Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Mobile travels through Kenya

This BBC post 'From Matatu to the Masai via mobile' describes how reporter Paul Mason traveled through Kenya using a map of the country's mobile phone networks as his guide:

'With one in three adults carrying a cellphone in Kenya, mobile telephony is having an economic and social impact whose is hard to grasp if you are used to living in a country with good roads, democracy and the internet. In five years the number of mobiles in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million - while the number of landlines remains at about 300,000, mostly in government offices...

...Soon you will even be able to pay for a trip by Matutu by mobile phone. To find out how I zipped across Mombasa to the offices of Safaricom, one of the two network providers in Kenya, part owned by Vodafone. It let me film the launch of a project called M-Pesa - and, read my lips, I said "launch" not "trial".'

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