Futurity Media

My buddy at the ITU spotted this fantastic visualisation of global mobile phone penetration. Wonderful how a bit of number crunching combined with some charts can instantly grab you. The work is done by Richard Heeks on the ICTs for Development blog.

What was instantly striking was how far Estonia has climbed the mobile penetration charts – it’s the world’s no. 2 on 188 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, sandwiched between UAE and Bahrain. Not much further behind is Lithuania on 155.

Estonia’s economy has been rocketing along – 10 years ago it had a GDP per capita around 1/3 of the EU15 average, now its more like 2/3. But even this economic growth doesn’t explain quite why the small baltic state can have such an affintity with all things mobile. Could it be the proximity to Finland and Sweden? Or maybe it was the massive investment the government made in ICTs during the 1990′s to drag Estonia out of the ashes of the Soviet state. The web site of Estonia’s Tiger Leap is here and there’s a fascinating profile of Estonia’s online and ICT development here. Did you know Estonia has 200 licensed telecom operators????

What’s interesting about this visualistion of penetration is that you can see how penetration has developed. Back in 1998, not surprisingly, Finland topped the charts at 55 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, and the average in sub-Saharan African was a fraction of 1% (actually closer to 0.1%). Now it’s around 35% (my calculation). On their own, communications don’t lift people out of poverty but they are a massive contributing factor. I could go on forever about some cool initiatives to bring mobile to the unnconnected – such as shared access to voice, mobile banking for those without bank accounts, telemedicine cabins, green base stations extending connectivity into regions without stable power supplies (and don’t say how do they charge their mobiles then)….but it might be easier to scoot along to the GSMA’s Development Fund blog or check out the UN Millennium Project which was led by Jeffrey Sachs or check out the work that Grameenphone does in Bangladesh.

The role of mobile in the developing world is a bit of a pet topic – I’ll explore the impact of mobile broadband in a future post.

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