooperatives can improve their efficiency and monitoring, and ensure conformance with quality and certification standards. A preliminary evaluation suggests that these applications are accessible to target users and will serve a significant need.

In this paper we detail the synergies we have observed be-
tween the features and limitations of mobile phones, and the
usability and accessibility requirements of rural developing
world users. This includes support for sequential interac-
tion, multimedia input and output, asynchronous messag-
ing and a universally familiar numeric keypad. However,
we argue that the WWW as currently conceived may be an
inappropriate model for delivering mobile information ser-
vices in this context. We highlight a number of tensions we
have observed between the traditional web model, and the
design synergies that we have uncovered. To demonstrate
an alternative framework, we describe CAM | a platform
for delivering mobile information services in the rural devel-
oping world. Supporting scripted execution, media-driven,
tangible interaction as well as an online usage model, CAM
is uniquely adapted both to rural accessibility requirements
and the inherent capabilities of mobile phones. By learning
from the CAM design, we can either improve the design of
existing mobile web standards and services, or implement a
more appropriate framework altogether.

This paper presents descriptive accounts of time-critical organizing in the domain of emergency response. Patterns of mobile phone interaction in such work is analyzed showing how the dyadic exchange of mobile phone numbers between the actors plays an important role in the social interactions in the organizing and sensemaking of the emergency. Enacted sensemaking is used as an analytical framework. Implications for design of emergency response information technology are outlined and discussed.

This paper presents descriptive accounts of time-critical organizing in the domain of emergency response. Patterns of mobile phone interaction in such work is analyzed showing how the dyadic exchange of mobile phone numbers between the actors plays an important role in the social interactions in the organizing and sensemaking of the emergency. Enacted sensemaking is used as an analytical framework. Implications for design of emergency response information technology are outlined and discussed.

This work consists of two main components:
(a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that
demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the
developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT
solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system
engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information
infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a
very important shared resource; enabling efficient and effective
use of such resources aids overall development goals.
The system, *bus, involved the development of a hardware
device (a *box) containing a GSM modem and a GPS unit, that
can be installed on a vehicle and used to track its location. The
*box communicates via SMS with a server connected to a basic
GSM phone. The server runs route a prediction algorithm and
users can send SMS messages to the server to find when a bus
will arrive at their location.
The paper discusses the system and early testing, as well as the
development implications for a range of urban and rural
environments where transportation is scarce or inefficient, and
where a central authority or institution is not in a position to
provide robust information resources for users. We describe how
the solution is also situated within technology usage patterns
common to the developing world.