Mobile Phone Entrepreneurship in the Developing World

This morning, I’ve been reading about an exciting ongoing project called EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles) that is focused on fostering mobile-phone related research and entrepreneurship in the developing world. The EPROM project is lead by Nathan Eagle, whose seminal Ph.D. research at the MIT Media Laboratory focused on understanding complex human dynamics from social interaction data derived from mobile devices.

To fully appreciate the motivation for EPROM, it is important to consider the trends within Africa. The following statistics are from the EPROM site.

2006 Statistics

• Worldwide, there are more than 2.4 billion cellphone users, with more than 1,000 new customers added every minute.
• 59 percent of these 2.4 billion people live in developing countries, making cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world.
• Mobile phone shipments grew 19 percent to 810 million units in 2005 and are expected to rise by 15 percent to 930 million units in 2006
• Cellphone usage in Africa is growing almost twice as fast as any other region and jumped from 63 million users two years ago to 152 million today.
• Kenya is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. In June of 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2004 the country had 3.4 million subscribers, and in the last 18 months this number has grown to over 5.6 million, despite the fact that only 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity.
• It has been shown that adding an additional ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts a typical developing country’s GDP growth by 0.6 percent.
• Access to market information through mobile phones provides rural communities with invaluable information about centers of business; many African fishermen check the local fish market prices on their phones to determine where to bring the day’s catch. The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (Kace), now provides crop growers with up-to-date commodity information via text message (sms). This allows farmers to access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets, and many have quadrupled their earnings because they have access to information about potential buyers and prices before making the often arduous journey into urban centers to sell their produce.

Such statistics clearly indicate the power provided by communications technologies that support efficient information exchange and market formation. One particular example of this within the EPROM project is txteagle, a mobile crowdsourcing application that allows individuals to make small amounts of money by completing simple text-based tasks via text messaging.

EPROM has a strong empowerment agenda as well that is educating future African entrepreneurs on mobile phone application development technologies through the Mobile Phone Programming Curriculum and the SMS Boot Camp. It will be fascinating to watch how these empowerment activities fuel the development of new mobile social software, further supporting economic development.