Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during his visit to a school in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, on October 17 last year, where all the students raised their cell phones to take photos with the leader. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 27 2025 (IPS)

It was necessary to repel the “invasion” of mobile phones in Brazilian classrooms, even to spark a debate about the use of technology in education, according to Silvana Veloso, an educator with extensive experience on the subject.

On January 13, Brazil enacted a law that bans “the use of personal portable electronic devices by students during classes, recess, or breaks between classes at all levels of basic education,” making it the first Latin American country to impose such a nationwide restriction."Technology must be introduced in each school in an organized manner, avoiding the current chaos”: Bernardo Baião.

An unusual agreement among various opposing political factions allowed the new law to be passed by the National Congress in December 2024. Only a few far-right lawmakers, primarily from the Liberal Party, voted against it.

They wanted students to have access to phones to film “indoctrinating practices” by teachers and expose Marxist ideological activism, which they claim is contaminating Brazilian education. However, even some of their legislators supported the law.

Restricting mobile phones in schools aims to “safeguard the mental, physical, and psychological health of children and adolescents,” as stated in the approved Law 15.100. It includes exceptions for pedagogical use, emergencies involving risks, or health and disability issues.

The new law took immediate effect, with no transition period, and will be enforced starting in February, when the school year begins in this country of 212 million people.

“This law is small and limited, but positive because it mobilizes the community, parents, teachers, and even the school cafeteria staff, sparking debate,” Veloso said. She does not reject technology in schools but advocates for its appropriate use.

As an educator, Veloso led the BH Digital program, a digital inclusion initiative in Belo Horizonte – the capital of the southern state of Minas Gerais, with 2.3 million inhabitants -, from its inception in 2004 until 2012.

The program established telecenters with 10 to 20 internet-connected computers in public institutions like libraries, assistance offices, cultural centers, and NGOs, as well as a mobile unit – a trailer equipped to teach computer classes in neighborhoods.

With 40 of her 60 years dedicated to education, Veloso also served as Secretary of Education for Rio Acima, a municipality of 10,000 residents, from 2022 to 2024. During her tenure, she implemented a technology program in local schools, including robotics labs. She continues to work as a teacher and advisor on the subject.

Rio Acima and many other municipalities received computer equipment, such as desktops and tablets, but lacked the knowledge to use them effectively.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, as they enact a law in Brasilia on January 13 that bans the use of cell phones and other mobile electronic devices in classrooms nationwide. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

Unprepared Schools and Teachers

Just as with the overwhelming presence of mobile phones, schools and teachers are generally unprepared to integrate new technologies into teaching, Veloso lamented. They have not developed pedagogical projects to incorporate these tools.

Regarding mobile phones, which are owned by a vast majority of students, Veloso has witnessed troubling cases. In response to school violence, which surged in late 2022 and early 2023 – with five assaults and 11 deaths in five Brazilian states – students aged nine and ten in Rio Acima organized self-defense networks via WhatsApp.

Instructions on using kitchen knives to “bleed the bandits” who might invade schools and the preparation of Molotov cocktails were part of the group’s discussions, until a mother found out through the students themselves, Veloso told IPS over the phone from Rio Acima, where she lives.

The leader of the movement was just 10 years old and headed several WhatsApp groups. “They were reproducing the violence” they feared becoming victims of, Veloso noted.

Another earlier case, from 2017, came to light when a student was found with cuts on her arm. It involved girls self-harming, encouraged by a website that promoted competitions among those who could cut themselves the most.

Training, particularly for teachers, to manage and leverage technological innovations is the central challenge facing education, Veloso argued.

“Technology does not cause regression; we are the ones responsible. Humanity has always sought interactive communication. What we have achieved is marvelous – phones that allow us to talk while seeing the other person’s image are fascinating,” but they require debate and dialogue for proper use, she concluded.

A poster by the Rio Acima City Hall promoting the use of tablets and computers in the environmental education of students. Credit: Rio Acima City Hall

The Harm of Mobile Phones

Numerous studies highlight the negative effects of mobile phones on learning, including attention deficits, social media addiction, and increased anxiety among students.

Brazil has become the first Latin American country to pass a law restricting mobile phones in schools, following a global trend. A quarter of the 194 member states of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have already adopted restrictive measures, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Although the law takes effect in February, its full implementation requires regulations and protocols for schools managed by states (secondary schools) and municipalities (primary schools).

After political consensus, driven by the proven distraction caused by mobile phones in both schools and workplaces, the new law now prompts reflection on pedagogical projects in schools.

“Technology must be introduced into each school in an organized manner, avoiding the current chaos,” said Bernardo Baião, coordinator of Educational Policies at Todos pela Educação, a nonprofit civil society organization advocating for quality basic education in Brazil.

Two students from Rio Acima participate in the municipality’s school technology program, aimed at better utilizing digital resources in education. Credit: Rio Acima City Hall

The proliferation of mobile phones, combined with social media, has a cognitive dimension, affecting learning. Students themselves admit that it distracts them from their studies.

“More screen time, less learning,” emphasized Baião, a history graduate turned educator, who has worked full-time for the Todos pela Educação movement in Rio de Janeiro for the past three years.

Other aspects of the technological challenge include the emotional impact on those who “cannot live without social media” and the social interaction aspect of “living and playing at school, making it naturally noisy, without the silence of mobile phones, which bring distant people closer while pushing away those nearby,” he told IPS.

“Technology is not the enemy. We must combine different tools. Printed books are better for memorization, but digital ones are more suitable for personalized teaching, addressing different needs and interests,” he added.

“The teacher is more important than the computer or phone screen; technology cannot replace them,” he stressed.

The ban on mobile phones in schools had already been implemented in many private schools, and four of Brazil’s 26 states had passed their own legislation. In fact, 28% of schools had already adopted a total ban, with few exceptions, by 2023, according to the Internet Steering Committee.

This committee includes government and civil society participants, including academics and industry representatives. It assists in internet governance, maintaining neutrality against political and private interests, and established the core principles of Brazil’s internet law, the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet.

The swift passage of the national law was due to near-consensus in public opinion. A survey conducted by the non-governmental Locomotiva Institute in October 2024 showed that 82% of respondents supported banning mobile phones in schools.

Members of a women-farmers’ collective demonstrate use of a devices that sends daily bulletins on weather patterns, crops and other matters of importance to farming communities in rural India. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
MAHABUBNAGAR, India, Mar 4 2015 (IPS)

Jawadi Vimalamma, 36, looks admiringly at her cell phone. It’s a simple device that can only be used to send or receive a call or a text message. Yet to the farmer from the village of Janampet, located 150 km away from Hyderabad, capital of the southern Indian state of Telangana, it symbolises a wealth of knowledge that changed her life.

Her phone is fitted with what the farmers call a GreenSIM, which sends her daily updates on the weather, health tips or agricultural advice.

“My profits have increased from 5,000 to 20,000 rupees (80-232 dollars) each season.” -- Jawadi Vimalamma, a smallholder farmer participating in a mobile technology scheme to create awareness among rural women.
Three years ago, a single message on this mobile alerted Vimalamma to the benefits of crop rotation.

“My profits have increased from 5,000 to 20,000 rupees (80-232 dollars) each season,” says the smallholder farmer, who now grows rice, corn, millet and peanuts on her three-acre plot, instead of relying on a single crop for her livelihood.

Not far away, in the neighbouring village of Kommareddy Palli, a woman farmer named Kongala Chandrakala is using the same SIM card on a device nicknamed a ‘phablet’ – a low-cost combination mobile phone and tablet computer that dispenses vital information to small farmers.

The little machine has been a lifeline for this woman, who survived years of domestic violence before striking out on her own.

“Fifteen years ago, I was a school dropout, living in an abusive marriage. Today, I have my own farm, and am making money,” Chandrakala tells IPS.

Both women are members of Adarsh Mahila Samakhya (AMS), an all-women collective that helps empower smallholder women farmers through modern technologies.

The collective has 8,000 members, 2,000 of whom use the GreenSIM card, the result of a collaboration between the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) – an international research organisation headquartered in Hyderabad – together with the Indian Farmers’ Fertiliser Cooperative and Bharti Airtel – one of India’s largest mobile service providers.

The scheme began in 2002, when the government asked ICRISAT to help train local farmers in drought-resilient agricultural practices. When the Institute started searching for local partners on the ground to help execute the project, AMS – then a fledgling group of just a handful of women – came forward.

Shortly after, the collective used its small office to host a Village Knowledge Centre, a kind of experimental technology hub where women could learn how to operate basic devices such as mobile phones and computers, and use them to get information on climate change, groundwater levels, and adapted farming techniques that would help them increase the yields on their small plots of land.

According to Dileep Kumar, senior scientist at ICRISAT, the most popular tool by far has been the GreenSIM, which disseminates a variety of bulletins daily, ranging from market prices, to weather forecasts, to tips on accessing farmers’ welfare schemes, as well as guides to crop planning and best-practices for fertiliser use.

A fight against suicide

A mobile phone may seem like a humble intervention into the vast and poverty-ridden arena of Indian agriculture, but it has proved to be a literal lifesaver for many.

Data from the 2011 census indicates that there are 144.3 million agricultural labourers in India, including 118.6 million cultivators, comprising over 30 percent of the country’s total workforce of roughly 448 million people.

A huge portion of this workforce survives on between one and two dollars a day, pushing many people heavily into debt as they struggle to make payments on farm equipment, and costly pesticides and fertilisers.

A changing climate, resulting in extreme weather events and prolonged periods of drought, does not help the situation, and scores of farmers are impacted by what experts are calling the country’s agrarian crisis.

With few options open to them, hundreds of thousands of farmers choose death over life: data from the Indian National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) indicates that 270,940 farmers have committed suicide since 1995, rounding out to a total of 45 farmer deaths every single day.

Mahbubnagar, the district where the AMS is located, is well known for its recurring droughts and a wave of suicides. The district receives only 550 mm of rainfall each year, well below India’s national average of 1,000-1,250 mm per annum.

The district has seen about 150 suicides since 2013 alone.

Erkala Manamma, president of the AMS collective, claims that the introduction of the GreenSIM is changing this reality. Crop failure is less of a crisis here today than it was a decade ago, and thousands of farmers now feel empowered by the knowledge source that fits snugly in the palms of their hands.

Gopi Balachandriya, a 50-year-old farmer from Rachala village in Mahbubnagar District, is one such example.

In December 2013, he was waiting for an astrologically auspicious day to harvest peanuts on his three-acre farm until a message on his GreenSIM cell phone one morning warned him of a coming storm. “I quickly harvested my crop before the rains came. It saved me from losing my produce,” he recalls.

A similar message helped Mallagala Nirmala, a farmer from the village of Moosapet, understand the need for sustainable usage of fertilisers.

One day a voice message asked, ‘Have you had your farm soil tested?’ A curious Nirmala visited the Village Knowledge Centre where she learnt the basics of healthy soils, including when to add inputs of additional nutrients, which she receives free of cost from ICRISAT. The farmer is now the secretary of AMS.

One of the more tangible results of this experiment in knowledge sharing has been better profit for the farmers involved. Chandrakala, one of 20 female farmers using the ‘phablet’, has increased the rice yield on her one-acre farm from 55 to 75 kg at each harvest.

If she hears, via voice message, that groundwater levels are too low to support a healthy rice crop, she switches to growing grass, which she sells to a nearby community-managed dairy that produces 2,000 litres of milk a day.

Having these options allows her to make between 20 and 30,000 rupees each season, a princely sum compared to the average earnings of farming families in the region, which barely touch 10,000 rupees a month.

The GreenSIM initiative is certainly not the first time groups have partnered together to empower farmers using modern technology.

In the northern Indian state of Haryana, for instance – where 70 percent of the population of roughly 25 million people relies on agriculture for a living – widespread use of a handheld device known as the GreenSeeker, which calculates the health of a particular crop using infrared censors, had massive success among rural communities.

And in 2013, the World Bank reported on a scheme using a mobile phone app that allowed insurance agencies to collect reliable data on crop yields, thus enabling them to offer lower premiums to farmers who rely largely on rain-fed agriculture and were desperately in need of robust safety nets in the form of insurance policies.

In the first year alone, some 400,000 farmers in 50 districts across the northern and western states of Maharashtra and Rajasthan benefitted from the scheme.

The challenge for policy makers is how to replicate such initiatives on a wider scale, in order to ease the abject poverty facing millions of farmers across India – particularly the women, who are most vulnerable to the crushing impacts of poverty and hunger.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

For Cherie Blair (left), founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “empowering women and girls to access education isn’t an option, isn’t a nice thing to do, it’s an imperative”. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Feb 26 2015 (IPS)

Providing women with greater access to mobile technology could increase literacy, advance development and open up much-needed educational and employment opportunities, according to experts at the fourth United Nations’ Mobile Learning Week conference here.

“Mobile technology can offer learning where there are no books, no classrooms, even no teachers. This is especially important for women and girls who drop out of school and need second chances,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women.

The agency, which focuses on gender equality and the empowerment of women, joined forces with its “sister” organisation, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to host the Feb. 23-27 conference this year.“Mobile technology can offer learning where there are no books, no classrooms, even no teachers. This is especially important for women and girls who drop out of school and need second chances” – Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women

The aim, UNESCO said, was to give participants a venue “to learn about and discuss technology programmes, initiatives and content that are alleviating gender deficits in education.”

Participants from more than 70 countries shared so-called best practices and presented a range of initiatives to address the issue, including reducing the costs of access to mobile services in some developing countries, and providing training and free laptops to women teachers in countries such as Israel.

“There is still a persistent gender gap in access to mobile technology,” said keynote speaker Cherie Blair, founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In an interview on the side-lines of the conference, she told IPS that “anything that encourages the education of girls is important” and that it was “particularly significant” that UNESCO and UN Women had joined forces to work together in this area to achieve results.

“We need to encourage women to use technology and we also need to involve men to provide support,” Blair said. She cited research showing that a woman in a low- or middle-income country is 21 percent less likely than a man to own a mobile phone. In Africa, the figure is 23 percent less likely, and in the Middle East and South Asia 24 percent and 37 percent respectively.

“The reasons women cite for not owning a mobile phone include the costs of handsets and data plans, lack of need and fear of not being able to master the technology,” Blair said.

Yet, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), mobile phones are the “most pervasive and rapidly adopted technology in history”, with six billion of the world’s seven billion people now having access.

If there existed gender parity in this access, women could benefit from the technology in a number of ways, including getting information about healthcare and other services, experts said.

They could also potentially follow massive open online courses (MOOCS) such as those offered by an increasing number of universities and other institutions, despite on-going controversy about their benefits. Currently, the majority of students enrolled in MOOCs are men, and often from wealthy backgrounds, surveys suggest.

Whether women live in low-income or rich countries, learning how to use technology could have future benefits especially regarding employment, said Mark West, a UNESCO project officer.

“Ninety percent of jobs in the future are going to require ICT skills,” he told IPS in an interview. “So any idea that it’s not socially or culturally acceptable for women to use technology is extremely dangerous.”

He said the fact that 25 percent fewer women than men currently access the Internet “was alarming” and that changes needed to occur early in education so that girls were not left out of future jobs.

“We don’t often realise how gendered our perceptions of technology are,” he added. “Women are taught from a young age to not like technology, taught that maths and science are not for them, and this is a big problem.”

At university level, only about 20 percent of female students are pursuing careers in computer science, and in the technology sector, only six percent of CEOs are women, according to the ITU.

“We should do more to get women in STEM fields,” said Doreen Bogdan, ITU’s Chief of Strategic Planning and Membership Department, referring to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Some participants highlighted current programmes to keep girls interested in science, such as camps run by the California-based semiconductor company Qualcomm, which brings sixth-grade female students together to learn coding and tech skills, and does follow-up work with them as they continue their education.

“All of the tech companies are fighting for the same talent pool and there are not enough females in that talent pool because not enough girls are studying it,” said Angela Baker, a senior manager at Qualcomm.

“There’s a ton of research that shows that when you have more women in the industry, companies tend to do better … so we have a vested interest in building that pipeline of girls and women,” she told IPS.

Apart from the STEM fields, girls have made great strides in education over the past 30 years, but there is “still a long way to go,” said experts, who cited U.N. figures showing that globally there are seven girls to every 10 boys in school.

Both UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova and Cherie Blair described education as a “human rights imperative” as well as a development and security imperative.

They stressed that the goal of achieving gender equality in education will continue for the post-2015 development agenda, and that technology has an important role to play.

“Empowering women and girls to access education isn’t an option, isn’t a nice thing to do, it’s an imperative,” Blair said.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Carlos M. Correa
GENEVA, Sep 29 2014 (IPS)

The steady increase in patent applications and grants that is taking place in developed and some developing countries (notably in China) is sometimes hailed as evidence of the strength of global innovation and of the role of the patent system in encouraging it. 

Carlos M. Correa

However, such an increase does not correspond to a genuine rise in innovation. It points instead to a major deviation of the patent system away from its intended objective: to reward those who contribute to technological progress by creating new and inventive products and processes.

The increase in the number of patents reflects, to a large extent, the low requirements of patentability applied by patent offices and courts. Patents granted despite the absence of a genuine invention detract knowledge from the public domain and can unduly restrain legitimate competition.

Low standards of patentability encourage a large number of applications that would not otherwise be made, leading to a world backlog estimated at over 10 million unexaminedpatents.

This problem affects various sectors. For instance, Nokia is reported to hold around 30,000 patents relating to mobile phones, a large part of which are likely to be invalid, while Samsung holds more than 31,000 patent families. A study covering various fields of clean energy technologies, including solar photovoltaic, geothermal, wind and carbon capture, found nearly 400,000 patent documents.“The steady increase in patent applications and grants … does not correspond to a genuine rise in innovation. It points instead to a major deviation of the patent system away from its intended objective: to reward those who contribute to technological progress by creating new and inventive products and processes”

The proliferation of patents is particularly high and problematic in the pharmaceutical sector, where large companies actively seek to acquire broad portfolios of patents in order to extend patent protection beyond the expiry of the original patents on new compounds. These ever-greening strategies allow them to keep generic producers out of the market and charge prices higher than those that would otherwise exist in a competitive scenario.

For example, the basic patent for paroxetine, an antidepressant, expired in the late 1990s, whereas ‘secondary’ patents will extend up to 2018.

Ever-greening strategies by one company often force others to follow the same pattern as a defensive approach.  The proliferation of ‘secondary’ or ‘spurious’ patents can impose significant costs on patients and public health systems.

Several measures can be applied at the national level to avoid the proliferation of patents on trivial developments in full consistency with the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), because they fall within the policy space that World Trade Organisation (WTO) members have retained to design and apply their patent laws.

The most important policy that governments may implement is the rigorous application of the requirements of patentability, based on a thorough examination of patent applications. The TRIPS agreement neither defines the concept of ‘invention’ nor how such requirements need to be interpreted.

Thus, national laws may differentiate inventions and discoveries, and require that the former result from an inventive activity, thereby excluding pre-existing subject matter that is merely found, such as natural substances.

While some patent offices grant patents on the basis of legal fictions on novelty, there is no reason to follow such practices in other jurisdictions.

An example of this practice by some patent offices is to admit what are known as ‘selection patents’, whereby one of more items that were previously disclosed are independently claimed. This type of patents provide an effective means of ever-greening, because protection can be extended for the full length of a new patent, i.e. normally twenty additional years, despite the fact that novelty was actually lost when such items were first disclosed.

While some large patent offices, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office and the Chinese Patent Office, seem to apply a lax inventive step standard thereby allowing for the granting of a large number of ‘low quality’ patents, there are strong public interest arguments to follow a different approach, particularly in developing countries.

A strict application of the industrial applicability/usefulness requirement, when provided for by the national law, may also contribute to prevent the grant of unwarranted patent rights.

This is the case, in particular, for claims on new medical uses, which are equivalent to claims over methods of treatment that have no industrial application or technical effect. The lack of industrial applicability may be a sufficient ground to reject such claims.

Given the policy space left by the TRIPS agreement to adopt their own definitions of the patentability standards, and to do so consistently with their legal systems and practices, governments can follow different methods to ensure that patents are granted only when there are sufficient merits under the applicable law.

Governments may introduce specific standards in the patent laws themselves. A notable case is the Indian Patent Act, as amended in 2005, which incorporated in section 3(d) specific standards to assess patent applications in the field of chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

In a case brought by Novartis (a Swiss pharmaceutical company) against the rejection of its patent application relating to a beta crystalline form of imatinib mesylate, the Indian Supreme Court held that the claimed invention failed in both the tests of invention and patentability.

The definition of the standards of patentability can also be made through regulations, including patent offices’ guidelines. A good example is provided by the guidelines on the patentability of pharmaceutical products and processes adopted by the Argentine government in 2012 to limit the ever-greening of pharmaceutical patents.

Finally, it is worth noting that in applying patentability standards, patent offices can differentiate, in line with the TRIPS agreement, among fields of technology in order to take into account particular features of specific sectors and public policies objectives, for instance in relation to the promotion of generic drugs.

Measures to accommodate these differences constitute a necessary response to the diversity of technologies and, consequently, a condition sine qua non for an intrinsically balanced system of protection that remains neutral in its effects on competition. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

This column is taken from the author’s research paper on ‘Tackling the Proliferation of Patents: How to Avoid Undue Limitations to Competition and the Public Domain’, published by the South Centre (http://www.southcentre.int/research-paper-52-august-2014/).

Excerpt:

New studies argue that mobile technologies can be more effective than microcredit in promoting entrepreneurship and fighting poverty in developing countries, like Mauritania. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Farangis Abdurazokzoda
WASHINGTON , May 31 2014 (IPS)

Mobile-finance and direct cash grants are revolutionary tools that can substitute for under-developed financial sectors and help reduce poverty and promote entrepreneurship in developing countries, according to researchers here.

Rodger Voorhies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Christopher Blattman, a Columbia University political scientist, say these two potentially empowering mechanisms can help global efforts to provide needed assistance to vulnerable and poor populations.

In a teleconference hosted by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the country’s most influential think tanks, the two men argued that mobile technologies can help poor people in developing countries manage their personal finances, including savings, insurance, credit, and cash transfers that many in the developed world take for granted.

Mobile technologies can help fill the gap by providing easy and free access to financial tools, according to an article published in CFR’s journal, ‘Foreign Affairs’, co-written by Voorhies and Jake Kendall, who also works at the Gates Foundation.

The article, ‘The Mobile Finance Revolution’, cites World Bank statistics showing that, on average, nearly nine out of every ten people living in a developing country have a cell-phone account, although some users may, of course, have multiple accounts.

Mobile technologies are more effective than much-lauded microcredit programmes in promoting entrepreneurship and fighting poverty, according to the article.

Among other advantages, they eliminate the bureaucracy and routine banking costs associated with in-person and cash transactions. In addition, mobile-finance clients generate data that can be further used by banks and investors as an alternative for the traditional credit scores, according to Voorhies and Kendall.

In a second article titled ‘Show Them the Money’, Blattman and Paul Niehaus, who teaches economics at the University of California San Diego, detail recent studies that show the effectiveness of cash grants and outline the comparative disadvantages of microloans and related programmes, such as donating money to buy cows, goats, seeds, beans, tools, and other agricultural inputs, as well as schoolbooks and clothing for poor families.

Not everybody wants a cow

Despite the fact that the microcredit movement brought significant positive results – recognised in 2006 when the Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were awarded with a Nobel Peace Prize – a series of more recent studies on the effects of microloans have put their success into question, according to Blattman and Niehaus.

In one study, the economist Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a number of collaborators examined the case of the Indian non-profit Spandana that provided 250 dollar loans to women in Hyderabad at low-interest rates. Over three years, they found no measurable improvements in the education, health, poverty, or women’s empowerment among the recipients.

After collecting an additional 20 years of data on Spandana’s lending and their borrowers, Banerjee found “no evidence of large sustained consumption or income gains as a result of access to microcredit.”

As for the effectiveness of training programmes, economists David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff reviewed the outcomes of the International Labour Organisation’s ‘Start and Improve your Business Programme’ that has provided training to over 4.5 million people in over 100 countries since 1977. They found that there was little lasting effect on the sales or profits of the business owners in the recipient countries.

“No wonder people in developing countries, when given the choice, don’t necessarily choose to invest in skills training,” write Blattman and Niehaus.

The two authors argue that providing cash grants to poor people directly is also preferable to supplying goods that will presumably be used by recipients to increase their income or skills.

They argue that poor people in developing countries often use the cash to buy the same things that aid organisations would provide, such as livestock, tools, or training, in any event, but giving people cash directly provides them with more flexibility.

“Not everyone, after all, wants a cow,” the authors write.

Blattman and Niehaus do not deny the benefits of aid, training programmes, and microloans but insist that significant improvements are possible depending on how the money is allocated.

In a study conducted in Uganda, 250 groups of 15-25 young adults were each given 400 dollars in cash to spend as they wished, so long as the purpose was to enhance their livelihood.

The study found that most of the money was spent on acquiring the physical tools and materials they needed to start working, and only ten percent was used for training. It turned out that over four years, the participants’ incomes rose by an average of 40 percent.

A similar study was conducted in Liberia, where unconditional 200 dollar grants were given to drug addicts and petty criminals. The recipients “did not waste the money,” but used it to fund legitimate enterprises.

“Fears that poor people waste cash are simply not borne out by the available data,” the authors write.

Cash or cell phones?

Blattman and Niehaus outline the benefits of cash transfers over traditional aid programmes. They emphasise the importance of money transfers in places where the population has been hit by unexpected crises – conflicts, natural disasters, or extended periods of political uncertainty.

“Think of Southeast Asia after [the] tsunami or the Middle East flooded with Syrian refugees, where the returns on capital after a recovery period are likely to be unusually high and the challenge of making smart investments without localised knowledge unusually large,” the authors write.

Further, cash transfers are essential to emerging markets that have relatively stable economies but where few firms offer jobs and where most workers, by necessity, are self-employed.

More specifically, the authors suggest that cash transfers better enable entrepreneurs to start businesses in countries where banks and other credit institutions are weak or under-developed.

Just as Blattman and Niehaus argue that cash transfers can be particularly helpful in emergency situations, Kendall and Voorhies insist that cell phones may actually prove more effective.

“A study in Niger by a researcher from Tufts University found that during a drought, allowing people to request emergency government support through their cell phones resulted in better diets for those people, compared with the diets of those who received cash handouts,” according to the authors.

In addition, studies have shown that cell phones encourage financial discipline and savings. In Malawi, for example, farmers were offered an option to have their harvest proceeds directly deposited into savings accounts. Those farmers who chose this option ended up investing 30 percent more in farm inputs and had a 22 percent increase in revenues compared to those who chose not to participate.

But while both articles articulate valid criticisms of how aid and microloan organisations operate, they fail to address important aspects. The most obvious are literacy rates, especially low financial literacy that is often prevalent in developing countries. The issues that need to be considered with mobile-finance are the access of affordable network providers as well as a very basic one – electricity.

Because of a lack of electricity in Zimbabwe’s rural areas, most people have to charge their mobile phones on solar-powered chargers. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Michelle Chifamba
HARARE, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

Prosper Muripo rents a small space in a general dealer’s shop at the Gotora shopping centre in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East province. He is one of the many people in rural Zimbabwe who earn a living selling recharge vouchers and charging mobile phone batteries on solar-powered chargers.

“I charge 50 cents to charge a battery for 30 minutes and a dollar for an hour. I also charge non-owners of mobile phones 50 cents to make a one-minute phone call,” Muripo told IPS.

Rural Zimbabwe is characterised by a lack of proper infrastructure, a limited electricity supply and poor road networks. Traditionally, communication to these areas has always been limited.“Job notifications can now be sent on mobile phones. I’m not employed and when work is available in the city and the major towns I can be notified.” -- Rural Zimbabwean Miriam Chauke

However, over the past five years mobile phones have begun providing a means of communication, connecting Zimbabwe’s rural population with urban dwellers.

According to the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), a body mandated to issue licences in the postal and telecommunications sector, Zimbabwe now has a mobile penetration of 97 percent.

“The increase in mobile penetration has been triggered by increased investment in communication infrastructure in both urban and rural areas, meaning that marginalised people can now afford to use mobile phones,” POTRAZ acting director Alfred Marisa told IPS.

Mobile phones have slowly become the simplest and cheapest mode of communication in this southern African nation.

According to the Zimbabwe Statistics Agency’s 2011-2012 Poverty Income Consumption and Expenditure Survey, which was released in June, 7.7 percent of Zimbabwe’s economically active population is unemployed. This is a marked contrast to previously reported unemployment figures of 85 to 90 percent.

The report also noted that 8.2 million Zimbabweans in rural areas are poor, while 10.7 percent of the rural population is unemployed. It is estimated that 72 percent of Zimbabwe’s  12.75 million people live in rural areas.

But despite these high poverty figures for rural Zimbabwe, mobile phone usage is growing rapidly there.

According to Frost and Sullivan Growth Partnership Services, an international company that conducts business research to accelerate growth, “despite the high levels of unemployment, the number of mobile phone subscribers in Zimbabwe has increased from less than two million at the end of 2008 to more than 10.9 million in 2013.” The country’s mobile phone users are expected to reach 13.5 million subscribers by 2015 and the industry will be worth 1.34 billion dollars by 2016.

Much of this increased usage has been attributed to a massive decline in SIM card prices. In 2008, a SIM card cost about 90 dollars, now it costs less than one dollar. And since 2009, when Zimbabwe opted to adopt a multi-currency regime to beat hyperinflation under the Zimbabwean dollar, Chinese-made mobile phones have become easily available here. On average they cost about 21 dollars.

Mobile phone dealers who sell Chinese-made products in Harare say they are doing brisk trade as a result of the affordability of their products.

“Business is booming, especially during the tobacco harvesting season when many rural farmers auction their produce [in the city]. Since the multi-currencies system brought economic stability, people have steady incomes and can save to purchase gadgets such as mobile phones, which were [previously] reserved for the rich and elite,” mobile phone seller Sylvester Mbirimani told IPS.

Telecel Zimbabwe, the country’s second-largest mobile phone operator, has been expanding and upgrading its network over the last two years to access more subscribers in rural areas.

“Telecel has been creating value for money for its clients. We were the first to slash the price of SIM cards and we are committed to satisfy our clients and promote growth in all unconnected areas,” Telecel marketing director Octivius Kahiya told IPS.

Many rural Zimbabweans like Miriam Chauke from Mutare, Manicaland Province, say that the access to mobile phones has empowered them. Chauke is unemployed but she worked part time as a manual labourer and was able to earn enough money to purchase a SIM card and a cheap mobile phone.

“It now seems that mobile phone use is becoming a basic human right, because they are offering the opportunity to help [close] communication barriers that were present in the past.

“Job notifications can now be sent on mobile phones. I’m not employed and when work is available in the city and the major towns I can be notified [by SMS subscription service],” Chauke told IPS.

Mobile phones have also compensated for poor banking services in rural areas thanks to mobile banking. Now rural Zimbabweans are able to supercede the rigid rules of formal banking and make financial transactions. However, this still remains a fledgling market as most rural Zimbabweans still mostly use their mobile phones for texts and making calls.

Economic analyst Eric Shabangu predicts that the mobile phone banking has the potential to become the biggest banking platform in Zimbabwe.

“The rapid spread of mobile phone penetration, as opposed to bank outreach, has created a fertile ground for mobile money to grow in Zimbabwe. Mobile banking could be the platform for rapid financial inclusion of people that now only need mobile phones to access a certain range of essential financial services they never used to get,” Shabangu told IPS.

According to Josham Gurira, an economist at the University of Zimbabwe, access to mobile phones will continue to change rural Zimbabwe.

“Access to information and communication technologies is now considered a basic human right and mobile phones have offered the best opportunity to enhance the digital divide which could have prevented it. The use of mobile technology has empowered many people and is regarded as a key tool in helping alleviate global poverty,” Gurira told IPS.

“The adaption of mobile technology has redefined the way people communicate and the growth in mobile phone use has shaped a new way of engagement and connection. Mobile phones are providing Zimbabwe with an opportunity to develop,” he said.