[kictanet] Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

[alice]

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*Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?*
By SARA CORBETT.

 
   If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way 
to get
him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was 
at home
in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital 
of Ghana,
in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of
Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki,
London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but 
rather to
send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you'll get an ''out of 
office'' reply
redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current 
time
zone -- ''GMT +9'' or ''GMT -8'' -- so that when you do call, you may do 
so at a
courteous hour.

     Keep in mind, though, that Jan Chipchase will probably be too busy 
with his
job to talk much anyway. He could be bowling in Tupelo, Miss., or he 
could be
rummaging through a woman's purse in Shanghai. He might be busy 
examining the
advertisements for prostitutes stuck up in a Sao Paulo phone booth, or 
maybe
getting his ear hairs razored off at a barber shop in Vietnam. It really 
depends
on the moment.  

     Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and
high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be
amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last 
seven
years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a
''human-behavior researcher.'' He's also sometimes referred to as a ''user
anthropologist.'' To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His
mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people,
accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that 
he can
feed helpful bits of information back to the company -- to the squads of
designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set 
foot in
a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber
someday were to buy a Nokia.

     What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big
multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit. Pretty 
much
wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a 
couple of
soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might 
be even
remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia's nine design 
studios
around the world. Almost always, some explanation is necessary. A 
Mississippi
bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of
information about how people communicate. A photograph of the contents of a
woman's handbag is more than that; it's a window on her identity, what she
considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute 
ads in
the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, 
coupled
with real cellphone numbers -- lending to Chipchase's theory that in an
increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed 
piece of
our identity.

     Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside 
the
one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling
Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed 
them
about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and
their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly
interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several
months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a 
month, could
run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also
occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 
yards from
their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his 
phone inside
a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that 
they also
had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor
space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that 
sometimes
got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his 
family
over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all 
onto a hard
drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family's 
next
cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so 
it, like
everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.

     This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what's
known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become
especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to 
figure
out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that 
people find
useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies,
including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists 
to study
potential customers, while Nokia's researchers, including Chipchase, 
more often
have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to 
Vietnam or
India as an emissary for the company -- loaded with products and pitch 
lines, as
a marketer might be -- the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a 
patently
good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the 
shoe-shop
owner's wife, enlightening the company through written reports and 
PowerPoint
presentations on how they live and what they're likely to need from a 
cellphone,
allowing that to inform its design.

     The premise of the work is simple -- get to know your potential 
customers
as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those 
customers
live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in 
China,
when you are trying -- as Nokia and just about every one of its 
competitors is
-- to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people 
left on
earth who don't yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, 
making
$4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the 
challenges are
considerable.

     One morning last fall, I arranged to meet Chipchase in a 
neighborhood in
Accra where he and a few other Nokia people were doing research. At his
suggestion, I took a taxi to the general area and then called him on his
cellphone. This part of the city, called Nima, was a jumble of narrow 
alleyways
hemmed in by a few major thoroughfares and anchored by a teeming 
marketplace.
The homes in Nima were small, low-roofed and usually one or two rooms 
made from
concrete or crumbling mud bricks, often set back behind a homegrown 
business --
someone's peanut stand or a shack selling dust-coated secondhand stereos 
and
television sets. The streets around the market were swollen with a 
slow-moving
river of people. On their heads, Ghanaian women toted pyramids of 
pomegranates,
bagged loaves of fresh bread, baskets of live chickens. Trucks belched 
diesel
exhaust; men pushed carts full of sugar cane and fat, purplish bulbs of 
garlic.

     From an unseen distance, Chipchase used his phone to pilot me 
through the
unfamiliar chaos, allowing us to have what he calls a ''just in time'' 
moment.
''Just in time'' is a manufacturing concept that was popularized by the 
Japanese
carmaker Toyota when, beginning in the late 1930s, it radically revamped 
its
production system, virtually eliminating warehouses stocked with big 
loads of
car parts and instead encouraging its assembly plants to order parts 
directly
from the factory only as they were needed. The process became less 
centralized,
more incremental. Car parts were manufactured swiftly and in small batches,
which helped to cut waste, improve efficiency and more easily correct
manufacturing defects. As Toyota became, in essence, lighter on its 
feet, the
company's productivity rose, and so did its profits.

     There are a growing number of economists who maintain that 
cellphones can
restructure developing countries in a similar way. Cellphones, after 
all, have
an economizing effect. My ''just in time'' meeting with Chipchase required
little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the
oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to 
rendezvous.
He didn't have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. 
Knowing
that he wasn't waiting for me, I didn't fret about the extra 15 minutes 
my taxi
driver sat blaring his horn in Accra's unpredictable traffic. And now, 
on foot,
if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using 
mobile
phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. ''Do you see the
footbridge?'' Chipchase was saying over the phone. ''No? O.K., do you 
see the
giant green sign that says 'Believe in God'? Yes? I'm down to the left of
that.''

     To someone who has spent years using a mobile phone, these moments are
common enough to feel banal, but for people living in a shantytown like 
Nima --
and by extension in similar places across Africa and beyond -- the 
possibilities
afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary. 
Today,
there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which
means that there are at least three billion people who don't own 
cellphones, the
bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest 
improvements in
efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could
reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to 
understand.
This is part of what Chipchase was eager to show me, if only I could 
spot him.
''I'm by the hair-salon stall,'' he was saying into his phone. ''Next to 
that
goat. Do you see it? See me? Ah, yes,'' he said brightly, ''there you 
are.'' And
then, face to face and sweating in the climbing equatorial sun, we hung up.

     To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global
marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to 
statistics
from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years 
for the
first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold 
in four
years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world's
population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double 
the
level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications 
Union show
that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world's mobile subscriptions 
were in
developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run 
telecom
systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private
investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic
chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone
networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require 
customers to
have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or 
personal
computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the 
cellphone
is more egalitarian, at least to a point.

     ''You don't even need to own a cellphone to benefit from one,'' 
says Paul
Polak, author of ''Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches
Fail'' and former president of International Development Enterprises, a
nonprofit company specializing in training and technology for small-plot 
farmers
in developing countries. Part of I.D.E.'s work included setting up farm
cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a 
local
person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales 
agent, using
the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable 
sale.
''People making a dollar a day can't afford a cellphone, but if they start
making more profit in their farming, you can bet they'll buy a phone as 
a next
step,'' Polak says.

     Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based 
environmental
research group, published a report with the International Finance 
Corporation
entitled ''The Next Four Billion,'' an economic study that looked at, among
other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their 
money.
One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families 
invested a
significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category -- 
information-communication
technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study's principal 
author, can
include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this 
segment of the
population that's almost never the case. What they're buying, he says, are
cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more 
telling
is the finding that as a family's income grows -- from $1 per day to $4, 
for
example -- their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in 
any other
category, including health, education and housing. ''It's really quite
striking,'' Hammond says. ''What people are voting for with their 
pocketbooks,
as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are 
met, is
telecommunications.''

     There are clear reasons for this, but understanding them requires
forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your
cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that's mostly a convenience
booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our 
disposal --
land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars -- can be a life-saver to 
someone
with fewer ways to access information. A ''just in time'' moment 
afforded by a
cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry 
a child
with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like 
to know
first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to 
the rural
Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request 
information via
text message from a hospital in Kampala.

     Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off
example upon example of the cellphone's ability to increase people's
productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they 
can be
reached. There's the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an
indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could 
call
and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around 
outside
of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry 
other
people's loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs 
are. Having
a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity 
point,
which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move -- 
displaced by
war, floods, drought or faltering economies -- can be immensely valuable 
both as
a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business 
tool. Over
several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, 
prostitutes,
shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less 
the same
thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

     It may sound like corporate jingoism, but this sort of economic 
promise has
also caught the eye of development specialists and business scholars 
around the
world. Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked
fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they
invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective
buyers before they'd even got their catch to shore, their profits went 
up by an
average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went 
down by
4 percent. A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even
further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 
people, a
country's G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.

     Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a
particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable 
people
privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South 
Africa now
send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their
medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions 
about
culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted
diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.

     Some of the mobile phone's biggest boosters are those who believe that
pumping international aid money into poor countries is less effective than
encouraging economic growth through commerce, also called ''inclusive
capitalism.'' A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses 
it to
grow his business -- which presumably gives him more resources to feed, 
clothe,
educate and safeguard his family -- represents a textbook case of bottom-up
economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging
entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in 
which aid
money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its
beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive 
recipients.

     For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the 
microfinance
movement. After Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning founder of Grameen 
Bank, began
making microloans to women in poor countries so that they could buy
revenue-producing assets like cows and goats, he was approached by a
Bangladeshi expat living in the U.S. named Iqbal Quadir. Quadir posed a 
simple
question to Yunus -- If a woman can invest in a cow, why can't she 
invest in a
phone? -- that led to the 1996 creation of Grameen Phone Ltd. and has since
started the careers of more than 250,000 ''phone ladies'' in Bangladesh, 
which
is considered one of the world's poorest countries. Women use 
microcredit to buy
specially designed cellphone kits costing about $150, each equipped with a
long-lasting battery. They then set up shop as their village phone 
operator,
charging a small commission for people to make and receive calls.

     The endeavor has not only revolutionized communications in 
Bangladesh but
also has proved to be wildly profitable: Grameen Phone is now Bangladesh's
largest telecom provider, with annual revenues of about $1 billion. Similar
village-phone programs have sprung up in Rwanda, Uganda, Cameroon and 
Indonesia,
among other places. ''Poor countries are poor because they are wasting 
their
resources,'' says Quadir, who is now the director of the Legatum Center for
Development and Entrepreneurship at M.I.T. ''One resource is time, 
another is
opportunity. Let's say you can walk over to five people who live in your
immediate vicinity, that's one thing. But if you're connected to one 
million
people, your possibilities are endless.''

     During a 2006 field study in Uganda, Chipchase and his colleagues 
stumbled
upon an innovative use of the shared village phone, a practice called 
sente.
Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from 
place to
place, something that's especially important to those who do not use banks.
Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the 
equivalent of
$5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but
rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the 
village phone
operator (''phone ladies'' often run their businesses from small kiosks) 
and
read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and 
completes the
transaction by giving the man's mother the money, minus a small commission.
''It's a rather ingenious practice,'' Chipchase says, ''an example of
grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology 
based on
need.''

     It's also the precursor to a potentially widespread formalized 
system of
mobile banking. Already companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and 
GCash, in
the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their 
phones
to store cash credits transferred from another phone or purchased 
through a post
office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator. With their 
phones, they
can then make purchases and payments or withdraw cash as needed. Hammond 
of the
World Resources Institute predicts that mobile banking will bring huge 
numbers
of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply 
because
the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural
poor. This bodes well for cellphone companies, he says, since owning a 
phone
will suddenly have more value than sharing a village phone. ''If you're 
in Hanoi
after midnight,'' Hammond says, ''the streets are absolutely clogged with
motorbikes piled with produce. They give their produce to the guy who 
runs a
vegetable stall, and they go home. How do they get paid? They get paid 
the next
time they come to town, which could be a month or two later. You have to 
hope
you can find the stall guy again and that he remembers what he sold. But 
what if
you could get paid the next day on your mobile phone? Would you care 
what that
mobile costs? I don't think so.''

     In February of last year, when Vodafone rolled out its M-Pesa
mobile-banking program in Kenya, it aimed to add 200,000 new customers 
in the
first year but got them within a month. One year later, M-Pesa has 1.6 
million
subscribers, and Vodafone is now set to open mobile-banking enterprises 
in a
number of other countries, including Tanzania and India. ''Look, 
microfinance is
great; Yunus deserves his sainthood,'' Hammond says. ''But after 30 
years, there
are only 90 million microfinance customers. I'm predicting that 
mobile-phone
banking will add a billion banking customers to the system in five 
years. That's
how big it is.''

     When he is not doing his field work, Jan Chipchase goes to a lot of 
design
conferences, where he gives talks with titles like ''Connecting the
Unconnected.'' He also writes a popular blog called Future Perfect, on 
which he
posts photographs of some of the things that amaze him along with a 
little bit
of explanatory text. ''Pushing technologies on society without thinking
through their consequences is at least naive, at worst dangerous . . . 
and IMHO
the people that do it are just boring,'' he writes on his blog's 
description
page. ''Future Perfect is a pause for reflection in our planet's seemingly
headlong rush to churn out more, faster, smaller and cheaper.''

     Clearly, though, Chipchase's work puts him smack in the middle of this
rush, and no company churns out phones like Nokia, which manufactures 1.3
million products daily. Forty percent of the mobile phones sold last 
year were
made by Nokia, and the company's $8.4 billion profit in 2007 reflects as 
much.
Chipchase seems distinctly uncomfortable talking about his part as a 
corporate
rainmaker, preferring to see himself as a mostly dispassionate 
ethnographer,
albeit one with Nokia stock options. The only time I saw him get even 
slightly
prickly -- or indeed behave like anything but a mild-mannered guy who is 
wholly
absorbed by the small, arcane things that serve as clues to bigger 
patterns of
communication -- was when I happened to muse that maybe there were still 
places
in the world where technology might not be so vital.

     We were sitting under a slow-revolving ceiling fan in a small 
restaurant in
Accra, eating bowls of piquant Ghanaian peanut-and-chicken stew. 
Chipchase told
a story about meeting some monk disciples at a temple in Ulan Bator, 
when he
vacationed in Mongolia a few Decembers ago. (Most of Chipchase's vacation
stories, it turns out, take place in less-developed countries, often in
forbidding weather and frequently relating back to cellphone use.) 
Despite their
red robes and shaved heads and the fact they were spending their days in 
a giant
monastery at the top of a windy hill where they were meant to be in 
dialogue
with God, some of the 15 monk disciples had cellphones -- Nokia 
cellphones --
and most were fancier models than the one Chipchase was carrying. One of 
the
disciples asked to look at Chipchase's phone. ''So he's got my phone and 
his
phone,'' Chipchase told me. ''And as we're talking, he's switching on the
Bluetooth. And he then data-mines my phone for all its content, all my
photographs and so on, which is absolutely fine, but it's kind of a 
scene where
you think, I'm here, I'm so away from everything and yet they're so 
technically
literate. . . . ''

     This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be
something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its
convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. 
Chipchase
raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear 
that
responding to me was going to require patience. ''People can think, 
yeah, monks
with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?'' he 
said. ''But
if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them,
they'd probably say: 'You're going to have to fight me for it. Are you 
going to
take my sewer and water away too?' And maybe you can't put communication 
on the
same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some
contexts, it's quite viable as a fundamental right.'' He paused a beat 
to let
this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, ''People once 
believed that
people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.''

     For the last year, Chipchase has been working on a project he calls 
Future
Urban, the goal of which is to explore what the cities of tomorrow will 
be like.
Which is why one afternoon in Ghana he provided me with minute-to-minute
cellphone instructions (''Do you see the sewing stall? O.K., now look to 
the
right'') for finding him at the outskirts of Buduburam, a densely populated
refugee settlement about an hour's drive west of Accra. For the previous 11
days, Chipchase, two of his female colleagues from Tokyo -- Indri 
Tulusan and
Younghee Jung -- and a small group of hired Ghanaians had been running 
what they
called an ''open design studio'' in the heart of Buduburam, which is 
home to
approximately 40,000 people, most of whom had fled from the civil wars in
neighboring Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

     Nokia's temporary design studio sat in a rented two-room concrete 
hut at
the intersection of two busy dirt lanes, across from a woman selling 
chunks of
watermelon and peeled lemons and next to a large water tank labeled 
''Church of
God.'' There was a sheet of fabric strung up in front, with neat painted
lettering that read: ''Your Dream Phone. Share it with the world.'' It 
went on
to describe how the community was invited to come share ideas and 
drawings for
the ideal mobile phone. Prizes were offered. So far, 140 people had 
shown up to
sketch their dream phone.

     ''For the first time, there are more people living in urban centers 
than in
rural settings,'' Chipchase explained as we sat in the shade outside the 
studio.
''And in the next years, millions more will move to these places.'' At 
current
rates of migration, the  United Nations  Human Settlements Program has 
projected
that one-quarter of the earth's population will live in so-called slums 
by the
year 2020. Slums, by sheer virtue of the numbers, are going to start 
mattering
more and more, Chipchase postulated. In the name of preparing Nokia for 
this
shift, he, Jung and Tulusan, along with a small group of others, spent 
several
weeks in various shantytowns -- in Mumbai, in Rio, in western China and 
now here
in Ghana.

     People in the mobile-handset business talk about adding customers 
not by
the millions but by the billions, if only they could get the details 
right. How
do you make a phone that can be repaired by a streetside repairman who 
may not
have access to new parts? How do you build a phone that won't die a 
quick death
in a monsoon or by falling off the back of a motorbike on a dusty road? 
Or a
phone that picks up distant signals in a rural place, holds a charge off 
a car
battery longer or that can double as a flashlight during power cuts? 
Influenced
by Chipchase's study on the practice of sharing cellphones inside of 
families or
neighborhoods, Nokia has started producing phones with multiple address 
books
for as many as seven users per phone. To enhance the phone's usefulness to
illiterate customers, the company has designed software that cues users 
with
icons in addition to words. The biggest question remains one of price: 
Nokia's
entry-level phones run about $45; Vodafone offers models that are closer 
to $25;
and in a move that generated headlines around the world, the Indian 
manufacturer
Spice Limited recently announced plans to sell a $20 ''people's phone.''

     Even as sales continue to grow, it is yet to be seen whether the 
mobile
phone will play a significant, sustained role in alleviating poverty in the
developing world. In Africa, it's still only a relatively small 
percentage of
the population that owns cellphones. Network towers are not particularly
cost-effective in remote areas, where power is supplied by diesel fuel. ''I
don't see cellphones as a magic bullet per se, though they're obviously 
very
helpful,'' says Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, a nonprofit entity that
provides free text-messaging software and information-technology support to
grass-roots enterprises, mostly in Africa. ''Many people in the 
developing world
don't yet have a phone -- not because they don't want one but because 
there are
barriers. And the only way companies are going to sell phones is to 
understand
what those barriers are.'' He cites access to reliable electricity as a 
major
barrier, noting that Motorola now provides free solar-powered charging 
kiosks to
female entrepreneurs in Uganda, who use them to sell airtime. The 
company is
also testing wind- and solar-powered base stations in Namibia, which 
could bring
down the cost of connecting remote areas to cellular networks. ''Originally
mobile-phone companies weren't interested in power because it's not their
business,'' Banks says. ''But if a few hundred million people could buy 
their
phones once they had it, they're suddenly interested in power.''

     Many of the people in Buduburam who came to sketch their ideas for a
perfect phone at the Nokia studio did not actually own one. The community's
power grid had been down for the last month, so those who did have one 
had been
paying to have their phones charged at a local shop with a diesel-run 
generator.
But when I paged through the fat three-ring binders where the Nokia team 
was
storing those sketches, it was evident that the future, or at least some 
vision
of it, had already arrived. Some of the drawings were basic pencil 
sketches;
others were strikingly elaborate, with arrows pointing to different dream
features, which were really just a way of pointing -- I realized then -- 
to the
dreams themselves.

     Jung and Tulusan said they'd found this everywhere, the phone 
representing
what people are aspiring to. ''It's an easy way to see what's important 
to them,
what their challenges are,'' Jung said. One Liberian refugee wanted to 
outfit a
phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to 
his home
village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could
forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims 
wanted
G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a 
phone
shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious 
drinking
water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarezinho, a bustling 
favela in
Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women
sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. 
Another
designed a ''peace button'' that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood 
with a
single touch.

     Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a
remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and 
peace.
After the government imposed a media blackout in late December last year,
Kenyans sought news and information via S.M.S. messages on their phones 
and used
them to track down friends and family who'd fled their homes. Many also 
reported
receiving unsolicited text messages to take up arms. The government 
responded
with an admonition, sent, of course, via S.M.S.: ''The Ministry of Internal
Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any 
S.M.S. that
may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.''

     As a joke, Chipchase sometimes pulls out his cellphone and pretends to
shave his face with it, using a buzzing ring tone for comic effect. But 
there's
a deeper truth embedded here, not just for people in places like Kenya or
Buduburam but for all of us. As cellphone technology grows increasingly
sophisticated, it has cannibalized -- for better or worse -- the 
technologies
that have come before it. Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens 
your needs
for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video 
camera,
home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With 
the
advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as 
well. That
a phone might someday offer a nice close shave suddenly seems not so 
ridiculous
after all.

     One morning I followed Chipchase as he waded deep into the Nima 
market, a
hodgepodge of vegetable stalls and phone-booth-size stores selling 
sundries like
candles and palm oil. He was accompanied by a Ghanaian interpreter and 
two Nokia
designers who had flown in from California to test the cultural waters 
for a
phone that -- if everything played out perfectly -- could cost as little 
as $5.
The $5 phone was still a pie-in-the-sky concept, explained Duncan Burns, 
one of
the designers, something they were fiddling with to see if it might be 
possible
someday probably years from now. Each time the group stopped to chat with
someone, Burns pulled out several prototypes -- or ''physical 
sketches,'' as he
called them -- for potential phones, handing them over one by one for
examination.

     These were elegant, futuristic-looking things, just odd enough to 
seem as
if they'd arrived not from California but from outer space. One was long 
and
wandlike, looking something like an aluminum version of a thick vanilla 
bean.
Another was a slimmer rendering of an everyday phone but with no keypad 
and no
screen, just a single unmarked button. A third did not look at all like 
a phone
but rather like a credit card. There were a couple of small digital 
photos of
people's faces stuck to the front of the card, and it came with a small 
stylus
that could be used, Burns said, to touch a face on the card, which would 
then
dial that person's number -- a pictorial address book for someone who was
illiterate. A fourth had a camera that took pictures and deposited them 
right
into the phone's address book.

     A young man selling beans stared at each of the pretend phones
uncomfortably, as if he mistrusted the devices or perhaps the small 
crowd of
sweat-soaked foreigners suddenly leaning in close to see how he handled 
them.

     ''How would you use that?'' Chipchase asked through the 
interpreter, using
a dialect called Twi and pointing to the wand phone. The bean seller 
tentatively
lifted it to his ear. ''Where would you keep it?'' The young man 
gestured to his
neck. ''On a rope?'' Chipchase said. The man, still looking bewildered, 
nodded
yes.

     Moments later, we came upon an ample-bodied woman dressed in a 
bright gold
wrapper and matching head scarf, sifting rocks and twigs out of 
scoopfuls of
corn beneath an umbrella in a quiet corner of the market.

     ''Hellllloooooo,'' Chipchase said, smiling broadly.

     ''Helllllooooo, Brudda,'' she said back in English.

     ''We work for Nokia. You know Nokia?''

     The woman said nothing, but reached down and from the folds of her 
wrapper
produced a Nokia phone. ''Not good,'' she said, shaking her head 
disparagingly.
''You call. It switches off.''

     Chipchase enlisted the interpreter to explain that her problem 
sounded like
a network problem and not a Nokia problem. Shrugging, the woman went on to
inspect the prototype phones, testing their weight in her palm, pressing 
them
against her cheek, punching buttons. She pooh-poohed the stylus phone 
but said
she liked the one-button model if it meant she didn't need to use a lot of
numbers. ''Brudda, how do you charge it?'' she asked. From his bag, 
Burns pulled
another still-conceptual design, this one a thin metal cylinder with a
whirlybird antenna on top. He showed the corn seller how to rotate the 
cylinder
in small circles, causing the antenna to swing, which, he explained, in 15
minutes or so would generate enough power to charge her phone battery.

     The woman picked up the futuristic gizmo and began to swing it; the 
antenna
whipped around and around. She let out an enthusiastic whoop. Then a 
friend of
hers who'd been sitting in the shadow of her umbrella started to laugh. 
Another
woman, a spice seller perched on a stool next to small mountains of 
turmeric and
cumin heaped on canvas cloths, began to laugh also. ''Very nice,'' the corn
seller said to Burns and Chipchase, swinging the antenna like a toy. ''It's
good!'' Then, after a moment, she gathered her composure and handed the 
charger
off to her son, a heavy-lidded teenager who was lounging on a sack of corn
nearby. ''Doing that,'' she said blithely as she returned to picking 
through her
kernels of corn, ''can be his job.''

 

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