The ‘mobile revolution’ of cell phone companies and customers in Malawi over the last five years makes it easy to envisage a time in the not too distant future when the digital divide will cease to be a byword for the have and have-nots.
Malawians are never wasteful. A household item discarded by one family will be salvaged for a different purpose with another. Sugar bags are plastic wallets for the health passports at clinics; bicycle parts can be made into an over-land stretcher for carrying patients in rural locations to the clinic; and plastic kitchen utensils can be interactive toys for young children. And so it so it should come as no surprise that mobile phones are no exception to the potential for adaptability and renewal. Old car batteries are rigged up inside brightly painted roadside shacks; serving as charging stations for mobile phone handsets. I’ve also seen ingenious relaying by SMS message of English football team scores onto wooden placards in villages where satellite TV is not a reality in the local drinking dens.
Reception desk at Matawale Clinic in Zomba – the radio receiver is used in place of a mobile phone or email but it is not ideal for communicating detailed information and cannot store messages when staff are busy with a patient.
Mobile phones are light, durable in the dust and heat, and a relatively cheap means of communication when compared to landline telephones in remote areas. Yet, despite a rate of uptake in SIM cards and handsets unprecedented in Europe, the Malawian love affair with the mobile phone can frustrate the most patient of foreign visitors to the country:
“Mobile etiquette seems to dictate that almost any activity, particularly a meeting, can be interrupted to take a call.”
Should this matter? Are mobile phone calls of inherently greater importance in Malawi than elsewhere because of the unreliability of landline telephones and the poor road infrastructure?
In my next post, I’ll touch on whether Internet access is the ultimate communications enabler and whether Malawi is ready for projects like One Laptop per Child and the Intel Classmate. In the meantime, you can read some background about these and other developments in information and communications technology on pages on this blog site.
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