bangladesh

Imagine you're in Bangladesh and you want to buy a cow. You pull your mobile phone out of your pocket and start sending text messages to 3838, the shortcode for CellBazaar, a mobile phone marketplace which some have called the "Craigslist of Bangladesh." You look through the relevant ads and look at the ages, locations, and number of teeth of the 187 cows that are currently for sale. After another SMS, you are connected with the phone number of the the seller, ready to make your new purchase.

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Bangla blogging platform Somewherein,together with Save the Children, has launched an SMS fundraising campaign thay call “Jagoron” (‘the awakening') to generate funds from within Bangladesh to support Sidr victims.

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Abu Sufian's small room in Fultola, Bangladesh looks like a standard Internet cafe. There are four workstations -- each with a mouse, keyboard, and monitor -- where customers can check email or browse the Internet. But this isn't just any Internet cafe -- the center is all made possible by one mobile phone.

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Last week a new service was launched in Bangladesh that connects people who are selling products with potential buyers through their mobile phones. The service CellBazaar was started with support from GrameenPhone, the country’s largest cell phone provider.

What the service does is allow people to access a database of goods via SMS from their mobile phone. Once a user registers their phone and their location by sending a message to an SMS short code, they can enter their product into the database, look around for something to purchase, or just check the going rate for a certain product in different towns.

CellBazaar creator Kamal Quadir says that the service is not just mobile classified ads but a social development service that cuts out the middlemen for buyers and sellers, which means more profits and savings for them. He envisions, for example, that the service will let farmers get a better price when they sell their potatoes. And if a farmer or another seller doesn’t have their own cell phone to send the SMS from, then they can look for a “Phone Lady” who will let them use her phone for a small fee.

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Cell phones have added $650 million to Bangladesh’s gross domestic product (GDP) and created almost 240,000 jobs in the country. On top of that, most of the jobs pay significantly more than the average job, a recent study by the international firm Ovum found. Grameen Phone, and its Village Phone program, should be given a lot of credit for this.

Grameen Phone is currently the largest mobile phone company in Bangladesh with seven million subscribers in April. The telecom company itself is a for-profit operation but has a nonprofit arm that works with the microfinance giant the Grameen Foundation to get mobile phones to people living in poor, rural areas. How the Village Phone program works is that select members of Grameen’s micro-banks, usually women who have proven their ability to work and repay loans, use a small loan from Grameen to purchase a mobile phone. Often times this is the first working phone the village has ever had. The women then turn the mobile phones into businesses, charging fellow villagers a fee to make calls. Essentially this makes each owner of a Village Phone the head of a small, mobile call center.

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