The latest issue of Business Week contains an informative report on cellphones in Africa (mainly East Africa). ‘By yearend, Africa will have 261 million cellular subscriptions, more than 10 times the number in 2001. The penetration rate is approaching 28%, according to market watcher Informa Telecoms & Media in London.’
According to Business Week Reporter Jack Ewing ‘… the explanation for the growth, put forward by executives at Nokia, Ericsson, and other companies in the wireless industry, is that poor people are willing to spend their scarce cash on mobile communications because the return on investment is huge. Their lives improve dramatically when they can call a potential employer rather than going in person, summon medical help, or find out which local market is offering the best price for pineapple. Yet there is meager independent research to support this assertion. So I figured there was just one way to find out: Go talk to people in emerging markets myself.’
Apart from some hyperbole upfront ([''Cellphones'] arrival has changed life … as any development in the past century’), quoting the wisdoms of Jeffrey Sacks (a standard in Western journalism’s stories about economic issues on the continent),underestimating some of the negative effects of mobile technology on economic and social relations and consumption patterns (critics are dismissed as the ‘minority view’) and equating having cellphones with political freedom, the piece is actually very good. I really liked it. Good reporting.

* The image is from a slideshow that accompanied the story. It is credited to journalist Ewing.

The New York Times‘ Sunday Busines Times has published a report by one if its reporters Ron Nixon on an initiative to increase internet connectivity in Rwanda.
In 2003 the Rwandan government signed a contract with a US company Terracom to ‘lace Rwanda with fiber optic cables, connecting schools, government institutions and homes with low-cost, high-speed Internet service.’
Four years later, however, ‘… most of the benefits hailed by him and his company have failed to materialize,’ according to government officials.
The article deals with why this is still the case. According to Nixon the main reason for this state of affairs is because it is ‘emblematic of what can happen when good intentions [presumably on the part of Terracom and its owner] run into the technical, political and business realities of Africa.’
However, if you read the rest of the article, it tells a more complex story, including that the company promised more than it could deliver, was not always forthcoming about its changing motives [that the cellphone industry was more lucrative, for example] and that it also treated the Rwandan government with contempt some of the time [it secretly tried to trade its shares in the national telecommunications company, Rwanda Telecom].