Joel Selanikio, MD

THE CASE FOR
AFRICA AS A MOBILE
DEVELOPMENT
HOTHOUSE
Joel Selanikio, MD
Overview
•
What’s happening in Africa with cell phones and the
internet?
•
Why is it di!erent from what’s happening here?
•
Why would it be useful to increase development
capacity in Africa?
•
Why does it matter for us?
60"
Average annual mobile
subscriber growth,
1994-2004
58"
45"
34"
30"
15"
21"
23"
Oceania
Americas
26"
29"
0"
Europe
World
ITU 2006 Report
Asia
Africa
Cell vs. internet
expansion in Africa
(millions)
100
82.0
75
51.0
50
28.0
25
2.0
0
1998
4.7
0.5
2000
2002
2003
Source: Economist, ITU
2004
2007
African access vs US
#
African access vs US
•
Cell phone user in US very likely to have access to
Web$enabled desktop or laptop
•
Cell phone user in Africa extremely unlikely to have
that access
•
Cell phone user in Africa is extremely unlikely to get
that access any time soon
•
This means that the low$bandwidth cell phone is the
most likely route to the internet for the foreseeable
future
But what can you do with
slow processors and lowbandwidth??
Let’s not forget:
IBM PC %1981$1987&: 4.8Mhz, 640K RAM
Apple Macintosh %1984&: 8Mhz, 128K RAM
Palm Treo 650 !2004" #: 312MHz, 32M RAM
Apple iPhone !2007" #: 620MHz, 8G RAM
Necessity being the mother
of invention...
•
We think it’s likely that if you have
skilled developers based in that
environment, AND,
•
If we can stop them from taking
jobs installing and troubleshooting
Windows, THEN,
•
They’re more likely than their
opposite numbers in Silicon Valley
to come up with important, useful,
low$bandwidth apps for mobile
phones
For example
•
What about giving people the ability to search
the “text internet” via SMS?
•
Or even just giving special groups, like doctors,
access to reference materials for drugs, diseases
info, etc?
•
Why not managing your own medical record on
your SIM?
•
How about reminding parents that their children
need to be vaccinated?
A real example: m-banking
So what are we doing?
•
Working with The Vodafone Group Foundation and
the UN Foundation on a plan to set up and/or support
a variety of programs to increase mobile development
capacity
•
EPROM.mit.edu as a model and potential partner
•
Setting up a development center in Africa to support
public health programming needs
Discussion
Joel Selanikio
joel@datadyne.org