Talking revolution

As the sun slips behind the jagged hills of the Transkei, Chief David Lingazwe surveys the land his family has farmed for hundreds of years. He smiles as he tucks a cellphone into the folds of the traditional blanket he wears to keep out the evening chill.

The chief’s daughter Bonizwe has just given birth at a government hospital in Bizana, 60 km away. A year ago, Vodacom, one of Africa’s biggest mobile technology players, installed a mast and base station in Amambisi village, ending isolation, but also bringing hope to this impoverished community of 30,000. Before, the village, 50 km from the nearest road and often cut off by swollen rivers, would have waited days for the news of the birth.

Amambisi, with no electricity or running water in a province with 50 percent unemployment seems an unlikely place for a mobile phone boom. But operators are taking the plunge in rural parts of South Africa and erecting network infrastructure in order to be a part of one of Africa’s most important growth industries. “Things are changing round here quickly,” Zwelibanjiwe Njomi, the principal of the local secondary school told IRIN. “Before the mast it took half a day to get to town to make a call, now we’re in touch with the whole world,” he beamed.

Mobile phone technology, once the preserve of a privileged few, is now touching the lives of millions of rural South Africans. Many of Africa’s fixed line operators are cash-strapped state-owned companies that do not have the resources required to modernise their ageing systems. “In many cases mobile is taking the place of fixed line,” Fernando Goncalves of Siemens, one of the continent’s key infrastructure providers, told IRIN.

The African Telecommunications Union (ATU) expects mobiles to overtake fixed phone lines in Africa within the next five years. In South Africa, mobiles already exceed fixed line phones. The ATU estimates that only about two percent of Africans have phones compared to a global average of about 10 percent. Africa has only 14 million phone lines, fewer than Manhattan or Tokyo. “It’s a huge challenge, because of poor infrastructure and low incomes,” said Mondi Mama of the Vodacom Foundation, the development wing of Vodacom. “But we’re succeeding against the odds in South Africa and it’s a blueprint for the rest of the continent,” he added. The company has business in Tanzania and Lesotho and is eyeing the lucrative Nigerian market.

Vodacom’s confidence comes from strategies they’ve pioneered in places like Amambisi. “We had to get over the problem of poor credit records and non-existent bank accounts and now prepaid accounts for nearly 80 percent of our business in South Africa,” said Don Schorn, the regional Vodacom head in KwaZulu Natal.

The prepaid scheme, besides making cellphone lines available to millions of low income subscribers, has also meant business opportunities in impoverished rural areas. Nokawe Tozana was a teacher in Johannesburg until she saw the potential of selling airtime to mobile phone users. “Those far from town need airtime, often they cannot travel to buy the cards, so I go to them,” she explained. Equipped with a hand-held device that allows her to sell the airtime anywhere, she ventures into newly-networked parts of the country. “Business is good and I’m helping people keep in touch,” she added as she loaded her newly-purchased car for a trip to the rural Northern Province.

The device was purchased through the South African Council of Churches’ Sakhisizwe Trust. The trust distributed 15 machines last year and plans to distribute 500 machines to rural entrepreneurs and organisations this year. “This is a great opportunity for job creation and also to provide funds for churches and women’s organisations,” said Thembile Xipu, the director of Sakhisizwe Trust. To finance the US $400,000 cost of the airtime machines, the trust enlisted the help of a Philadelphia investment firm, Reinvest in South Africa. “It appealed to our concept of a double bottom line: to run a business while essentially empowering a community,” said Sam Folin, managing director of the Reinvest in South Africa fund. Xipu added that the machines could be programmed to sell credit for electricity and water as well as cellphones, “effectively bringing banking to areas with no financial institutions”.

Network providers in Africa are aware that their businesses can only grow if access to phones improves. The relative cost of a phone connection in Africa’s mostly low income countries remains many times higher than in Europe. The answer is more public phones. Private “phone shops” are springing up across the continent. Senegal has over 7,000 “telecentres”, employing over 10,000 people and generating nearly a third of all phone revenues. South Africa wants to improve public phone access to the point where everyone is within a 30 minute walk to a phone.

The problem is resources, but the South African government has enshrined the principal of community phone access in its licence agreement with the big operators. “Under our licence obligations we agreed with the South African government we’d put in 22,500 phones into areas where the phone density was less than one per hundred people,” Schorn said. The phones are usually located in a container, where people pay less than half the cost of a mobile call. “We see this as an important development tool as well as growing the market,” Schorn added.

At the Amambisi phone shop a long early-morning queue snaked away from the container as the heavy steel doors were swung open for business. “Having phones in our village at last is great, my son got a job because he could contact an employer,” Mary, waiting to phone a relative in Durban, told IRIN. Another customer said that she had started a weaving business and the phone had helped put her in touch with buyers. “At last we feel part of the modern world,” Chief Lingazwe said.

Increasingly, greater access to communications networks is being viewed as a prerequisite to development rather than an outcome. “You simply cannot have growth without connectivity in our wired globe,” Phillip Matundwe of ATU told IRIN. Vodacom’s Don Schorn is positive about a connected continent. “Mobile phone technology must be the future for Africa. After phones the next step is internet connections. Within a decade I believe every very rural African will have an e-mail address, now that’s an African Renaissance.”