Hmmm… I spotted this over at “Smartmobs”:http://www.smartmobs.com about rising mobile phone usage in Africa this morning…

African leaders will launch a global fund to help people in poor countries buy mobile phones and Internet access as a step out of poverty and into economic growth, the president of Senegal said on Wednesday, reports Reuters

“There are more telephones in Manhattan than in all Africa,” President Abdoulaye Wade said at a news conference held on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly meeting.

The new fund, pooling voluntary contributions solicited from buyers of high-tech goods in wealthy nations, will be launched in Geneva on Nov. 17, Wade said.

While the fund will primarily help poorer countries, wealthy nations also have a stake in its success as the fund will bring in “millions and millions of dollars” that will be used to buy equipment from the industrialized world, he said.

This is a really old article so the news is, well, old news but I think it illustrates the dilema Africa is facing. Technology can definately play a strong role in shaping Africa’s future but the approach here, this fund, seems to be missing the point completely.

Looks at what’s happening in Brazil. Lawrence Lessig went and had a look at the “Brazilian free software movement”:http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_14505,300,p1.html

bq. As I listened to the Brazilians explain the free-software lab, I began to realize that this pattern was recurring. They were doing for culture what “Stallman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman had done for software. The lab was not so much about “free software.” It did not, for example, teach people how to make free software. Its aim instead was to help them build free culture using free software. The lab offered “workshops about video editing, audio editing, collaboration tools, [and] online collaboration,” all “on top of free software.” But the objective of this teaching wasn’t, or wasn’t just, better software. The objective was a different economy for culture. Culture itself, as one Brazilian explained to me, should be free, meaning, he said, “free as in free software.”

That’s the point africa is missing. Ok, there are more phones in Manhattan than in all Africa but so what? What do you actually want these phones for? _To help people in poor countries buy mobile phones and Internet access as a step out of poverty and into economic growth_ What does that actually mean? How can technology create wealth? and how do we make that wealth accessable to the average man?

And this bit really freaks me out:

bq. _While the fund will primarily help poorer countries, wealthy nations also have a stake in its success as the fund will bring in “millions and millions of dollars” that will be used to buy equipment from the industrialized world, he said._

Africa seems way too preocupied with becoming the ideal _emerging market_.

But, all that bitching and moaning aside, here is some really interesting research that looks at addressing the technological divide: “Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication”:http://research.nokia.com/bluesky/non-literacy-001-2005/index.html

The United Nations estimates the total number of illiterate adults to be 799 million worldwide, 270 million of which are located in India alone. UNESCO defines illiteracy as a ‘person who cannot with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on their everyday life’. In this article, the author uses the term ‘textually non-literate’ to reflect that there are many ways to define literacy. For example, task-literacy can be the ability to complete a particular task, computer-literacy the ability to make basic use of a computer. The author acknowledges that non-literacy is not caused by lack of ability but rather by lack of opportunities for learning.

The key question for mobile phone manufacturers who wish to address the communication needs of this potential customer base is: How does the inability to read and write affect the ability of mobile phone users to make effective use of mobile phones? How can we design communication tools that draw on the knowledge and experiences that these users do have?

The answers to these questions will help create technology of real value for Africa. This is where the focus needs to lie.