Global mobile telephony use has soared in the last decade, with many of its new users living at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
This is the finding of the Mobiles4Dev study, which was commissioned by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), and carried out by the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation (CTO).
It revealed there are more than five billion mobile subscriptions in the world today - up from 720 000 in 2000 - a number the mobile industry believes will exceed 6.2 billion by 2013.
According to the CTO, this study will help refine Unicef's approach to engagement with regional and global mobile operators. It believes this research will help the organisation to contribute to a greater effectiveness within the mobiles for development (M4D) field as a whole.
Unicef hopes this research will also help the organisation to honour its mission to advocate for the protection of children's rights, help meet their basic needs, and expand opportunities to help them reach their full potential.
CTO CEO Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah says he is pleased that Unicef chose the CTO to undertake this important project. “Like the CTO, Unicef believes in the huge potential for mobile telephony to further improve socio-economic outcomes, and I am pleased that it will use the findings from this research to improve its work.”
He says the nature of the open source applications that Unicef has successfully used in the past, like RapidSMS, and the speed at which they are customised, is presenting the development community with unprecedented opportunities that they must seize.
“We need the global community to feed into the M4D community.” They should contribute by actively engaging, providing information about the use of M4Ds and registering themselves on the database of experts who can assist Unicef in this field, he adds.
Ubiquitous cellphones
According to the research findings, the last decade was characterised by an explosion in the growth of mobile telephony in many less developed countries, resulting in unprecedented social and economic change.
The study pointed out that in Africa, mobile subscriptions grew from 5% of the population in 2003 to more than 30% by the end of 2009. This has revolutionised the way people communicate, do business, learn, and find employment, the report revealed.
“Although voice services have been the main driver of subscriber growth, operators, policy makers and civil society stakeholders have begun to place much greater emphasis on mobile applications and content that can provide much-needed services in less developed countries,” the study said.
It also revealed that the phenomenal growth of mobile telephony is presenting development organisations and other stakeholders with unprecedented opportunities to leverage the most basic of mobiles phones to improve the livelihoods of the world's poorest people.
Save the world
The study showed that up to this point, mobile operators have tended to support M4D through concessions such as free or subsidised shortcodes and SMS tariffs. This has been negotiated as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, it added.
“A feature of CSR initiatives in health, education, and child protection, for example, is that they rarely exploit technical resources held by companies,” it said.
CSR departments tend to be poorly integrated with the core business, and have small budgets and limited decision-making power, points out the report. “Some operators would like to develop services that have a developmental impact, but also a return on investment - M4D that is revenue-generating and scalable.”
The project was undertaken in phases and required key stakeholders, including mobile operators, applications developers and organisations using mobile applications, to engage with the research team and provide information about the development and use of mobile applications.
The team also reviewed Unicef's current use of mobiles in order to make recommendations on how Unicef can best leverage mobile telephony in its work and improve its mobile engagements.
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