This is Africa Blog

The development of the mobile phone in Africa: Social and economic inequalities remain (2/2)

On October 3, 2010, in Posts in English, by Pierrick Jacob
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After watching the swift take off of mobile telephony in Africa, some experts have been quick to predict that it would play a core role in solving the economic and social problems of the continent. The technology brings the possibility of getting people together in such a vast territory, but its positive effects both socially and economically have been exaggerated.

1. The economic underdevelopment persists

According to Alison Gillwald, director of ICT Africa! (RIA!) the continent’s mobile phone boom lags behind the rest of the planet in three key areas: Access, quality of the services and price.

The Access problem: Even though the mobile telephony growth rate is very strong, the numbers can be misleading as the initial user base is very small. The number of people without a cellphone remains bigger than those with access to one. Even if they have a mobile phone, some people cannot use some services like the SMS due to illiteracy or lack of skill.

The Quality of services: Voice services are widespread, but many Africans do not have access to more advanced features taken for granted elsewhere, such as those offered by the smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone …).

Douala, Camerun. Telephone ladies. You can buy airtime here. (RTS)

Prices: Everywhere in Africa, infrastructure deployment is expensive. The study of RIA! concludes that the prices charged to customers are considerably higher than the costs. Alas, the companies providing these services obtain incredible profits. This excessive prices are ‘the result of an excessive taxation on the equipment and the services, the weak price regulation by the government and the incapacity to limit the domination of the big Telecommunication Operators in the market’. These prohibitive prices prevent potential customers from using the services, specially people with a low income.

2. Cellphones in Africa are not the magic remedy to fight against poverty and gender inequality

It is true that mobile phones can help overcome and shape social norms. Kazanka Confort and John Dada from African Women and TIC report that entrepreneurial women in the Muslim Nigeria use the telephone to bypass religious constraints and stop them from talking directly to men and obtain bank accounts. Mobile phones allow many women to consolidate their independence.

http://www.photos-afrique.fr/photos-visages-afrique/

However, gender inequality remains even in the usage of the mobile telephone, there is still a big inertia. Kathleen Dig has made a study on mobile phones and their relation to poverty reduction in Uganda. She states that ‘the most vulnerable members of the families don’t always benefit from the new technologies, which often remain under control of the household’s head‘. It’s  not only that the head of the family is afraid of an excessive usage of the telephone’s airtime, but also that they want to protect an erosion of their authority.

Due to their own mobility, husbands hold a greater control over the cellphone communications: when they leave and take it with them, the wives don’t have access to it anymore.

For Kiss Brian Abraham, one of the authors of African women and TIC, this leads to a marked separation between a group of women who have access to cellphones and have enough income to use them and another group which doesn’t have access to it, where the poorer women are left behind.

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The Mobile phone, social and economic development engine in Africa (1/2)

On October 2, 2010, in Posts in English, by Pierrick Jacob
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Technology follows a different path in Africa as in the West, due to poverty. The mobile phone has become the most widely used tool of communication, with still-expensive computers lagging behind. According to a report published by the French Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFRI), there were 246 million mobile line users in 2008. (…) The growth rate of the mobile market and the Internet in Africa is two times bigger as the global average.

Mobile usage growth in Africa

The mobile phone technology is creatively used by health programmes, weather forecasts, to control the price of goods and to access banking services.

A tool of prevention and medical assistance

The AIDS epidemic in Africa is still dramatic, with many HIV-positive people not having access to any kind of treatment. Cell Life is an initiative developed together by the University of Cape Town and the Peninsula University of Technology with the aim of improving the lives of the people infected with the HIV, with the help of the mobile phone technology in South Africa.

The areas worst affected by the HIV suffer from a lack of qualified health professionals. Cell Life uses mobile telephones to put in contact professionals and patients so they can communicate information about the treatments. Each doctor or nurse can thus give advise remotely to about 20 patients. There are other diseases that can be equally fought off in this way: This system of health care through mobile communication has helped to impede the propagation of Typhoid epidemic in Uganda too.

Photo futureatlas (Flickr) sous licence CC by

Widely accessible weather forecasts

The initiative ‘Weather forecasts for everyone’ was launched in June 2009. In Africa there is an important lack of weather stations and monitoring, so the weather forecast coverage is 8 times lower than the minimum recommended by the World Meteorological Organization. There is a sense of urgency in solving this problem: The climate change affects directly the daily life of farmers, who need accurate weather information in order to prepare themselves against potential problems. The project ‘Weather forecasts for everyone’ counts with the help of the World Humanitarian Forum, Ericsson, the World Meteorological Organization and the Telecom Zain. They will install more than 5000 meteorological autonomous stations and transmit the data collected with the help of mobile telephones. The initial deployment has already started and is concentrated in the areas of the South of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

A useful way of managing prices in the agricultural market

The cellphone allows farmers to know the prices of agricultural products firsthand and avoid middle men by selling directly to the consumer. Mobile phones help also increase revenues while reducing the final price for the consumers. In Kenya this service is provided in the cereals market by the DrumNet network.

People using their cellphones in Soweto, South Africa —JON HRUSA/EPA/SIPA

Mobile banking

In the rural regions of Africa, access to traditional banking is heavily limited. This means that a big number of people can only use cash as a method of payment, which not only is less convenient but also limits their business opportunities. Mobile phones help change this reality by offering the users a way to access banking services through mobile networks.

Gimme that code

More specifically, mobile banking allows the users to make bill payments, transfers, deposits and withdrawals. These orders are done by SMS, with PIN codes to authenticate the transaction authors.

In the cases of Congo and Zambia, customers can use their cellphones to pay their bills. The customer opens an account with Celpay and then can make payments by sending SMS to Celpay, which in turn transfers the money to the merchant’s account.

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The Great Green wall under heavy criticism

On October 1, 2010, in Posts in English, by Pierrick Jacob
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Certain people among environmentalist groups and scientist question the project of the Great Green Wall in Africa (we talk about it here: The Great Green Wall project: 11 African countries against the advance of the Sahara)

‘Nothing but a daydream to misuse money’

The FFEM (French Global Environment Facility) has promised 119 million dollars (97 million euros) to finance the project.

Haidar El Ali, leader of the Environmentalists Federation in Senegal declared in RFI -Radio France International- the 17th of June 2010 that this project wasn’t convincing enough: ‘I just come from the countryside and everywhere I hear the same complaints. The farmers don’t have enough seeds, and sometimes none at all. For me the Great Green Wall is a Utopia, daydreaming to misuse money‘.

In the creation of the Great Green Wall there are economic and political interests at play, so for Haidar El Ali ‘this wall is show biz. Name a single Senegalese project that has succeeded. People have other things to do and don’t trust this anti-democratic government that presents itself as green but over exploits the forests and doesn’t even consider the solar energy‘.

The desert approaches

Scientiest doubt the effectiveness of the project

For Marc Bied-Charreton, president of the French Scientific committee for desertification in an interview in www.terre-eco.com, this initiative is going to inevitably fail: ‘It’s incorrect to say that the desert is advancing and that we need to stop it. What is progressing is the deforestation of soils. Therefore what we need to do is protect the soils and not build barriers like these‘.

Martin Benistor, lecturer in the Institue of Environmental Sciences in the University of Geneve questions the efficacity of the project: ‘A green cover to interact with the atmosphere and increase the rains. But with a width of about 15 km, this seems insufficient. The wall could modify the atmospheric conditions and counteract the expansion of the desert in certain semi-arid zones, but never along its whole length‘.

This is the answer of one of the people promoting the project, professor Abdoulaye Dia, of the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar: ‘Around one hundred scientists, American, Israelis, Japanese and African met in February 2009 to study the viability of the project. They identified the species of trees, the soils and the rain rates better adapted to the conditions of reforestation. In Senegal for example, we plant above all acacias ‘.

What are the alternatives to the project?

Marc Bied-Charreton proposes a solution based on two main axis: Sustainable agriculture and Decentralization.

Sustainable agriculture

The implementation of Sustainable agriculture to protect the soils means:
  • Stopping the practice of leaving the land fallow six months per year.
  • Limit the ploughing
  • Introduce rotation of cultivation
  • Decrease fertilizer usage
On the political side of the problem, Decentralization:
  • The states must accept the management of farmable land to the villages or groups of villages. This is the way it is done in Mali, Niger or Burkina Faso and it works.
  • For the reforestation to take place, the local people should have access to the profits. This is how they can get engaged in the process and how the massive cutting down of trees avoided.
  • The administration should not try to establish a top-down system for transfer of technical help and information, this is bound to fail.

Related posts: The Great Green Wall project: 11 African countries against the advance of the Sahara

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The Great Green Wall project: 11 African countries against the advance of the Sahara

On September 30, 2010, in Posts in English, by Pierrick Jacob
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Eleven African countries met in a summit in N’Djamena (Chad) on June the 17th 2010 expressed their compromise for the development of the Great Green Wall that should eventually stop the Sahara’s desert advance. This massive green strip will be 7100 km long and 15km wide, tracing a path between Dakar and Djibouti through these countries: Burkina Faso, Djiboute, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Chad.

The infertility of the soil is the responsible of a massive food crisis along the Sahel strip, the worse such crisis in 30 years according to some observers. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates that 2 million hectares of green zones disappear every year.

The President of Nigeria proposed to the other countries in the Sahel area (CEN-SAD) the creation of this green strip in order to fight off the desertification and its consequences. At the beginning of 2007 the conference of heads of state and the governments of the African Union adopted this project, giving it the name of ‘The Great Green Wall’.

This vegetation belt will be made of species with resistance to high temperatures and dry conditions, but also will be useful for the local population and be economically profitable. Acacia, jujube, date palm, mango tree … there will be trees but also bushes and plants will cover the soil. This green belt should include the forests that already exist across the line of the project, and these areas will become natural reserves of fauna and flora. The idea is to foster also agriculture societies through this diversity.

Along the green wall there are questions about the relocation of villages when it crosses inhabited areas. The non inhabited areas will be managed by the public services of the respective countries or by private organizations. There are also plans for building water reservoirs, about 80 per country, so the vegetation can survive the dry season.

Objectives and expected results:

  • A reduction of the soil erosion
  • An impulse to the development and diversification of the agriculture in these areas
  • The restoration, conservation and promotion of the biodiversity in fauna and flora
  • The improvement of the living standards and well-being of the local population
  • Reversing the rural exodus
  • Gain control over the water resources

Financing the project:

The international community is following closely the project and the FFEM (French Global Environment Facility) has promised economic help for each of the countries that will have to manage the Great Green Wall. The amount varies according to the countries, between 6,6 million dollars (5,3 million euros) to 23 million dollars (18,7 million euros). The total amount provided by the FFEM will be around 119 million dollars (97 million euros).

During the next 10 years there will be a need of 600 million dollars for the completion of the project. Today, 3 years after the confirmation of the project, only 10.500 hectares have been planted in Senegal plus several hundred in the other countries. This is only a few kilometers …

Related post: The Great Green wall under heavy criticism

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The history of tourism (2/2)

On September 29, 2010, in Posts in English, by Pierrick Jacob
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This is the second part of Isabel Babou’s article in the French monthly magazine Biocontact, may 2010 is mainly about the development of an alternative type of tourism in the face of the mass tourism growth.

The state of tourism in numbers

In these times of worries and concerns about the planet’s future and the depletion of the fossil energy sources, what is the tourism’s place, this useless invention, as the French historian specialized in tourism Marc Boyer puts it?

From an economic point of view, tourism is extremely important. The World Tourism Organization predicts there will be 1,6 billion tourists  by 2020. In 2007 the tourism industry’s revenues were 625 billion euros, the equivalent of the 30% of world wide services (Source: WTO).

In the environmental front, tourism is strongly criticized. Its greenhouse gas emissions contribute to about 5% of the total. Air travel is responsible of 40% of the emissions related to tourism, while road transport produces 32%.

Tourism makes local population hosts, but the economic effects are not as big as they could: Only 20% of the price paid by the tourist to the tour-operator remains in the country when the destination is in the South!

Alternatives to the mass tourism

We can still enjoy our right for holidays, but in slow-mode!

What does this mean, what is this kind of tourism? It is a respectful tourism. What does it respect? The environment, the local population, their local economy, their culture. The problem is that sustainable tourism comes in many different names, colours and shapes, which make it more difficult for the traveller to choose.

Taking all these definitions into account, a responsible tourism should allow the traveller to discover the way of life of those visited. ‘This implies evidently that the responsible tourist accepts to share the everyday constraints of the local population he/she visits, like the accommodation, the food or the water shortages‘ (Pince, 2007). This also implies that the host consents to this visit. Does the host normally have a choice? The example of Gabon is telling: they prepare a future without oil by betting on tourism, what a paradox!

So our theoretical traveller is going to choose another version of this ‘good tourism’. He/she will seek the advice of a professional who will propose the fair tourism, which is ‘a series of activities and services offered by the tour operators specialized in responsible tourism and which are controlled by local communities. These communities participate with a relevant role in the evolution of these activities’ definitions‘ (source: Association pour le tourisme équitable et solidaire).

Some sources establish that in the responsible tourism ‘the tour operator is responsible of the effects of tourism on the local population and the environment‘ (Claudine Zysberg, who was in charge of the French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable development in 2004).

Another option is the ecotourism, which the International Society of ecotourism (TIES) defines as ‘a kind of responsible travel taking place in the natural spaces and which contributes to the protection of the environment and the well-being of the local population‘.

Mass tourism keeps growing, but like with energy or food, we will have to share. The carrying capacity of the destinations should be analyzed and understood. For the fans of the ‘antipodes’, an eco-tax can make the responsible actors aware of the effects of their trip and help limit them.  We are occupying ourselves the causes rather than the consequences, but all these are options that are worthy of careful thinking.

Related articles: History of Tourism (1/2)

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