Mobile Phones: Uplifting Weak and Failed States

Abstract

Mobile telephones are revolutionizing politics and driving political change throughout the developing world. Nothing is so powerful, so transformative. Mobile telephone technology has already changed how people in the developing world cope with their political, economic, and social circumstances. Now, through its ability interactively to transmit verbal and visual (photos or video) information by voice and/or text messaging, mobile telephone technology is poised dramatically to improve human outcomes and life choices for many millions across the globe’s weak and failed states. No other recently-introduced technology has been so widely embraced or has so much potential to alter rural and urban outcomes for the better in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. Mobile phone coverage in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has grown at staggering rates over the past decade. In 1999, only 10 percent of the population had mobile phone coverage, primarily in South Africa and Senegal. From 2000 to 2008, according to Wireless Intelligence and the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association, persons owning mobile telephones in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 16 million to 376 million. By 2012, that figure was over 500 million, perhaps two-thirds or more of the entire population of the subcontinent. (Individuals sometimes share telephones, thus multiplying the number of users, or some individuals own multiple telephones and multiple subscriber identity