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Theresa Regli

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South Africa, land of things that ring in the pocket

18-Dec-2008

Tags: Web Analytics,

I recently had the great fortune of taking a holiday trip around the diverse and beautiful country of South Africa. For a stage of the trip, in a remote area of northern Kwa-Zulu Natal, my husband and I had a Zulu guide and translator, which allowed us to explore the communities more in-depth and converse more freely the locals.

Most of the schools and homes in this area (including our translator's) had no electricity or plumbing; in these parts, it costs approximately 300 ZAR (about US$30) to send a child to school for the year (including textbooks). Most people don't own cars, so oftentimes groups of people stand along the side of the road waiting for a ride.

And while they wait, they tap away text messages on their mobile devices.

It was then I learned the Zulu word uma-khala-khukhwIni, which translates literally as "thing that rings in the pocket." In a country where unemployment hovers around 25%, men in rural areas tend to leave for several weeks at a time to work near a city, then come home with money and things for the kids, like mobile phones. Those who don't have electricity go to a general store in town to plug the phone in and charge it. These kids may not have running water, but they can look things up on Wikipedia.

Naturally I was curious about the economics: how could these kids afford to rack up SMS messaging costs in an area where wealth is still largely measured by cattle, and public education only arrived after the fall of apartheid?

It turns out that the communication happens via a service called MXit, a free instant messaging software application that runs on GPRS/3G mobile phones with Java support, and native to South Africa. MXit doesn't charge for sending and receiving person to person messages, and while some service providers charge for GPRS/3G data cost, these costs are comparatively minuscule, about 1 ZAR cent, or one tenth of a US penny. In other words, the next time you buy a beer in London or Moscow, it's worth about 8,000 text messages to a kid in rural South Africa.

We mentioned in our 2009 predictions article that mobile analytics is going to become increasingly important in 2009 -- but for still too many companies, a mobile strategy isn't even on their radar. Smart companies have the foresight to think about content distribution beyond the technology elite, those of us sitting in our offices with PCs and dollars, euros, or pounds sterling in our wallets. As wealth grows in places like China, India and South Africa, where mobile phones far outnumber PCs, you'd be wise to do the same.