In the rural areas around Hyderabad, in central, a small revolution has overturned in a few years, power relations secular. The true masters, until yesterday, were the middlemen, the wholesalers who were buying the crops of rice and corn to hundreds of thousands of small farmers, then resell them in town.
At what price include? At the same wholesalers that the assured to be fair, in those market conditions. Besides, how could they control the peasants? With one phone call, certainly, but good, old phone never came in those campaigns: in the world, says the World Bank, there are around one billion telephone lines and more than half are in Europe and the United States. This is what has changed over the past five to six years: now you can make a shot phone, which is easy to bring in the countryside, it works and keeps at bay the intermediary.
The success was such that, today, the farmers of Hyderabad have a situation not too different from those of the legendary trader on Wall Street. Reuters, one of the few real gig, via SMS, information on time and on price movements. We are accustomed to thinking that the arrival of the mobile phone has profoundly altered our daily routine of the West. But, in reality, it is little stuff. It is in what used to be called Third World that the phone – not even mentioned in the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN ten years ago – had a disruptive impact, revolutionizing people’s lives in depth, the economy and the very way of conceiving money.
From India to Africa, the mobile phone is both a window on the distant outside world means business, bank. The first to understand were the people involved. The boom of mobile phones today is in countries in the developing world. Since 2000, the number of mobile subscribers in developed countries has remained more or less the same. The explosion occurred in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Results, also, paradoxical.
Six and a half billion people on Earth, more than a billion have no running water, 1.6 billion have no electricity, 2.6 billion do not have sewers. But only 2.5 billion do not have a cell phone. Statistics, in fact, is a bit ’stretched: the more than 4 billion cell phone subscriptions, surveyed by the World Bank, include, for even whom, telephone cards, has two, three or (at Moggi) a score. However, according to one of the major handset manufacturers, Ericsson, the number of users with at least one subscriber is a mundane level, at 3.6 billion: more than 70 percent in developing countries. In short, only three billion people still lack a mobile phone.
Probably, for many of them, not for long. “The next billion subscribers – is betting the study of World Bank – are poor peasants. Recent history seems to prove it: the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world, where less than 1 percent of the population (4 million) have access to a landline phone in less than a year the mobile network has already collected 127 thousand subscribers. In the small and troubled Guinea-Bissau (1.5 million inhabitants), in a year and a half there were 60 thousand subscriptions.
But these are extreme cases and more recent. In the most backward continent, Africa, in 2000 there was a phone every 50 inhabitants. Today, mobile penetration has reached 28 percent of the population: it is easy to see the fishing boats in the desert between the camels in front of a pile of mangoes in the country. It is an epoch-making revolution, stress, researchers from the International Monetary Fund, “in less than a generation has made in developing countries, agriculture, markets, fisheries, transport, irrigation, banking and small businesses. ”
And, somehow, the same theory of economic development. Once, establish a national mail service and a fixed telephone network, was a necessary step in the development of a country. No more: mobile phones, observe the IMF, it would allow developing countries to “leapfrog a stage of economic development that before, undertook a country for decades.”
The reason is obvious. Implanting a fixed telephone network infrastructure involves heavy, expensive, pervasive, long to achieve. The mobile network has virtually none of these problems. Peasant country, condemned the export of one or two commodities can create wireless networks on a large scale, modern, almost in a few weeks. The web of Guinea Bissau has cost 25 million dollars, less than that of the Central African Republic 40. And, contrary to what would have happened, probably, with fixed telephony, networks are advanced, fully digital. Why are more modern and less cost. The next step, warns the World Bank, will be the spread of broadband (wireless) Internet.
But even with the voice and SMS, the mobile phone has already changed a channel crucial: that of money. In particular, the money of the poor. Elizabeth Littlefield, the IMF notes that poor families have more complex financial needs than you think, save money by buying bricks or animals, they do anticipate money from shops, receive remittances from relatives abroad, money deposited by neighbors with homes safer .
Research has shown that households in Bangladesh use at least four different types of financial services (to black or not) and some even ten. Usually, the key problem is how to move money. We’re working in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and you want to send money home, in Arusha, in the interior. Traditionally, with some risk, you could confide in someone or bring them personally, with a twenty-hour bus ride through the forest. It is here that enters the field today, the “mobile banking”, where a mobile does not mean a truck carrying a bank branch here and there, but the mobile phone. The secret, no one knows who discovered, is to use your phone bills for your phone.
The system recalls the “letters of credit” of the Middle Ages and is easier than it looks. Buy a prepaid calling card and then the cell phone the seller of your village. The code read the paper, if he collects on his mobile phone and gives the equivalent in hard cash to your mother. Or, if you want to buy a cow, do the same thing on the phone breeder. Given that the numbers involved are usually relatively small, the process ends without a hitch.
In countries where you can buy directly called by the manager, the credit can be transferred directly, even with an sms. African telephone companies are gearing up to create real accounts by telephone, where you can deposit real money on your phone bill and send it with a code, through text messages, such as a bank transfer.
The greatest success of the finance cabinet is Kenya, where in two years, 6.5 million people have used the phone to transfer money. In fact, a Kenyan on two uses this system to move money, almost $ 2 million travelers every day in the ether of the country in this way, most transactions in the order of $ 20. The point is that costs little, almost nothing compared to alternatives.
Send money by mail involves a commission of 5 percent, through Western Union up to 57.5 percent. Via phone, 2.8 percent. The result, calculates the IMF, is that each week the Kenyan poor savers, this way, $ 4 million. It is basically an entire new branch of finance: The World Bank estimates that there’s a billion people in the world with a subscription to the phone, but no bank account. At least 360 million could be attracted, by 2012, a mobile financial service. Sms.