Some of the insights of  ‘mobile as a tool’ are below.

• Mobile use by BOP women seem to be driven by practical, utility-oriented needs such as family coordination and emergencies rather than the desire to socialize and ‘chat’. This is also seen when looking at perceived benefits in LIRNEasia’s teluse@BOP4 quantitative study. Both ability to act or contact others in an emergency and ability to maintain relationships with family and friends scored over 4 on a scale of 1-5 in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

• Radio proved to be important as a kill-time feature of the mobile handset, an indication that greater emphasis should be placed on entertainment and infotainment services for women in addition to important life-enhancing services such as mHealth, mAgri, mobile money, etc. Looking at LIRNEasia findings, we can see that 6% of Indian women who are mobile owners listen to the radio via the mobile. The numbers are relatively higher in Sri Lanka (13%) and Pakistan (11%).Whilst the numbers may seem low, it is one of the highest uses of mobiles after voice and SMS. Games have scored higher, surpassing radio in India (12%), Bangladesh (18%) and Pakistan (17%). Taking photos and videos is also popular amongst women in Bangladesh (12%), Sri Lanka (13%), and Thailand (18%).

• BOP women had limited knowledge of VAS, including limited use of SMS. Looking at LIRNEasia results amongst women who did not use SMS, 51% in Bangladesh and 72% in India did not know what SMS is. Confusion in using SMS and difficulty in typing also scored high.

Detailed regional insights are expected over the next few weeks whilst full details about this article can be found here.

The survey found that Thai users spent more than any other nationality on mobile phones, $93 on average compared to $50 or less elsewhere.

Most of the phones they bought had radio connections, while 14 per cent had a Web browser and 5 per cent had touch-screens.

Ninety-one per cent of the Thais said they’d used a mobile phone in the previous three months, up from 77 per cent in 2008.

More than 90 per cent of the urban users made regular calls, compared to 80 per cent in the rural areas. Interestingly, 90 per cent of Thai females had a mobile phone but only 80 per cent of the males, a proportion reversed in the other countries.

The study in 2011 by the LIRNEasia think tank said found that the use of mobile phones for services other than the basic voice function was still sparse among the poorest users compared with a previous survey in 2008.

In Sri Lanka only six percent of users in the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) or poorest segment knew of banking services through mobile phones compared with 18 percent in India and 15 percent in Thailand.

But Sri Lankan users were the most aware in the case of health services, scoring the highest among all countries in the study at 22 percent compared with 16 percent in India and 17 percent in Thailand.

Use of mobile phones to fix appointments with doctors in private hospitals has caught on in the island where the health system is overloaded and patients face lengthy waiting times for consultations.

The researchers who did the study said more-than-voice services like health could be an important means of accessing the BOP market for services for mobile phone companies.

Presentation slides can be found here.

Some of the media coverage received from Thailand, India,  Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The Financial Express (Phones a bare essential for bottom of pyramid: Study)

The Daily Star (Talk business on mobile)

The Hindu Business Line (More poor people own mobile phones, but productive use still a far cry)

Lanka Business Online (Mobile momentum)

The Bottom Line (Productive use of mobiles needed – LIRNEasia survey)

Republica (Low call charges within each network major reason for owning multiple-SIM)

What is even more worrisome is the lack of knowledge among all the parties about the available modes of communicating early warnings. No mention of cell broadcasting that is capable of delivering location-specific tailored information to all mobile handsets within the range of a base transceiver station. The journalist has done a good job except for repeating misinformation about poor communication infrastructure and access in rural areas.

Pradeep Koddippilli, the DMC assistant director-in-charge of early warnings, told IPS that the centre had not received any warning from the meteorology department tasked with assessing dangerous weather events. “We kept contacting them repeatedly through the 25th, but there was no warning,” he said.

Despite the millions spent on setting up early warning towers and networks, a recent assessment by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in November said that the meteorology department, in fact, lacked the technical capacity to predict rainfall and fast moving weather patterns.

“The U.N. assessment confirms the technical capacity of the department of meteorology needs to be further developed in order to enable it to deliver reliable quantitative rain forecasts,” said the report titled ‘Disaster Response and Preparedness Assessment Mission to Sri Lanka’.

Experts told IPS that multiple dissemination systems are at the disposal of the DMC – ideal for a country where communication infrastructure is poor in rural areas.

In addition to the 67 warning towers set up island-wide, the DMC can also tap into the wide network of public officials at the village level, volunteers with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, secure satellite communications and, at least, one national mobile network to send out alerts.

“You cannot say what is the best system because each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is to have several systems to make sure vulnerable communities receive warnings in time,” Suranga Kahandawa, disaster management specialist at the World Bank, told IPS

The government’s own nationally and provincially representative Household Income and Expenditure Survey shows that more than 75 percent of households in the Southern Province (affected by the most recent early warning fiasco) have a telephone in the house (almost all being GSM and CDMA handsets capable of receiving cell broadcasts), clearly contradicting the claim of poor infrastructure in rural areas.

LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP4 research (representative of those at the Bottom of the Pyramid; but not at the level of Province) showed that urban households has slightly higher (7%) ownership of phones, but that when it came to access to a phone within the household there was no difference between urban and rural households.

Findings of the research carried out in South Asian countries by regional ICT policy and regulation think tank LIRNEasia maintain cheaper on-net call is the main reason for multiple-SIM ownership. The research was conducted among bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Unveiling the findings of the report in Bangkok, CEO of LIRNEasia Rohan Samarajiva said that the research showed that the network coverage of mobile operators in this region was getting better and most subscribers said cheaper on-net calls are the major reason. The previous research conducted in 2008 had shown a better network coverage as the major reason for multiple-SIM ownership.

It was ironical that we had to listen to the speeches on digital Bangladesh phoneless, having been compelled to leave all electronics behind in the name of security. They announced the event was being tweeted, forgetting the very nature of tweeting,v a decentralized activity done by many without central control.

Then in the afternoon, I found myself stepping in to chair a session on broadband access that was to have been chaired by Mr Wazed. In a short period of 90 mts, we squeezed in eight speakers, two from equipment vendors, two from service providers, a representative of APNIC talking about IPv6, an IGO representative and myself. The Secretary of the Bangladesh Ministry of Post and Telecom gave summing up comments. And we had 25 mts of questions and answers as well.

It was not surprising that I found most interesting the proposal to enhance Asia’s backhaul capacity using terrestrial cables. It was in my talk, but Tiziana Bonapace of UNESCAP’s presentation dealt with in greater detail.

The MOPT Secretary said that BTCL’s fiber had been taken over by the Ministry and there were plans to give them over to a private operator to manage, on several conditions, including, one hopes, non-discriminatory, cost-oriented access for all operators. The devil is in the details, but one hopes this will be done properly (and quickly).

There were many questions, but the one I liked best was what one young man asked: what in all these was the opportunity for a young person to start a business?

This reflects the story Teleuse@BOP tells about Bangladeshis more than anyone else seeing ICTs as a way of making money.

We have open data sets, but they are just there. How can we make them more usable and truly open? This is something we need to grapple with once the Teleuse@BOP4 data are brought under control.

The mobile revolution was building up a head of steam from the 1990s, but really took off at the turn of the century, with massive growth occurring in South Asia since around 2004. That is when LIRNEasia started work, with a focus on South Asia. At the urging of Randy Spence we began the Teleuse@BOP demand-side survey. Its results have gained much media attention, but we were too busy communicating the results to policy makers and the media to put a lot of effort into scholarly publication, other than in our 2008 book and a few academic publications.

But now we have an entire issue devoted to analyses of Teleuse@BOP results in the leading journal in the ICT for Development field, Information Technology and International Development.

One thing I did not get from the writeup was relative cost. Convening a community meeting is not costless. Neither is the asset-based method. Also, the account refers to villages. Will this work as well in cities?

The field experiment, conducted in collaboration with the Indonesian government and the World Bank, offered a small amount of cash to households deemed below the poverty line. In one-third of the villages, the government used a proxy means test involving household assets to create an objective measure of wealth. Another third of the villages used the “community method,” as the researchers call it: With the assistance of facilitators from the research project, citizens from certain neighborhoods would gather at meetings and subjectively rank the wealth of the local inhabitants. The final third of the villages employed a hybrid of both methods.

The economists also used a research firm to survey all the citizens about their spending habits. Using this spending data as a baseline for wealth, the results show that the proxy means test is the best method for estimating wealth — but only by a slim margin.

On the other hand, the community method led to 60 percent fewer complaints among villagers about the results of the programs, compared to the proxy means test.

The report.

The article is by Aileen Aguero, Harsha de Silva and Juhee Kang. It’s not about food prices, per se, but about some extensions that allow the identification of necessary goods and luxuries. Their interesting finding is that voice telephony is a necessity in Asia (in the six countries covered by LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP research), while it is still a luxury in Latin America. How could the same thing be a luxury in one place and a necessity in another?

Research on healthcare in Africa changing from a luxury to a necessity within a decade, also reported in the article, suggested an explanation: As communication services become cheaper, they become necessities. Latin American mobile voice users currently suffer from much higher mobile prices than their Asian counterparts. When and if they decrease, they too will be seen as necessities, and one would be able to conclusively refute the claim that communication is a luxury for the poor and a necessity for the rich.

Having written the guest editorial, I thought I should do a little more checking. The Annual Report of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, 2010 compares data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey of 2006-07 and 2009-10. Go right to the last page: for some reason only known to the Central Bank, the 2009-10 data are given only in the last page.

Household incomes have gone up a quite a bit, from LKR 26,286 to LKR 35,495, a 35 percent increase.

Household expenditures have also gone up: LKR 22,952 in 2006-07 to LKR 32,446 in 2009-10, an increase of 41 percent.

Now communication expenditures should have gone down, if Aguero, de Silva and Kang, are right:

And they have: transportation and communication expenditures declined from 10.5 percent of total expenditures to 10 percent. Nice if communication was broken out from the combined number but given fuel prices increases, we can assume that transportation increased, giving a decline (larger than 0.5 percent) for communication. So Aileen, Harsha and Juhee are on safe ground.

Now comes the surprise: expenditures on food (as a percentage of the total) have not declined, but have increased: from 37.6 percent to 39.8 percent. So food is a luxury in Sri Lanka, not a necessity?

Perhaps, Harsha de Silva will provide an explanation?

.

The slides are here.

“Ki raflé du ki amul yeeré wayé moy ki amul nit”, as a Senegalese proverb has it, “the poor person is not the one without clothes but the one without anyone.”

Seems to capture the essence of the power of social networks (I do not mean FaceBook).

Albert Tung regional director for South Asia at Asus Technology says it is the third best selling notebook brand in the world. In 2011 the group is 12 billion dollars in revenues of which 74 percent will be from notebooks.

Tung says in the short term he is expecting sell 500 units a month in Sri Lanka.

Singer says its top revenue earners are television, refrigerators and sewing machines followed by computers. Though most of the sales are in Sri Lanka’s western province, officials say even notebooks are being sold in areas as remote as Wellawaya.

Peiris said the government’s ‘Gamata IT’ program to take information technology to the village was helping broaden use.

The firm estimates that 18 percent of Sri Lankan households now have a computer.

Source report.

It was possibly because of this “priming” (a key concept in contemporary behavioral research) that I was unquestioningly amenable to the suggestion to study how poor people actually used ICTs that came from the research planning sessions we conducted as part of the launch of LIRNEasia in September 2004. Randy Spence, our champion within IDRC at that time, was a key proponent. So since 2005, LIRNEasia has been studying how those at the Bottom of the Pyramid use ICTs (mostly mobiles) and feeding those results into our other research and to the policy and regulatory processes in the countries that we work in. For example, we pulled back from giving high priority to mobile number portability based on Teleuse @ BOP research.

We are avid followers of the behavioral economics literature (associated with Kahneman, Thaler, et al.) and are working on a reconceptualization of the consumer and his/her “protection” in the light of learnings from behavioral economics. We also know that the very success of the mobile-driven narrowband model is drying up research funds for research such as Teleuse@BOP.

So we resonate with the comments of one of the most interesting newspaper columnists around, David Brooks, who takes this example from a book called Nudge, authored by Thaler and Sunstein:

Fortunately, today we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real-world applications. Here’s one simple example:

When you renew your driver’s license, you have a chance to enroll in an organ donation program. In countries like Germany and the U.S., you have to check a box if you want to opt in. Roughly 14 percent of people do. But behavioral scientists have discovered that how you set the defaults is really important. So in other countries, like Poland or France, you have to check a box if you want to opt out. In these countries, more than 90 percent of people participate.
. . . .
This is a gigantic behavior difference cued by one tiny and costless change in procedure.

Yet in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.