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Since
there is so much labour migration, mobile phones can
keep families in contact. Vital details about remittances
from other areas and overseas can be transmitted in
a secure and direct way. The landlines in Bangladesh
are very limited, only 450,000 fixed telephones for
a population of more than 130 million, and a service
so unreliable that only 20% of calls are successfully
completed. It was clear that the only feasible way to
overcome these information obstacles to development,
and to achieve nationwide coverage, was to set up a
serious mobile phone network. To do just that Grameen
Telecom was established as a not-for-profit company.
"This
is a successful Robin Hood enterprise" says Mr.
Isa, "we take from the rich and give to the poor".
In 1997 GT started operations by forming a joint
venture company called GrameenPhone with investments
from Norway's Telenor, Japan's Marubeni
and the U.S. company Gonofone. The business has
grown fast and this January GrameenPhone celebrated
reaching 500,000 subscribers, more than 70% of the mobile
subscribers in the country, and it is the success of
this mainly urban business that supports the development
of the village phones. The Village Phone subscribers
program currently has 9,400 phones in nearly as many
villages. In each village the phone business is set
up with a poor woman who is one of the 2.4 million borrowers
in Grameen Bank's microcredit program. They take a loan
for the phone equipment and pay it back slowly with
the money they make from charging villagers for phone
services. The phone operators know everyone in their
village and they rent the phone, take calls and pass
on messages for anyone. "There are plenty of people
with enough money to buy the phones outright, and we
could get far faster coverage by offering the phones
openly on the market", says Isa, "but we want
this to be a business opportunity for the poor, especially
poor women".
Each
phone has a coverage of about 2,500 people, so though
9,400 phones mightn't seem much, they still have a coverage
of 23.5 million people in Bangladesh. This year, with
expansion of the Village Phone program it will be possible
to more than double its current coverage and it is planned
to reach 50,000 phones by the end of 2004.
Mrs.
Begum has been running the phone in her village for
three years and explained that she had paid back the
loan to buy it, in the first year. She uses the phone
for about 1600 minutes a month, 600 minutes being outgoing
calls and this has provided her with enough income to
set up another small business for her husband! As we
sat discussing Begum's mobile phone business, village
people passed by carrying pitchers of water from the
pump, others crouched down chewing beetlenut and chatting,
a lady nearby was cooking on an open fire and one caller
arrived carrying a duck. Tongue-in-cheek I asked if
I could make a call to the UK, having failed to do so
from the capital city Dhaka, I assumed it was an absurd
request. To my astonishment Mrs. Begum put me straight
through on a perfect line.
The
Grameen Bank model is already in use in more than 80
countries and some countries have asked for Grameen
Telecom staff to act as consultants to help start programs
elsewhere, but so far they have mostly been too busy
to accept. Mr Shawkat, the Grameen Telecom manager who
accompanied me on the visit, said that they could barely
deal with their own expansion and the development of
new programs such as community media centers, online
health consultancy, e-mail and fax services.
In
Shawkat's view one of the clearest successes of their
work is that the program is directed at very poor women.
"Nice idea" I said, "but does it really
work that way? Mrs. Begum doesn't look very poor".
Mrs. Begum laughed: "I'm not poor" she said,
"I was poor".
by
Sean Hawkey, WACC,
Extracted from ACTION 241, February, 2002
More
Info: A case study by CIDA on the Village Phone
is available at: www.telecommons.com
Grameen
Trust's Program for Research on Poverty Alleviation
has supported
research on this subject. Please contact: gmgt@grameen.com
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