We’ve reached a very strange point in human history when it is assumed that people who don’t have access to food will have working cell phones.
lfar:
[This was observed by Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating, who] points to an announcement by the UN that it will use cell phones to send $22 vouchers to Iraqi refugee families in Syria every two months. They are provided with special SIM cards for the transactions, and the vouchers can then be exchanged for staples such as rice, flour, lentils, chickpeas, and oil at selected stores.
Perhaps expecting that eye brows might be raised at the idea that those needing food aid would have cell phones, the UN’s Emilia Casella reports, “all the 130,000 Iraqi refugees currently receiving food aid from the agency in Syria have mobile phones.” (tpr)
In Kenya, everybody had a cell phone, and I lived in a really rural place. I guess people might raise eye brows here, because we have fancy cell phones with colour screens and $50/month plans with our carrier. I don’t even have a cell phone at all when I live in Canada, but I had one in Kenya!
Kenya boasts the world’s first system to send money by phone. (M-PESA, it’s really cool) What people don’t have are bank accounts or addresses or post-office boxes. Sending money by phone is incredibly smart and effective.
Cell phone use is uneven across African countries: “In Gabon, the Seychelles, and South Africa there are 100 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people. In Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, the mobile industry has only penetrated 10 percent of the population.” (source) Which is just more reason why you should donate your old ones!
While this might raise some eyebrows - “If you can’t afford food how can you justify a cell phone?!?!” - it’s actually a huge step forward for many developing countries. Rather than spend the money to develop telephone infrastructure, these countries can go wireless and spend that infrastructure on other things. (Like, maybe, food.) Essentially, they can skip that whole step!
