Patterns of Mobile Phone Use in Africa

The distinctive features of this chapter are that it is conducted from an inter-country perspective; that it takes use rather than adoption as the measure of welfare; and that it deals with numerous impact mechanisms other than the purely economic (such as health and safety). Yet, the chapter retains a close affinity with Chaps. 5 and 7 ; the former because of its main hypothesis that mobile technology will be most widely used in countries lacking a viable alternative to the new technology. The latter chapter because it also challenges the conventional measure of the digital divide which is based on adoption rather than use. Particular attention is paid to the relatively poor East African countries in the sample, which tend to make the most intensive use of mobile phones in the areas of economics, health, social capital and safety. Because it turns out to be the most important of these use mechanisms and since it is not widely discussed in the literature, safety is studied more intensively in the Appendix to this chapter. A key question in this regard is why safety constitutes such a popular mechanism for mobile phone use in the countries concerned. My tentative answer is that it has much to do with the interactions between crime, poverty and inequality.