Originally published November 27 2005
Cell phones change life in Africa
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
It is estimated that 100 million of the 906 million people on the African continent have cell phones. Minutes have actually become a form of currency, transferable from phone to phone through text messaging.
"We can easily link up with customers, brokers and the market," she says, sitting between two piles of watermelons at Wakulima Market in Kenya's capital.
Another is Omar Abdulla Saidi, phoning in from his sailboat on the Zanzibar coast looking for the port that will give him the biggest profit on his freshly caught red snapper, tuna and shellfish.
Then there are South Africans and Kenyans slinging cell phones round the necks of elephants to track them through bush and jungle.
And there's Beatrice Enyonam, a cosmetics vendor in Togo, keeping in touch with her husband by cell phone when he's traveling in the West African interior.
As cell-phone relay towers sprout on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti plain, providers are racing to keep up with their exploding market.
Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in 2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western Europe, according to Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese who chairs Celtel, a leading African provider.
Prepaid air minutes are the preferred means of usage and have created their own $2 billion-a-year industry of small-time vendors, the Celtel chief says.
"We are developing unique ways to use the phone, which has not been done anywhere else," says South African Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, one of two service providers in Kenya.
For an impoverished continent, low-cost phones make "a perfect fit."
And cash-strapped governments which have had to give up their monopoly on land lines are looking to reap huge revenues from license fees, customs duties and taxes on calls.
It cuts the cost of tracking wildlife by up to 60 percent, said Professor Wouter van Hoven of the University of Pretoria's Center for Wildlife Management.
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