Mobile Potential

This is James. He lives in a little village outside of Bungoma, a small town located in Kenya’s Western Province.  He walks an hour and a half to work each day because he is too poor to afford the relatively economical forms of public transportation—boda-boda (bicycle taxi), piki piki (motorcycle taxi), or matatu (minibus)—and has no savings, so he cannot even invest in a bicycle. He barely has enough to feed and clothe his family, let alone send his two daughters to school.  However, there is one thing James does have, and it’s a cell phone.

While I was volunteering at the NGO James serves as the caretaker for, the directors of the program suggested we pay James a few Kenyan Shillings in exchange for doing our laundry. We were told he would truly appreciate the gesture, as he was struggling to support his family.

James, a deeply caring and kind man, was immensely grateful. However, rather than spend the laundry money on food and clothing for his wife and children, he purchased a brand new mobile telephone. He has no one to call, no one to SMS, and no one to call him. He just has a phone, an asset he cannot even afford to charge at one of the local phone charging shops.

While I was initially dismayed by the news of James’s self-indulgent purchase, I know of the opportunities the phone can open to James’s family and village if social entrepreneurship is actively promoted. James could become the center of information for his village, if he uses his mobile device to attain information about crop prices for the village farmers, to search for employment and business opportunities for the latent capitalist, and to access educational resources for the community youth. 

The governments of poor, developing countries must understand the potential of information and communication technologies in the rural villages, and must actively promote the social and economic benefits these technologies can provide. Although offering government resources through free telephone hotline numbers and SMS services may not be feasible in the short term, governments should develop practical ways to make this kind of electronic information more accessible to the rural poor.

In this globalized technological revolution, if new information and technology services aren’t given life in the most rural regions in the world, individuals like James will continue to flaunt their effectively dead phones to no avail.