To all - neat WSJ article about one (Nokia) cell phone in a Bangladesh village.
June 25, 1999
It Takes a Cell Phone
Nokia Phone Transforms
A Village in Bangladesh
By MIRIAM JORDAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
CHANDRYEL, Bangladesh -- Delora Begum's home office is a
corrugated-metal-and-straw hut with a mud floor, no toilet and no running
water. Yet in this humble setting, she reigns as the "phone lady," a successful
entrepreneur and a person of standing in her community.
It's all due to a sleek Nokia cell phone.
Mrs. Begum acquired the handset six months ago for about 18,750 taka ($375)
through a loan program from Bangladesh's Grameen Bank and launched a
profitable phone service. It's changing her life and that of hundreds of peasants
who live in this patch of isolated countryside northwest of Bangladesh's
capital, Dhaka.
"It was a very good investment," says the 32-year-old mother of two teenage
daughters, clutching the black handset and grinning proudly. "It's helping my
family, and villagers appreciate the convenience."
Grameen Bank, a private
commercial enterprise
based in Dhaka, gained
world renown for
nurturing rural
entrepreneurs in this
impoverished nation of
120 million people. For
the past 16 years, the
bank has made
microloans to villagers
to build fish ponds or to
buy dairy cows and
rice-husking machines.
Now the bank aims to
turn a trendy accessory of the developed world into a tool for Bangledesh's
most marginalized citizens, one of several schemes to help the poor jump into
the digital age.
"Many people thought we were making a mockery of technology. They could
not envision the poor getting good use out of a cell phone," says Mohammed
Yunus, the bank's founder and managing director, who earned his doctorate in
economics at Vanderbilt University. "The cell phone is the entry point. The
falling cost of technology makes it increasingly accessible to everyone."
There are only three phones for every 1,000 people in Bangladesh, among the
lowest phone-penetration rates in the world. About 90% of Bangladesh's
68,000 villages lack any access to a phone, according to Grameen Bank
estimates.
That ratio is slowly changing, thanks to the bank's loan program and the
efforts of Grameen Telecom, a nonprofit bank unit that buys airtime and resells
it at cost to village cell-phone operators like Mrs. Begum. GrameenPhone Ltd.,
a joint venture of the bank and Telenor, Norway's telephone company, is
building and operating the rural phone network.
Since the program began in 1997, it has supplied phones to 300 villages and
aims to have 2,000 connected by year end. Within five years, Mr. Yunus
hopes, the network will be nationwide, putting every villager within two
kilometers (1.25 miles) of a cellular phone.
Where the hookups have arrived, they have already begun to boost people's
incomes and quality of life. Farmers use the cell phones to learn the fair value
of their rice and vegetables, cutting out middlemen notorious for exploiting
them. Families stay in touch with relatives working abroad, many of them
driving taxis in New York or working on construction sites in Saudi Arabia. In
a nation where only 45% of the people can read and write, the cell phone
allows people to dispense with a scribe to compose a letter.
And then there are the dramatic rescues, like the life-saving call from Mrs.
Begum's phone last October to a doctor. It brought help to a pregnant woman
as well as a newborn endangered by her severe convulsions.
Residents of 10 villages clustered around verdant rice fields and muddy
marshes visit Mrs. Begum to place calls. Even her telephone "booth" is mobile:
During the day, it's the stall on Chandryel's main dirt road where she sells
garments she makes with a sewing machine (also purchased with the bank's
help); at night, callers drop by her family hut to use the cell phone.
The phone has improved life for many villagers, in different ways. For as long
as he can remember, Khandar Abal Bashar resigned himself to taking a
two-and-a-half-hour bus ride to Dhaka to order furnace oil and coal for the
brick factory he manages. Now, he avoids the bone-jarring, biweekly trip. "I
can just call if I need anything, or if I have any problems," he says.
Local carpenter Massum Bellah uses the cell phone to check the current
market price of wood, so he ensures a higher profit for the furniture he makes.
"I am getting a better price for my chairs and cabinets," he says, beaming
broadly.
There is a regular pay phone about eight kilometers from the village, but the
line is usually dead or crackling with static, villagers say. Moreover, annual
floods wash out roads and turn the short trip into a cross-country adventure.
The average local cell-phone call costs five taka per minute, or approximately
10 cents. In a typical month, Mrs. Begum racks up about a $40 profit on her
$215 in phone charges, or about twice the average gross monthly income in
Bangladesh. She pays weekly installments of less than $5 toward the cost of
the $375 handset, which Grameen sold to her at cost.
Mrs. Begum has plowed most of the profits into expanding the chicken coop
that her husband tends. For her tidy hut, she bought a new wooden table and
two upholstered chairs. She indulged her daughters with singing lessons and
bought herself a pair of gold earrings. At the end of the month, she still
manages to deposit a few hundred taka in her Grameen Bank savings account.
"My life is getting better," she says. And there's a side benefit: "People consider
me a person of honor."
Occasionally, she has to fumble for the phone in the dark to answer a call from
across the globe. "That's the only disadvantage," she says. "The 3 a.m. calls."
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