Jackie Danicki

Excellent piece by my friend Michael Jennings on how the ubiquitousness of mobile phones is changing Africa - and the utter ignorance of this on the part of people who, somehow, have credibility and are considered experts in how poor brown people suffer. It’s a positive story, with some infuriating points:

[A]bout three years ago I was walking along the Thames path on a Sunday afternoon. and I passed City Hall. Outside the building was some kind of “Here is how bad things are in the third world and why we should feel guilty” kind of exhibition provided for us by Ken Livingstone’s lackeys using our money. Amongst the factoids of information in this display was the statement that “90% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”.

The “x% of the world’s population have never made a phone call” meme has been around for a while. 90% is obviously ridiculous and shows intense innumeracy from whoever made it up. (About 15% of the world’s population lives in rich countries, and if you add “rich parts of middle income countries, you can increase this number to 20 or 25%). The meme seems to usually be stated as “50% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”. Clay Shirky attempted to investigate where the meme came from, and the first recorded statement of it appears to be from engineer Greg LeVert of telephone company MCI in 1994. However, he said it in the context of “.. but oh boy is this going to change with all the great new technology that’s in the pipeline”. Nobody knows where he got the factoid from though: he may have just made it up. However, the Al Gores and Michael Moores and Kofi Annans and the like (and even people like Melinda Gates and Carly Fiorina who should know better) have repeated it endlessly since…

It is, of course, just not true. It is extraordinary that people should repeat out of context a ten year old view of what the poor world is like, as if the ten years between 1995 and 2005 were static in the development of telecommunications.

The great news:

Largely due to modern communications services, globalisation is changing Africa. In the poor world. Africa is now plugged into the world. Great technological change - be it the invention of electricity, the railways, electricity, the PC, the internet - seems to go through an initial stage when everyone initially recognises that the technology is important, but during which its importance is underestimated in productivity statistics and people don’t always understand its true importance. Then there is a stage in which the changes due to it are profound. I think Africa is about to go through the second stage, driven by both growth of the internet and the mobile phone simultaneously. I think the effects are going to be profound, overwhelmingly good, and the continent will be barely recognisable in two decades time.

One major development that will help people in Africa is mobile banking. But we know how much we’re supposed to hate bankers, right? Our politicians tell us so, and you rarely find anyone to disagree. (Yes, banking in many countries is a cartel, but it’s one enabled by politicians and their lobby-bought regulations. People still need to move their money around, pay bills, invest, etc.) Reconcile this with the overwhelmingly popular view in the western world that we need to take as much money as possible out of the hands of the people who are driving this innovation and wealth creation. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

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