Empowering low-income consumers with mobile phone technology

I’m currently in Nairobi, Kenya, trying to accelerate our opening a new country operation and streamline our management support of new and existing investments, around technology and strategy. I received an interesting SMS the other day from Maggy, the woman who cleans my apartment and washes my clothes here. The message, asking me what time she should come, wasn’t as interesting as the fact that she sent it at all. Here’s someone living on probably less than $1,000 of annual income, and she’s well-versed in a technology that more than a few of my friends at home are not.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the mobile phone and its relevance to our work trying to improve services to the world’s billions of poor consumers. And relevance it has. Mobiles will be the PC for the people who don’ t have the resources or time to get computers and connect to the Net. Some 70-80% of Kenyans are still without mobile phones, but millions of subscribers are added each year as the price of handsets drops and coverage expands. Companies like Safaricom, the dominant provider here, dominate African stock markets and societies. The companies make a tremendous profit on their pre-paid airtime schemes, but at the same time give a critical service to many of Africa’s lowest-income residents.

One of Acumen Fund’s portfolio companies, Voxiva, views itself as a sort of salesforce.com for companies and organizations serving the bottom of the pyramid. In lay terms, that means they want to be an open platform to make it easy to reach the lowest-income markets using mobile as an input device. Makes sense given that mobiles are all over the place, cheap to afford, easy to power and simple to use, and not surprisingly they just announced a major health initiative, Phones for Health, tracking disease information in nine African countries. We had dinner with Paul Meyer, Voxiva’s CEO, the other night here, and heard about his ambitious plans for nailing this project and building a business in East Africa.Our kiosk provider in India, Drishtee, is also looking at how to deliver its information services over the mobile platform, with support from an Acumen Fund Fellow with experience in mobile apps. Several other Acumen Fund investments have expressed interest in support in developing applications tying together remote sales forces and agents through mobile phones rather than their existing paper systems. And a book sitting atop my “to read” stack outlines the notable story of Grameen Phone, a billion-dollar phone company in Bangladesh built to serve the communication needs of that country’s millions of low-income residents, and its synergy with Grameen Bank, the world’s first microfinance institution founded by Nobel Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus. 

Back on the ground in Nairobi, I have just become a customer of M-Pesa, Safaricom’s mobile payment service, which lets me send money to vendors or friends using my phone. Very exciting, but the only problem I have is knowing what to do with it. Hopefully, that problem will solve itself, as consumers in Kenya and beyond become empowered by this technology and Acumen Fund finds its own insertion point in this emerging space. Until then, any help thinking through the possibilities is welcome.