Can You Hear Us Now?

By Frank Bures
Art by Martin Haake

Why technology is Africa's latest, greatest poverty fighter.

Back in the mid-1990s—the Dark Ages—I was living in a semi-rural area on the slopes of Mount Meru, just outside Arusha, Tanzania. Every now and then I had to make a phone call back home, across the world.

This is not an easy thing to do, I often thought to myself as I headed out into the neighborhoods to inquire about using one of the few phone lines at houses near mine. Often, these lines would be broken, or working spottily, and it could take weeks to get a repairman out to find the place where there was a problem. Moreover, the calls had to be arranged in advance so both people's ears could be physically connected to the line that ran under the sea.

Usually, I would end up knocking on the door of a business in town (owned by friends of friends), trying to be unobtrusive as I heard the crackly sound of the voice of the woman I would later marry. But our words seemed to run into each other along the way, and we each had to wait a minute to be able to hear the other. In the lag, the distance seemed tangible.

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These days, when I'm in Africa, I tell people this story and they laugh. They laugh as if they can barely remember those times. They laugh like I was telling them I used to hunt with rocks and start fires with sticks. Because technology in the developing world has changed so much and so fast that it's hard to believe unless you see it yourself.

I did see it last year, while I was taking a bus across West Africa. As I sat looking out the window at the dusty trees scattered around the Sahel, somewhere in the middle of Burkina Faso, I took a phone out of my pocket and called my wife. This time, the sound was clear. There was no delay. It was almost like she was sitting next to me.

I may have been the only passenger dialing America, but I was far from the only one with a phone. And while not everyone can afford this kind of technology, in the last decade cell phones have become shockingly common. There are now 415 million mobile subscribers in Africa, and a third of the world's 4 billion users are in the developing world. India and China alone added 700 million new users between 2000 and 2007, and the numbers continue to rise.

Among the many ramifications of this change, perhaps the biggest is economic. Now, not only can people reach out and touch their friends and family, they can also talk to business partners, get market reports and find clients. Mobile technology provides a significant boost to the incomes of those on the bottom rung of the ladder. In fact, a study from the London Business School concluded that each 10 percent increase in mobile phone use meant a 0.6 percent boost to GDP and another suggested a 1.2 percent gain.

In Uganda, farmers can send text messages for commodity prices or weather reports. In South Africa, a software service called Mobenzi allows the unemployed to find and conduct work via cell phone. Millions of jobs are created as people sell phone cards, resell phone cards or even parse out fractions of minutes. In Ghana, some people even build towers for subscribers to climb (for a fee) so they can get reception where the hills block it. All this phone-related commerce adds up. According to a study of families in Kenya who used the mobile banking service M-Pesa, cell phone access helps incomes grow anywhere from 5 to 30 percent.

The rising popularity of cell phone technology in Africa is prompting startups that can grow into big business. A service started last year called PesaPal allows people to shop by mobile phone. Founder Agosta Liko lived in the U.S. for several years, working in banking and information technology, before moving back to Kenya.

"There was no consumer payment system," Liko said. "People couldn't open PayPal accounts, so I decided to build something. Now I can pay my guys a good wage, and that is the best way to alleviate poverty. Technology is going to be Africa's biggest chance."

I'VE ALWAYS ADMIRED THE INGENUITY of people in the developing world to jerry-rig solutions to problems they have, whether that be a wheelbarrow made from sticks and boards, frying pans made from old car parts, or irrigation channels made from the husks of banana trees. I've even read of people making cars and a helicopter from scratch.

Take, for example, William Kamkwamba, a Malawian boy who had to drop out of school. He found an old science book in a library, which he used to build a windmill out of discarded parts. The homemade windmill powered lights in his parents' house and pumped water during a massive drought.

I first heard of Kamkwamba's story on a website called AfriGadget, which showcases all kinds of technical ingenuity born of scarcity. Erik Hersman, a web developer raised in Kenya and Sudan by American missionary parents, started AfriGadget.

Hersman is also the founder of Ushahidi.com. The website came about when, during Kenya's election violence in 2007, Hersman and some friends put together a program that allowed people to report incidents of violence via mobile phone text messages, creating a comprehensive crisis map. The platform is now called Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony") and is being used to monitor elections in India, to track violence in the war in Congo and to monitor rainforest destruction in Madagascar.

Ushahidi is one more example of how technology is helping people of small means gain a degree of control over their situations, helping them make the world a little more predictable and a little more livable. The Internet, solar power, biogas and other technologies are also helping poor people across the world. For example, in Zimbabwe, farmers can now get crop information via podcast. In Ghana, small-plot irrigation systems are helping farmers boost productivity through the dry season. In these and many other places, technology is giving people a leg up in the global economy.

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Even something like light can improve a poor family's situation. "Providing bright light really impacts so many facets of people's lives," said Dorcas Cheng-Tozun, of D.light Design, a company that has sold nearly 150,000 low-cost solar lights to rural communities in India and East Africa. "It essentially extends their day. It allows them to work for longer hours and more productively. It lets children study longer. And buying our products, using them for several years, ends up saving people a significant amount of money on kerosene," Cheng-Tozun said.

The productivity boosts associated with these technologies might seem small to us, but they're a great boon to the world's poor. One World Bank report found that these kinds of developments were key factors in reducing the number of people in developing countries living on less than $1 per day from 29 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2004, with that number expected to reach 10 percent by 2015.

ONE DAY when I was living in Tanzania, I was talking to a neighbor. He was from Germany and was not well-liked in the area, for reasons I was quickly learning. That day, he was complaining about an expensive solar water heater that had been donated from overseas but was already broken and in need of repairs. The problem, he told me, was that when you have a complicated machine, you need a white man to take care of it. A white man, he added, with his own car.

This statement left me speechless for several reasons. But the most shocking of all was its blatant falsity, something that has been clearly demonstrated in the years since. The problem was not with the technology itself. The problem was with something larger.

"There are three myths about technology," said Harish Hande, founder of SELCO-India, a "social enterprise" that has sold solar lighting systems to 112,000 households in India. "One is that poor people cannot afford sustainable technologies. Another is that poor people cannot maintain sustainable technologies. And a third is that social ventures cannot be run as commercial entities."

The trap my German friend fell into was what we might call the "solar-oven fallacy." The solar oven is a simple idea that has actually been around for a few hundred years. It is sometimes touted as a panacea for problems ranging from women's rights to global warming. The Peace Corps distributed them in the 1960s, and last year, a cardboard version called the "Kyoto Box" won a prestigious $75,000 design prize. On the surface, the idea seems like a good one: Use the sun to cook food. Free heat. No wood chopping or carrying. And yet, the solar cooker has, ironically, not set the developing world on fire.

"Solar ovens are not that complicated," said Paul Polak, author of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, and founder of International Development Enterprises, which has sold half a million low-cost drip irrigation systems throughout the developing world. "What is complicated is learning the cultural patterns of people in Africa with food and how they might interact with that technology."

Some of the problems with solar ovens: They take several hours to cook food; they don't function in the rainy season; wind can knock them over; they simply won't work for people who are up before dawn or need to cook after dark. So while it may seem like a good idea to someone sitting in an office in Washington, D.C., or Brussels, to a woman in a wattle house in Zambia, the benefits might be less clear.

"You've got to design for the market," Polak said, "not because you're a tinkerer who is fascinated with a technical problem."

"There are just too many prescriptive approaches to what is needed," said Emeka Okafor, a Nigerian entrepreneur based in New York City. "That is one of the biggest flaws of development. You have people running around with prescriptions for what they think works, because they have a simplistic understanding of what the problem is."

"Poor people will enthusiastically embrace something if they can see it will improve their lives," said Polak. "But they're looking for practical solutions—things that work—for the problems they're facing."

In the end, the solar oven solves a problem very few asked to have solved: How to cook lunch on a sunny day.

"THERE ISN'T ENOUGH MONEY in the world to provide safe drinking water to the billion people in the world in the form of subsidized, government funded hand pumps," said Polak. "The only way to achieve scale to make an impact on poverty is to design products that people are willing to buy."

And creating products people are willing to invest in helps both producer and consumer, Hande said.

"In the traditional, top-down methodology, it's a one-sided supply chain, where the product goes down to the poor. We go from the opposite side," he said. "We look at what the need is, then tailor the product to the need. We are intervening with a product that either increases their income or uplifts their quality of life, so it's a win-win situation for everybody."

SELCO not only sells low-cost solar lighting, but also power inverters, biomass cooking stoves and solar water heaters. And while it doesn't donate anything, its focus is neither simply on making money, nor on providing charity, but on a new model, like that used by D.light Design.

"We feel really strongly that market solutions and for-profit social enterprises will be a growing part of development," said Cheng-Tozun. "We see the customers we are trying to serve are just that: customers. We have to really understand them and know what they want, because they ultimately have the choice: Do they like our product or not? They'll let us know by whether they choose to buy it."

This can be uncomfortable terrain for many of us who were raised in the 20th century, and were taught that altruism and self-interest were fundamentally at odds. But as those ideas evolve, a more nuanced picture is emerging, and growth is not seen as a zero-sum game.

"The mobile-phone carriers are making money hand over fist and making a lot of great change happen," said Hersman, who also recently launched a technology innovation hub in Nairobi. "I think what we're starting to see is that businesses work here. Why not figure out a good business model, build it, and treat it like a real business instead of giving subsidies that provide a false floor and doom the project from the beginning."

There is no false floor under 24-year-old Wilfred Mworia, a Kenyan software engineer who was sitting on his couch one day in his small apartment in Nairobi when an idea came to him: What if you could keep a journal on your phone—more specifically, on your iPhone—but instead of just writing what happened, you could include pictures and audio? The idea was such a good one that Mworia was able to scrape together some funding to start a company to develop his "iScribe." Now that company, African Pixel, is doing its part to help the Kenyan economy grow.

If they keep up this pace, there's no telling what the lives of people in the developing world will look like in another 10 years. For ambitious youths like Mworia, the path to the future is clear, and technology is helping them put it in their own hands.

Frank Bures writes frequently about Africa, and his work was included in the book Best American Travel Writing 2009. For more, visit frankbures.com.