MobileActive.org

Based on two experiences using mobile phones in Africa to address women’s rights and social development, the author tries to understand whether mobile technology will bring social progress to the economically poor of Africa.

The author first examines mobile phone use in the campaign for the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted by the African Union (AU)in 2003 and in need of ratification by 15 countries. The technical barriers to message transmission in the campaign and the message spamming that it attracted inhibited the success of this particular application of mobile technology but did not reduce the campaign effectiveness because the uniqueness of the cell phone campaign strategy drew a large amount of publicity for ratification.

In the second example, the UmNyango Project intended to promote and protect the rights of rural women in the province of KwaZulu Natal (KZN), South Africa, from domestic violence against women and landlessness amongst women. The project created "an SMS gateway through which messages could be distributed to all those enrolled in the project, and it enabled every individual to send messages to the organisers and to the local paralegal officers where they needed assistance with regard to any incidence of violence or threat to their access to land....In practice, the project found SMS to be prohibitively expensive, despite the fact that some level of subsidy was provided by the project towards the cost of SMS." The author states that, "Mobile phones, after all the hype, are like pencils, tools for communication.... Like all technologies, tools do not themselves do anything." He uses the example of SMS hate mail messages to support the position that effects of technology result from the underlying values and morals of its developers, not from the tools themselves, and concludes: "In capitalist societies, all technologies have the potential for magnifying and amplifying social differentiation. It is only through the imposition of the democratic will of citizens can this inherent tendency of technologies be overcome."