Towards Universal Telephone Access

How best to increase wealth and decrease poverty at the base

of the pyramid? One really easy way to do that would be to give everybody

access to a telephone. Already we’re almost there: a new paper

by Charles Kenny and Rym Keremane estimates the world’s mobile footprint covered

86% of the world’s population, and 76% of Africa’s, in 2004.

How much would it cost to bring those numbers up to 100%? Kenny and Keremane

reckon it could be done for a total sum of $5.7 billion, most of which could

be supplied by taxing existing providers – the total external subsidy

needed would be just $1.8 billion. And fully 87% of that $1.8 billion would

be invested in Africa.

Also worth a read is an entirely separate paper from the same Charles Kenny,

entitled "Is

Africa A Failure?". Kenny’s answer is that actually it isn’t. Africa’s

growth rate has been pretty steady, it turns out – and there might well

be good structural reasons why it’s very hard to boost it. What’s more, Africa

has done pretty well with the money it does have:

Former President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere sums up his country’s successes

in elements of this broader agenda: “The British Empire left us a country

with 85 percent illiterates, two engineers and twelve doctors. When I left

office, we had nine per cent illiterates and thousands of engineers and doctors.”…

Turning to literacy rates, Africa has again been fast catching up with the

near-universal literacy of high income countries, with literacy in the Sub-Saharan

region increasing from 28 to 61 percent of the population over the 1970-99

period. The region has achieved these successes while its population (partly

as a result) has increased more than threefold –Africa has many more

people who are enjoying a better quality of life.

What underlies these impressive statistics is the region’s unprecedented

performance in improving the quality of living standards at low levels of

income. Compare Africa to Nineteenth Century Europe: in Nigeria in 1995, GDP

per head was $1,118. That puts it about equal with Finland’s GDP in

1870 ($1,107). But look at education: Nigeria had a literacy rate of 57 percent,

compared to Finland’s 10 percent rate in 1870. Or life expectancy: Nigeria’s

1995 life expectancy was 51 years. This figure is higher than any country

in Europe in 1870, –better than the UK, which had an income per capita in

1870 approximately three times Nigeria’s 1995 figure. This is an especially

impressive performance given both Africa’s largely tropical climate

which fosters communicable disease rates far higher than those in Europe,

and the recent advent of AIDS.

Kenny concludes that "realism tempered with humility is likely to improve

the quality of life of the people of Africa" – just because we’re

richer than most Africans doesn’t mean we know better than they do how to improve

their lives.