I'm not convinced mobiles are necessarily a boon for Malawi. People here just can't afford to run them.
It seems that almost everybody has a mobile phone in Malawi. Drive out to a remote village and you will see adverts for mobile phone credits and points to recharge mobile phones from home made devices based on car batteries.
It is perhaps the most blatant example of a technology leap enjoyed by Africa. In a continent where landlines are sparse in most countries, mobile phones enable people to communicate where traditional phone infrastructure would never be built.
Development economists are falling over themselves to point to the benefits of mobile phones in the developing world. Citing examples of Somali herdsmen phoning ahead to find out the prices in two different markets before deciding which to sell their livestock, these economists hail the mobile phone as a bedrock of economic development, pointing to all sort of statistics that for every addition x number of mobile phones in use, GDP rises by y.
However, I am not so convinced that mobile phones are the Holy Grail of economic advance. There are not many Somali herdsmen in Africa and there are none in Malawi. In this country, the arguments for more efficient markets assume a level of mobility that, in my experience, simply does not exist.
In fact, I'd argue that in Malawi, mobile phones are actually stunting economic growth. Mobile phone credit here is horrifically expensive. A K250 credit (about £1.20) will last you around three minutes if you are calling a different network or a landline. This in a country where the average wage is around K7000 a month, and that's in urban areas; in villages, those few that have access to a regular income will earn a lot less than that (even in urban areas the wage is considerably lower for many people: a friend of mine told me that his wife, a trainee teacher, earns just K2000 a month and works full time; that's a lot of work for a 30 minute conversation with your mother-in-law).
An expat friend likened the mobile phone industry over here to the Nestle milk scandal of the 1970s. This is perhaps a bit extreme, but he does have a point. My wife, who works as a pediatrician at the local hospital, says she regularly sees children brought in suffering from malnutrition - yet the mothers of the children are texting away on their mobile phones. Each text costs K10; a bag of maize is around K40.
Prices for credit continue to rise at well above inflation. Lack of competition is part of the problem. When we arrived in February there were adverts everywhere for G-Mobile: 'Coming soon', they proudly announced. It hasn’t come. Last I heard, they'd been given an extension on their license to produce the goods by May. Then, as is so often the case over here, nothing.
But it can't just be that - both of the incumbent providers are struggling to make a profit too. The prices are an inevitable consequence of an environment where contracts can't be granted for a myriad of reasons, ranging from a lack of security to an inability to bill people who live in villages with no addresses. Instead, providers must rely on a complicated network of scratch card distribution, selling credit in uneconomically low units.
There is no doubt that the mobile phone is an important part of development, and I would not for a moment want to deprive the many that can afford to operate a mobile phone without sacrifice. But I wonder the technology has come too soon for rural Malawi, where providers are unable to provide a service at low enough prices to make it an ethical sell to people surviving on significantly less than a dollar a day.
