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.