Wireless World

In reading the excellent piece on mobility in Africa in this week’s Business Week, you can’t help but get the feeling that the mobile platform is the economic spark the continent has long awaited.

We saw this first hand throughout our deep dives in Africa, and wrote about some of the fascinating mobile applications back in June. For the first time in a long time (ever?), Africans are not only rapidly adopting a so-called “first world” technology, but they are developing it, improving on it, and capitalizing on it. We have heard dozens of stories of local merchants and rural farmers using mobile phones to simply connect with buyers and sellers, improving market efficiencies and fattening bottom lines. For more on this, go to www.ibm.com, click on the Africa story, and select “The Mobile Imperative.”

But the impact of mobile phones has other, broader and more far-reaching positive effects as well. As the story in Business Week points out, Africa’s basic infrastructure is so lacking in some places, it can grind the wheels of commerce to a halt. Roads that are frequently impassable; huge swaths of land that are without electricity; painfully slow internet service. The growth of the mobile phone business, however, is starting to address some of these problems.

Now that wireless providers have learned that the rural poor is a market worth courting (there are more than 100 million mobile phone subscribers throughout Africa), there is reason to begin investing in infrastructure. To do mobile communications, you need fiber, electricity, and roads. Industry is taking the first steps towards addressing these needs.

In addition, communication, in any form, spurs commerce. Without it, you cannot have efficient markets. Now, for the first time, Africans are rapidly sharing information (sometimes in its simplest forms) and conducting business in a more sophisticated way. The result is higher margins for businesses, and better prices for consumers. It’s hard to see a loser in any of it.

Columbia University professor says plainly that mobile phones are the most important technology when it comes to transforming developing nations. Not $100 laptops. Not refurbished PCs that would take years to master. Mobile phones. Simple, affordable, easy-to-use mobile phones.