Mobile phones achieve posititive social change

Mobile technology is making inroads in African countries with cellular phones being used to daily access business market updates and for communication among business partners.

Lesotho is one such country where five local women from different villages of Lesotho who are in the farming business have, through a pilot project run by the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme(RHVP), managed to improve their the running of their businesses by using cellular phones.

Implementing this pilot project, the RHVP provided ten cellular phones among the five women with R500 airtime. Recipients we expected to use R100 each month for running their businesses and to sell the remaining airtime worth R400 in order to get cash to sustain their airtime business.

Through the use of mobile phones to communicate and to get market information, these women managed to cut their travel costs as they no longer had to travel in order to get information and to communicate with each other.

The project has also empowered them with skills to use mobile technology, has helped them improve the running of their business and has improved their socio-economic potential in society.

This is just one example of how mobile phones can be used as a major tool for social development and for these women in Lesotho, cellular phones became more than just a tool for communication but a way to give these women a voice in their business and opportunity to explore mobile technology practically.

While the use of mobile technology increases every minute in Africa, cellular phones are not without their shortfalls.

Presenting the evidence of how mobile phones are successfully being used for social change in Lesotho, RHVP consultant Katherine Vincent said at the Mobile Active 08 conference on Monday 13 October that cellular phones remain prone to damage and theft.

“It took time for some of the women that we worked with to get used to using cellular phones and this was somehow a limitation”, Vincent said.

She added that electricity availability to charge cellular phones still lacks and that airtime remains extremely expensive which might cause many people to prefer using landlines.

Even so,, mobile technology remains the most preferred method of interaction with some people from Africa even substituting some of their basic needs in order to buy airtime to operate their cellular phones.