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Mobile frontier
BBC Focus on Africa
April-June 2011

Not so long ago is Muhammad Awwal Umar, a 47-year-old car mechanic from Jos, a bustling city in Nigeria's central Plateau State, wanted to make a phone a call he would go to the public phone box. Then in 2003 the first cellular network arrived in his part of the world and by 2005 he owned his first mobile phone - a simple handset which he could use for telephone calls and SMS.

Internet cafes then started to spring around the city and, until October last year, Umar would visit one of these to email, chat and, more recently, update his Facebook page.

Then Glo Mobile, his mobile operator and with 25 million subscribers Nigeria's largest mobile network, launched Glo Messenger, a new service which allows email and online chat.

Umar's first though was that there must be a catch. Surely he would need a subscription and a smartphone like an iPhone or Blackbery. As it turned out the service is available on a pay-as-you-go basis and works on even the most basic handset. As yet there is no competition so it is still a little expensive - a user has to pay to receive email - but for Umar, who can now read and send emails from anywhere or use instant messenger, it is "a most welcome technology".

Other have seen the potential too. Since January 2009 four major mobile operators in four African countries - Lesotho, Kenya, Nigeria and the Republic of Congo - have launched the service.

The technology, developed six years ago by a Hong Kong-based software company,, was made commercially viable in 2008 when investment group Lonzim took a 51 per cent stake in the business. The company, now known as ForgetMeNot Africa (FMNA), is not looking back. It has a further 50 to 60 networks in its sights, believes existing users will start to use the service more and expects over a million people to sign up to the service this year alone. "The growth prospects are huge," says Jeremy George, FMNA's chief operating officer.

He is not the only one who thinks so. An increasing number of companies from global heavyweights to countless new entrants have recognised the developing applications for low-end handsets (also know as feature phones) is an important and growing market.

Nokia, whose handsets have struggled to compete against the like of the iPhone and the Blackberry in developed markets, responded by launching the Ovi Life tool. This, for example, enables farmers to access crop prices or women healthcare information on the most basic feature phone. It launched this first in China, then India and Indonesia and most recently in Nigeria, Africa's largest mobile market and a country where only five per cent of the households have a computer.

Africa is being seen as a key market to get involved in. over 50 per cent of the continent's population has access to a mobile phone and this is expected to rise to 80 per cent by 2014. But, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) worldwide mobile phone tracker, while smartphones sales may be rising steadily, especially in more developed markets like South Africa, these still only account for six per cent of total handsets sales.

This is because many of the features of a smartphone require data subscription which most users in Africa simply cannot afford. This is certainly the case in Congo, says Francis Okouele, product and services manager of Warid Congo, the country's third biggest mobile operator and one which is rolling out FMNA's technology.

"Affordability is probably the biggest issue facing people here," he says, explaining that the cheapest internet connection in Congo costs $270 a month and a Blackberry upwards of $640. So the charm of FMNA's technology and similar services, like Nokia's Ovi Life Tool, is that they can run on a basic mobile - voice plus SMS - connection.

"A technology like ours may not be sexy, but it has teeth," says FMNA's George, paraphrasing a line from the Hollywood film, Wall Street.

For Andy Hicks, telecommunications researcher manager at the IDC, one of the great assets of African mobile innovation is the emphasis on user experience. It works with the limited connectivity and what a basic handset can actually do. "When you're designing an application for smartphones and 3G networks you can get lazy about task design and efficient code." This is something that cannot happen in Africa.

What operators are also recognising is that if they want to tap rapidly growing emerging markets they cannot apply a one-size-fits-all approach. Take Vodafone's mobile money product, M-Pesa, which was first launched in Kenya and allows people without a bank account to send and receive money via a mobile handset.

A version of this is now available in most countries where Vodafone has presence. Its strategy has been either to take stake in a major operator like South Africa's Vodacom, or form service partnerships with local networks, such as its relationship with Libya's al Madar.

But instead of trying to control the entire technology chain it has taken a more flexible approach. It has done this by defining M-Pesa's main features but then allowing local operators the freedom to choose what software best suits the local IT environment.

There are a number of factors to consider, ranging from levels of IT infrastructure and investment, which vary widely from country-to-country, to GDP per capita, education and literacy levels. These factors sometimes hinder the take up of new technology as Warid Congo has discovered. To date it has just 12,000 of its 500,000 subscribers using FMNA Warid Messenger service. "The service is currently a bit complex so we are working on making it easier," explains Okouele. He is confident that once this is achieved "Warid Messenger will easily break the 50,000-users barrier."

What Okouele is clear about is that the appetite for technology in Congo is huge and growing. "Young people today want access to technology - email, instant messenger, Facebook and so on - wherever they are," he says. FMNA's George agrees. "Facebook is growing like wildfire in Kenya and Nigeria," he says.

In fact, FMNA recently held focus groups in Kenya and Nigeria with 60 people and of these 97 per cent used the social networking phenomenon. In August last year Internet World Statistics showed that there were 17.6 million Facebook users in Africa, of which over a million were in Kenya.

FMNA believes that this trend will continue to grow. Back in Jos, Umar is already posting updates to his Facebook page using software provided by his operator and this is an area Warid Congo is working on too. "Many people only want to go onto the internet for Facebook so having it on their phone would be great for them and for us as well," says Okouele.

For African consumers, who have some of the highest connectivity costs in the world, it will be better still when prices start to fall. This may happen as new fibre-optic cables are laid and internet-based services start to supplant more basic ones.

But one thing is certain, the market for low-end handsets, and applications that work on them, will be around for the foreseeable future.

Pamela Whitby is a freelance journalist and the sub-editor of BBC Focus on Africa magazine

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