Africans get upwardly mobile in cell phone boom
CNN reports on the cell phone boom in Africa:
“In less than a decade, cellphones, once the preserve of the very rich, are now ubiquitous in Africa and parts of Asia.
A device that’s sometimes used as a fashion accessory in the West has become a lifeline for millions of people in the developing world.” […]
“In the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a population of 60 million, there are just 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million cellphone subscribers. While in Chad, the fifth-least developed country in Africa, cellphone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.”
[…] Putting people first points to this acticle by CNN: “Africans get upwardly mobile in cell phone boom“. The report is focusing on numbers and starts with a story about a cab driver in Accra, the captial Ghana, where back in 2002 land plots where exchanged against cell phones. Nowadays cell phones are everywhere, even the poorest own them. There are now almost seven million cellphone users in Ghana, up from only a couple hundred thousand subscribers in 2000. The continent’s biggest users are in South Africa, with nearly 25 million subscribers, followed by Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco. [snip taken from here] […]