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4 February 2016

Billy MacInnesTwo years ago, I was lucky enough to return to Zambia, where I had spent a large part of my childhood, after a gap of 16 years. Much had changed for the better (and some for the worse). For example, the population explosion has resulted in many primary and secondary schools having to introduce two shifts with some pupils going in the morning and others in the afternoon.

Many of the kids going to school have uniforms but run along barefoot. It makes you appreciate the effort people in some of the world’s poorer countries have to put in to try and get some level of education. Just as they did all those years ago when I was growing up, the kids waved at me in the car as we drove past.

Many of the villages still have no electricity or running water.

But as we drove along, negotiating some patches of road that would make Ireland’s worst pot-holed stretches feel like a motorway, I noticed two things had I had never seen in Zambia before. The first was little huts dotted along the side of the road with advertising signs for mobile phone cards and networks. The other was solar panels.

My first thought was that the solar panels were there to power the huts they were placed outside but then I realised they were being used for another purpose: to recharge mobile phones. I remembered then that my stepfather, who continued to go back and forth to Zambia, had told me admiringly at the end of the 90s about how advanced the mobile networks being built across Zambia were.

So it’s significant that the percentage of the Zambian population with access to a mobile phone (64.5% of households) is double the number of households with access to electricity (33.1%). As many as 51% of people aged over 10 are active users of mobile phones. However, less than a sixth of people with mobile phones own a smartphone. A measly 0.3% of all households have a landline.

For many people in Zambia, particularly in rural areas, mobile phones are akin to banks. They use phone cards and credits as a way to store their cash, to pay for things or to transfer money to (or receive it from) relatives in other parts of the country.

The reason why I mention this is because of the publication of the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index which predicts more people in the world will have access to a mobile phone in 2020 than electricity, running water or cars. Some of us in the first world might find that a staggering prediction but the fact is that in many poorer countries, like Zambia, that’s already true.

From our perspective, this might be viewed as proof of the relentless growth of mobile phones across the globe, but it might not look the same to the little barefoot girl or boy waving at the cars driving past. The infant mortality rate in Zambia is 66.62 deaths per 1,000 live births, which ranks it as 17th worst country in the world, compared to Ireland which is the 200th. The mortality rate for children under five was 87.4 per 1,000 in 2013. The good news is that these figures are significantly better than they were in 2007.

For countries like Zambia, physical infrastructure for electricity and water is harder to provide to households and villages in rural areas than mobile access. In effect, those households with mobile phones but no electricity didn’t have a choice over which to adopt first.

In countries like Ireland we’re coming from a point where 100% of households (near as dammit) have electricity and running water. It will be near impossible for more households to have access to mobile phones than those two utilities, especially given the poor state of mobile network coverage in some rural areas.

Given that 1.2 billion people in the world don’t have access to electricity and more than 95% of those living without electricity are in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, should it be all that surprising if there are more people globally using mobile phones than accessing electricity by 2020? Disappointing perhaps, but not surprising.

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