Jan Chipchase and the shared mobile phone

Jan Chipchase, the well-known anthropologist with Nokia has come out with another one of his illuminating blog posts on the sharing of the mobile phone in Uganda.  You can read the blog post here.  It also provides a summary of the post and a 7MB Powerpoint presentation.

The study uncovered six shared phone practices summarized here:

1. Sente is the informal practice of sending and receiving money that leverages public phone kiosks and trusted networks. In Uganda the word Sente has two meanings the first being ‘money’ and the second ‘the sending of money as airtime’.

2. Beeping, flashing and missed calls are all ways to describe the practice of calling and hanging up before the recipient answers. It is in essence the cheapest form of lo-fi personal convenient communication and can be found anywhere where there are highly price sensitive consumers - from students in Helsinki to village dwellers in Uganda.

3. In Uganda most phone kiosk communication is mediated through a kiosk operator who completes parts of the calling task normally carried out by a sole device user.

4. Pooling is the collective buying of air time that exists amongst peer groups - students, colleagues, friends who each contribute to buy the lowest available denomination of airtime.

5. Phone kiosk owners often use a large notepad to document phone numbers used by their customers and over time it represents a form of address book and call log for the local community.

6. Step Messaging is the process of delivering either a text or verbal messages via shared mobile phone or kiosk where the message is delivered the last mile on foot.