A heavily subscribed workshop at this week’s Highway Africa conference, held at Rhodes University, heard that cellphones are ‘the biggest story ever’ in Africa.
A heavily subscribed workshop at this week’s Highway Africa conference, held at Rhodes University, heard that cellphones are ‘the biggest story ever’ in Africa.
The Highway Africa workshop, on how mobile phones can improve life in Africa, was led by the head of Mobile Money at MTN Uganda, Richard Mwami and Prof Harry Dugmore, the MTN chair of Media & Mobile Communications at Rhodes University.
Dugmore, said that due to the rapid growth in cellphone usage in Africa, almost every family on the continent has the device in their home.
It is now up to the cellphone companies to deliver news to them, as well as acquaint them with what is happening in the world,” he said.
Dugmore added, “Although the link is a controversial one, evidence suggests that, in Africa, the more mobile phones there are in a country, the stronger the democracy.”
MTN launched a mobile money transfer service in Uganda that has helped users take banking from the banking halls into their hands.
Illustrating how cellphones have improved business transactions, Mwami said their service provides a safer and much cheaper way of transferring money in a country whose physical infrastructure is still largely underdeveloped.
“You can leave your wallet or even you kids at home, but you cannot leave your cellphone,” Mwami said. The workshop was themed around the cellphone as an additional form of mass media, and how it has been able to fuse traditional forms of media, such as radio and television, with the internet and then, deliver all this in a compact, portable and very personal device.
