What if you have a mobile phone but you can’t read? Claire Melamed

February 7, 2011 | More on Africa, Economics and development | 9 comments

What will happen if mobile phone use carries on expanding at its current rate in Africa, but literacy rates don’t improve? This graph, using data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, gives us the answer:

If (and it’s a quite colossal if), the projections in this graph are correct, then by the end of next year there will be more mobile phone subscriptions in Africa than people who are literate. That’s when illiteracy, and not lack of access to technology, might be the thing that stops people communicating.

You need a minimum of literacy to be able to use a mobile. And if mobile phones become the main way that people access the internet, which may well happen as people leapfrog straight to smartphones, then illiteracy and not lack of technology may become the barrier to internet access too.

Mobile phones can help with literacy, of course, and there are already many pilot programmes testing out how this could work in different contexts. But at the moment the trend seems pretty overwhelming.

This graph shows another source of widening inequalities open up in front of our eyes. People who cannot read will be excluded from the information and opportunties offered by mobile phones and, soon, the internet, as well as those offered by paper and ink.

Of course there are many reasons why it probably won’t happen exactly as predicted by this graph. The people who are hardest to reach with literacy programmes will be the ones least likely to get access to mobile technology too. And the spread of mobile phones may slow down. And data from Africa, particularly when added up across the whole continent, is notoriously unreliable (there are just two data points for adult literacy, for example, in 2000 and 2008, so that line at least may well be a bit off).

But it does show a problem. This graph shows that while we’re probably right to get excited by the possiblities offered by new technology, those same technologies might make the old problems more rather than less important.

(with thanks to Alex Evans, it was a conversation with him back in September which got me wondering about this)

9 comments »

Thomas on February 7th, 2011 at 9:54 pm:

Presumably diffusion of internet access should have an effect similar to diffusion of books – increase in literacy because literacy becomes relevant. The movement for internet access can perhaps be compared to the free library movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries?
Vinay Rao on February 8th, 2011 at 12:55 am:

Literacy will improve because of the mobile phone. Especially true if most of the country is under the age of 25 (like in India). The rate of spread of mobile devices will not decrease because of literacy issues.
android developer on February 8th, 2011 at 5:04 am:

I agree on what Vinay Rao said that "Literacy will improve because of the mobile phone." using mobile phones it can help young people to improve their literacy and numeracy skills and to recognise their existing abilities.
janetcafod on February 8th, 2011 at 10:13 am:

There are a growing number of really exciting voice-driven ICT services – @speak2tweet got much attention in relation to Egypt. But Freedom Fone (http://www.freedomfone.org – designed in Zimbabwe) and Question Box (http://questionbox.org/ – designed based on testing in India and Uganda) are both projects that push us to think how to get information to those who prefer to listen as opposed to read.

One thing I really like about Question Box is its potential to serve as a kind of "village Google" – beyond dispensing information, it could create a vast body of data about what people actually want and need.
Eduardo Jezierski on February 8th, 2011 at 12:25 pm:

Many mobile apps – especially for this audience – are built with SMS because it's trivial to program, not because it's the right thing.
I think the use of bridge non-digital devices can be helpful – such as http://instedd.org/technologies/reporting-wheel/

(( Also.. at InSTEDD we are working with support of USAID and Google on a set of services that would allow folks take advantage of open source switch technology like Freeswitch; wrapped into simple http APIs so that any local developer with basic skills can also do voice-based applications for his country and community – as reaching the 'bottom of the pyramid' is not just design as much as access. We are going to do first pilots in Bangladesh in the next months, on maternal child health projects. Please contact us if it may be interesting, we want to hear your thoughts early on!))
Rachael Burke on February 9th, 2011 at 2:53 pm:

A brief point (that doesn't necessarily undermine the argument), but this shows total number of mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people. It's not necessarily showing the proportion of people with access to a mobile phone… as becomes obvious when you that the end of the red line goes up to 145. % literacy is obviously limited at 100%. Firstly, this makes the graph appear more impressive at first glance because the two lines aren't showing the same stats. Secondly, just because your neighbour has three mobile phones (as it not uncommon in anecdotal evidence for small traders etc. who have one phone on each network), doesn't necessarily mean you have access to a mobile phone.
But thanks for an interesting post, and those minor technical things certainly don't negate the main point.
Claire Melamed on February 10th, 2011 at 9:50 am:

Rachael, yes, I agree the two stats aren't quite comparable – but this was the best I could find on World Development Indicators! I expect that looking at these two trends at national and local level, with better data, would, as always, reveal more interesting and complex things going on, not least the interplay between mobile techhnologies and literacy rates, as some earlier readers have commented. I'd love to hear from anyone who has national or local data on actual mobile phone use and literacy, and particularly on the distributional effects of the spread of mobile phones – who is using them, and what impact are they having on inequality?
David Week on February 11th, 2011 at 4:06 am:

I'm afraid all this proves to me is that… you don't have to be literate to talk. Is that news?
Claire Melamed on February 11th, 2011 at 12:44 pm:

it's not so much the talking, more the other things you can do with a phone like transferring cash, texting, and accessing the internet. That's where the literacy comes in.

9 comments »

About Global Dashboard

Follow us

Authors