Phones in the developing world

A direct development of the paper I am working on (specifically due to the Safaricom IPO, the largest sub-Saharan African IPO) I came across this, a great article on the use, benefit, and unexpected demand for mobile phones in the developing world:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/sep2007/gb20070913_705733.htm

 

Excerpt:

What would a Kenyan farmer want with a mobile phone? Plenty, as it turns out. To the astonishment of the industry, people living on a few dollars a day have proven avid phone users, and in many parts of the world cellular airtime has become a de facto currency. The reason is simple: A mobile phone can dramatically improve living standards by saving wasted trips, providing information about crop prices, summoning medical help, and even serving as a conduit to banking services. "The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development," says Columbia University economist and emerging markets expert Jeffrey Sachs.

Mobile phones are changing developing markets faster than anyone imagined. Today there are some 3 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, and that will grow to 5 billion by 2015, when two-thirds of the people on earth will have phones, predicts Finnish handset maker Nokia Corp.