African Mobile Phones Disconnected
DEVELOPMENTS
Across Africa, the deadlines for SIM card registration are fast approaching. Some countries like Zimbabwe have already finished the process after a few extensions of the cut-off dates in consideration of the colossal task of identitying owners of mobile phones. As a result, close to three million mobile phones had been taken off available networks in Kenya and thirty percent of mobile communication devices went silent in Zimbabwe by the end of February. Although cognizant of the purpose, service providers are unhappy as they are facing plummeting revenue in one of the fastest growing markets in the world while subscribers are frustrated.
Correctly identifying owners of mobile phones is part of the KYC (know-your-customer) requirements as provided in many countries by the Regulation of Interception of Communications acts. SIM registration drives are globally enacted with the aim of preventing illicit uses of communication devises. The process consists of appearance in person by the customer together with official proof of identity and of address. On the surface, getting the paper work right might not look much of a big concern deserving headline space except that, in Africa, obtaining identity documents has never been an easy undertaking.
BACKGROUND
The relative ease of getting a communication device __and at low price points__ make mobile phones attractive to the majority of Africans who, until about a decade ago, had little access to any communication technology. Market women, day laborers, farmers, and migrants no longer needed to have physical addresses fitted with landlines in order to eke out a living. This leapfrog infrastructure provided millions of Africans not only the ability to communicate on the move but also a credibility of sorts that reflected well in their incomes. Across the continent, mobile phones are used to buy or sell products, advertize, offer financial services, entertainment, access market information, and much more. In short, the pocket-size devices opened up a new horizon of opportunities for multitudes of services. The conveniences are so compelling that that barriers of literacy and numeracy hardly stand in the way of uneducated Africans to dial the numbers they would like to reach.
The “revolution” spawned moguls like the Sudanese billionaire Mo Ibrahim whose company, Celtel (now Zain), ushered in the boom that has now skyrocketed to more than four hundred million subscriptions in a continent with an estimated eight hundred million total population. Multinationals like MTN, Orange, Vodacom, and Middle Eastern providers share the African market with home-grown outfits like the Egyptian Orascom. The growth has been phenomenal, making Africa a greener pasture than the comparatively saturated markets elsewhere in the world. Nigeria alone boasts eighty million mobile phones whereas as recently as 1999 many African countries did not have any such services at all. Records indicate that mobile phone penetration in Africa grew by an average of forty nine percent every year between 2002 and 2007, having now reached upwards of sixty percent overall coverage. If current trends continue, the reach of digital signals by 2012 into most of Africa’s villages will, undoubtedly, redefine proximity and remoteness.
The use of mobile phones is not restricted to voice and data traffic. Companies and subscribers came up with creative usage and business models that led to further innovations. What started out as sharing of pre-paid airtime with friends and family in Kenya, for instance, gave rise to M-pesa, one of the most advanced cutting-age financial services offered on a mobile platform ever. Kenyans living in urban areas like Nairobi and Mombasa can send money to family members who live in rural areas while villagers can receive unique money transfer code numbers instantly on their mobile phones that they can cash at any M-pesa outlet. Enterprising individuals operate thousands of M-pesa franchises set up for cash-in and cash-out services all over the country. Over the last five years, the service evolved into a major retail payment platform linked to financial institutions like banks; it has become an intermediary technology for the payment of utility bills as well p2p (person-to-person) transactions fully accessible through ATMs.
The success of M-pesa, however, has not been a smooth ride as it met with regulatory hurdles from central banks that got anxious at the possibility of the creation of unregulated monetary values, electronic or otherwise, other than by registered financial institutions. After prolonged reluctance, African policy makers now understand the benefits outweigh the downsides that come with ubiquitous mobile transactions. Sponsored by global organizations like the World Bank and Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), regulations are getting overhauled slowly with the aim of bringing financial services to the doorsteps of the majority of the continent’s unbanked inhabitants. Thus, the footprints of mobile banking spread far and wide in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Senegal as many other countries are ramping up.
In addition, mobile phones hold an unparalleled potential to support development goals such as healthcare, education, and agriculture. Health practitioners leverage mobile phones to prevent and treat diseases like HIV, malaria, and measles. Diagnostic and epidemics data can be transmitted to databases without hassle. Similarly, mobile learning projects are underway in South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia, for instance, where the limitations of resources make classroom-based education very challenging. Farmers rely on mobile phones to get market information on grain prices and pastoralists find water for their cattle using GPS.
Buying and activating a mobile phone was relatively effortless until recently. All one needed was enough cash to buy a new or refurbished device and to top up the minutes. In most cases, agents of service providers and kiosks did not necessarily require subscribers to produce proof of identity, let alone proof of address. Heavy rural to urban migrations and the inadequacy of government agencies that issue identification cards, especially in remote areas, are the marks of African countries. Besides, identification documents are fraught with conflicting understanding of citizenship as ethnic or clan identities trump membership in a nation-state which is relatively a new concept; it is common to find the same ethnic group straddling two or three countries. By the same token, identity may not always be a private realm as it gets caught in the complexity of social obligations. People access services on behalf of extended family members or even borrow each other’s identity documents in the same manner they may request farm animals from others during the planting season.
ANALYSIS
Mobile phones spread throughout Africa with the strongest of value propositions to extricate the poor continent from perpetual poverty, to narrow the “digital gap”, and introduce better services delivered on a cheaper platform. Who would have thought only fifteen years ago that the little machines could transform the lives of hundreds of millions of people to such a degree of dependence that they cannot imagine life without them? Social relationships have improved; searching for information on any topic is more facile and finding employment or casual work has never been as handy. If anything, these trends should be encouraged more intensively in league with appropriate policies that accommodate particular socio-economic realities. Continent-wide SIM registration drives, however, are casting shadows on the immense capabilities mobile networks offer because of some missed logical steps in their implementation.
Evidently, like all technologies, mobile phones have also been used by criminals intent on conducting illegal activities and disturbing the peace. Tracking suspicious communications and preventing dangerous offenses is critical. On the other hand, there are some essential prerequisites that should be carried out before launching mandatory SIM registrations in Africa, including consideration of alternatives to identify customers. Foremost is unclogging bureaucratic hurdles that render applying for ID cards overwhelming, especially for the majority of rural residents and urban migrants. Actually, governments and service providers can take advantage of the opportunity to introduce new ways of collecting identity data recognized by the law such as biometric attributes; if planned and executed carefully, issuing ID cards on site at the same time as SIM registrations can take off the burden on subscribers. What’s more, developed countries stand to benefit, too, by backing the efforts of African governments to issue smarter ID cards that can interface with global databases. Simply disconnecting mobile phones for lack of identity documents rolls back the clock on many of the gains Africa has made so far and disproportionately affects the poor.