Solar cell phones take off in developing nations (CNN)

By Moni Basu and Faith Karimi
CNN

(CNN) -- Peter Gathungu walks more than a mile to a shopping center, where he pays a sizable sum to charge his cell phone.

That's because electricity is nonexistent in Gathungu's hometown of Njoro, in northwest Kenya. Landlines and other forms of communication are not as efficient, so Gathungu and millions of others in emerging nations rely on mobile phones. Charging the phones can be a headache in towns and villages where electricity is scarce.

Gathungu's troubles may soon be over, though.

Kenya's biggest mobile phone company, Safaricom Ltd., launched the nation's first solar-charged phone this month. The handset comes with a regular electrical charger and a solar panel that charges the phone using the sun's rays, company CEO Michael Joseph told CNN by telephone.

Retailing at about $35, the phones were manufactured by Chinese telecomtelecommunications company ZTE Corp. Safaricom plans to make an initial supply of 100,000 phones available.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/21/solar.cellphone/index.html




This helps to point out that solar power (and other forms of alternative energy) is not just a way to provide on-line, on-demand power for homes and businesses. It can also be a way of freeing up small electrical/electronic devices from the grid, thus decreasing pressure for further grid expansion (and construction of CO2-belching power plants) to meet needs of convenience. Not a huge effect, but possibly a psychologically important one.

Cell phones have been a tremendous boon to poor rural countries. The biggest advantage of having cell phones in places like Kenya is that farmers can find out crop prices in different nearby market towns.

At one point in my life, I read a really huge amount of archival material from rural South Africa from 1900 to 1940. I was shocked to learn that most of the return that farmers received for their crops was eaten up by the cost of transport -- even though that transport was by ox-wagon.

Imagine taking 5 days to go to some market town to sell a wagon load of corn only to find that there is no demand or the price has collapsed!

In Africa right now, farmers are using cell phones to call around to find out which market town has the highest price.

Also cell phones are used across China and Africa to find out where jobs are. Tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers are constantly on the move looking for work. They used to just go different places based on rumors. Now in the off season, migrant workers call to different cities and find which places are hiring and which have the highest wages.

This isn't just a matter of the farmer getting the highest price or the worker getting the highest wage -- although those are good and important thing. The crop price and wage roughly reflect where the food is needed and where the labor is needed. So sending the food and worker to the right place is crucial to the larger national economy. What good is an unemployed worker sitting in the wrong town, or unsold crops sitting in the wrong market?

The development literature confirms that cheap cell phones have been a tremendous boon to the poor -- especially farmers and migrant workers -- all over Asia and Africa. They also avoid the cost of what used to be called in the telecom industry, "copper," the land lines that are very expensive to lay in remote rural areas.

That's why African governments, like Kenya's, are desperate to keep these cell phone systems up and running.

the people now have access to cell phones.

will sadly be used as an excuse for......

they now don't need, electricity, water, sewer,
or railroad.

:crazy:

than it is to install land lines. The less accessible the area, the more this is likely to be true. Many regions of Africa may go directly from zero phone service to cellular without ever passing through the landline phase. This is in keeping with an observation made by Arthur C. Clarke -- developing nations do not need to recapitulate the history of the developed nations; if a newer technology is superior to the one which historically preceded it, why not "leapfrog" (his word) over the earlier phase, and go directly to the more efficient, cheaper (usually greener) system? Why build a whole network of cross-country telephone lines (which would require new roads in many cases) when a few cell towers and satellite uplinks can do the job, with much less investment of materials, energy, time and labor? Why invest resources in a smokestack infrastructure when you know it's already largely obsolescent?

... by not putting the copper into the ground, they reduce the risk
of it being promptly dug up again for "resale" ...

This scheme is exactly the right thing to do (IMO).

By traveling?