Focus: When Rwanda’s ‘mobile phone’ is more than just a phone

Felly Uwimana received his tuition fee from Sweden without lining up queues in the bank. John Mugema received his antiretroviral treatments from TRAC the same day. Unbelievably both receiverships were made through a humble device – the mobile phone. The same device is being tested in many Rwandan ICT initiatives. One such initiative, created by the GSM Association (GSMA) and mobile phone vendor Voxiva, is a health based mobile system used to keep tabs on the health infrastructure replacing the old paper and pen input. Rwanda’s health practitioners are now tracking the spread of HIV and any such epidemics using the new tool. All requests and data are sent over Rwanda’s mobile network on GPRS technology where available. In areas with no GPRS coverage the system will drop back to sending data over short messages (SMS). What has become of the mobile phone? In Rwanda it is certainly a dynamic revolution. In Africa it is an eventual pocket answer to bridging the digital divide between the technologically rich and the technologically poor. Rwandans no longer look at a mobile phone as a status symbol. It has become a basic human right, just like internet access is to a local journalist. According to The Grameen Foundation Rwanda’s teledensity has risen and is now being registered at 5 percent as compared to regional giants Kenya. Kenya has the highest teledensity in the East African region measured at 14 percent. Teledensity is basically the number of telephone lines per 100 people. Rwanda’s Information Technology Agency (RITA) says that a country with a population not more than 9 million people the sky is the limit for mobile phone growth. Rwanda is still an emerging market for telecom growth. Statistics derived from Africa’s sub-Saharan region, growth in mobile phone subscribers show that mobile phones are superseding their usual functionalities. A London based research firm, Globe estimates that the global world wide growth of cell phone numbers is to pass the 3 billion mark by the end of 2007. Globe says that 50 percent of that figure could be claimed by emerging markets in Africa alone. At the recent ‘Connect Africa’ summit hosted here in Kigali, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) noted that Africa’s mobile phones overtook fixed lines six years ago and now outnumber them nearly with a ratio of five to one, with 137.2 million subscribers in 2005. Delegates were told that in sub-Saharan Africa alone, nine out of every 10 telephone subscribers are using a mobile. These statistics show that mobile phones are more than just mobile phones. In European, States mobile phones ceased to be called mobile phone since the introduction of third generation (3G) technology, which enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity. Mobile phones are referred to as PDAs. The acronym PDA means Personal Digital Assistants. Others call mobile phones ‘palm computers’ while in Africa we have started to call them just mobiles and not mobile phones. Mobiles are now schedulers and organisers of our daily work. They can record voice and data and can also capture images. They download Internet web pages and send and receive electronic – mails (e-mails). Some of them stream FM radio stations. The latest of these kinds on the Rwandan market is the Nokia N95. This is the most technically advanced smart phone ever! It has complete satellite navigation and a 3G technology video calling facility. The Samsung G600 which is also available in Kigali is a music player with 5 Giga byte of memory. This means it can be a storage device too and one doesn’t have to carry around flash disks with this kind of phone. The mobile phone has grown and matured too fast. It is now being used for convergence of technology. Mobile technology is now fused with web technology to offer a complete package of click-and mortar e-commerce. This kind of electronic commerce is purest in the sense that the product or service and the payments are all in soft or digital form. This year, Kenya became the first country in Africa to introduce a Digital Video Broadcasting technology which is embedded right there on one’s mobile phone. This Multi-Choice venture will have subscribers buying a special mobile handset from which, by just using their ordinary SIM cards they will be able to stream television content onto their handsets. This is basically TV on mobile phones. This technology will be introduced to all East African states by the time of the 2010 world cup. Rwandans despite being in a physical cash-flow economy with just a few Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) and no credit card signatures have beaten all odds to move with the times at this level of convergence. One such example is being offered by Rwanda’s web solution providers SMS Media. This firm has created a web site www.smsmedia.co.rw from which one can syndicate numerous SMS messages for a particular purpose. The website converges both web and mobile technology. The facility has been effectively utilized by those marshalling for wedding meetings and social parties. The same facility has recently been used in an e-poll where subscribers place or make a vote to Ferwafa for Rwanda’s ‘Football Player of 2007.’ Another case example was when thousands of Rwanda’s Multi-Choice subscribers voted via text messages in the recent ‘Big Brother Africa II’ reality show contest. In neighboring Uganda 300,000 SMS were used to protest the sale of Mabira Forest to sugar cane investors in a campaign dubbed ‘e-protesting Ugandans’. And in the Far East the President of the Philippines was deposed in 2001 in an SMS-organized mobilization he called a “coup de t ext” when only just 15 percent of Filipinos had mobile phones. Another British market research group called, Gartner has estimated that SMS sent to and from cell phones will more than double over the next five years to 2.3 trillion messages sent by 2010. The survey states that the number of messages transmitted over SMS systems in 2005 was estimated at 936-billion and total revenues from text messaging is forecast to grow to US$72.5bn in 2010 from US$39.5bn in 2005. One thing we all know for sure is that mobile phones and SMS technology are both compatible. In Rwanda, evident lack of handsets has not hindered people from purchasing SIM cards which has created a common practice of sharing phones and using communal phones. Sharing SIM cards is not uncommon in many parts of the world.It is just more visible in Africa because it is so widespread. Rwanda’s lowest income bracket the frequent users of mobile phones have discovered clever ways of minimizing their own call costs. One example cited is called ‘beeping’ which is also known as ‘flashing’. Here a caller dials a number, but hangs up before the call is connected to elicit a call back response from the recipient. In this way, even many mobile users in Africa’s low income earners are able to avoid expenses on call charges. Analysts believe that mobile devices might tussle it out with laptops once broadband infrastructure that will improve provision of Internet bandwidth is increased to suit that of the rest of the world. But as cinema didn’t kill theater, in the same way the TV didn’t kill cinema and Internet hasn’t killed newspapers, it is well thought that the seemingly mighty mobile phone won’t kill the laptop computer. It is by no doubt that mobile phones today have not only made access easy but altered the forms of socialisation in our communities today and especially for urban dwellers with man relatives in rural areas. Ends