Information Society Watch

July 14, 2006, Kathambi Kinoti, The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID)

This paper highlights the ways in which mobile telephony is transforming human interactions by enabling communication with low resource usage. For example, a large number of people in developing regions - the majority of whom are women - rely on remittances from relatives living in Europe and North America. Furthermore, it is now possible for relatives abroad to purchase air time to be transferred to their relatives in developing countries. Cyber currency is also used to help fund programmes such as the Nairobi Women's Hospital, which recently conducted a fundraising drive that included the transfer of donations through contributors' cell phones. Mobile phones are being used to check livestock and crop market prices, to transmit information about HIV and AIDS, to access banking services and to perform other activities more easily. They have also opened up business and employment opportunities, for instance, that of charging customers for making telephone calls through their mobile lines. The author contends that mobile telephony has emerged as the one form of ICT most likely to bring direct and immediate benefit to individual poor women, and asserts that women's rights activists would be well advised to explore further possibilities of advancing the rights of women through the use of mobile telephony.

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