Before, the village, 50 km from the
nearest road and often cut off by swollen rivers, would have waited
days for the news of the birth.

Amambisi, with no electricity or running water in a province with 50
percent unemployment seems an unlikely place for a mobile phone boom.
But operators are taking the plunge in rural parts of South Africa
and erecting network infrastructure in order to be a part of one of
Africa's most important growth industries. "Things are changing round
here quickly," Zwelibanjiwe Njomi, the principal of the local secon-
dary school told IRIN. "Before the mast it took half a day to get to
town to make a call, now we're in touch with the whole world," he
beamed.

Mobile phone technology, once the preserve of a privileged few, is
now touching the lives of millions of rural South Africans. Many of
Africa's fixed line operators are cash-strapped state-owned companies
that do not have the resources required to modernise their ageing
systems. "In many cases mobile is taking the place of fixed line,"
Fernando Goncalves of Siemens, one of the continent's key infrastruc-
ture providers, told IRIN.

The African Telecommunications Union (ATU) expects mobiles to over-
take fixed phone lines in Africa within the next five years. In South
Africa, mobiles already exceed fixed line phones. The ATU estimates
that only about two percent of Africans have phones compared to a
global average of about 10 percent. Africa has only 14 million phone
lines, fewer than Manhattan or Tokyo. "It's a huge challenge, because
of poor infrastructure and low incomes," said Mondi Mama of the Vo-
dacom Foundation, the development wing of Vodacom. "But we're suc-
ceeding against the odds in South Africa and it's a blueprint for the
rest of the continent," he added. The company has business in Tanza-
nia and Lesotho and is eyeing the lucrative Nigerian market.

Vodacom's confidence comes from strategies they've pioneered in
places like Amambisi. "We had to get over the problem of poor credit
records and non-existent bank accounts and now prepaid accounts for
nearly 80 percent of our business in South Africa," said Don Schorn,
the regional Vodacom head in KwaZulu Natal.

The prepaid scheme, besides making cellphone lines available to mil-
lions of low income subscribers, has also meant business opportuni-
ties in impoverished rural areas. Nokawe Tozana was a teacher in Jo-
hannesburg until she saw the potential of selling airtime to mobile
phone users. "Those far from town need airtime, often they cannot
travel to buy the cards, so I go to them," she explained. Equipped
with a hand-held device that allows her to sell the airtime anywhere,
she ventures into newly-networked parts of the country. "Business is
good and I'm helping people keep in touch," she added as she loaded
her newly-purchased car for a trip to the rural Northern Province.

The device was purchased through the South African Council of
Churches' Sakhisizwe Trust. The trust distributed 15 machines last
year and plans to distribute 500 machines to rural entrepreneurs and
organisations this year. "This is a great opportunity for job crea-
tion and also to provide funds for churches and women's organisa-
tions," said Thembile Xipu, the director of Sakhisizwe Trust. To fi-
nance the US $400,000 cost of the airtime machines, the trust
enlisted the help of a Philadelphia investment firm, Reinvest in
South Africa. "It appealed to our concept of a double bottom line: to
run a business while essentially empowering a community," said Sam
Folin, managing director of the Reinvest in South Africa fund. Xipu
added that the machines could be programmed to sell credit for elec-
tricity and water as well as cellphones, "effectively bringing bank-
ing to areas with no financial institutions".

Network providers in Africa are aware that their businesses can only
grow if access to phones improves. The relative cost of a phone con-
nection in Africa's mostly low income countries remains many times
higher than in Europe. The answer is more public phones. Private
"phone shops" are springing up across the continent. Senegal has over
7,000 "telecentres", employing over 10,000 people and generating
nearly a third of all phone revenues. South Africa wants to improve
public phone access to the point where everyone is within a 30 minute
walk to a phone.

The problem is resources, but the South African government has en-
shrined the principal of community phone access in its licence agree-
ment with the big operators. "Under our licence obligations we agreed
with the South African government we'd put in 22,500 phones into ar-
eas where the phone density was less than one per hundred people,"
Schorn said. The phones are usually located in a container, where
people pay less than half the cost of a mobile call. "We see this as
an important development tool as well as growing the market," Schorn
added.

At the Amambisi phone shop a long early-morning queue snaked away
from the container as the heavy steel doors were swung open for busi-
ness. "Having phones in our village at last is great, my son got a
job because he could contact an employer," Mary, waiting to phone a
relative in Durban, told IRIN. Another customer said that she had
started a weaving business and the phone had helped put her in touch
with buyers. "At last we feel part of the modern world," Chief Lin-
gazwe said.

Increasingly, greater access to communications networks is being
viewed as a prerequisite to development rather than an outcome. "You
simply cannot have growth without connectivity in our wired globe,"
Phillip Matundwe of ATU told IRIN. Vodacom's Don Schorn is positive
about a connected continent. "Mobile phone technology must be the fu-
ture for Africa. After phones the next step is internet connections.
Within a decade I believe every very rural African will have an e-
mail address, now that's an African Renaissance."

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IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect
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Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
2001