Barriers to mobile apps in East Africa
This 2010 report from Sida (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) contains a great deal of useful data regarding mobile apps in East Africa:
However the part that caught my attention the most was the discussion of the key barriers to mobile apps in the region.
So, what hinders the take off of mobile applications for economic and social development in East Africa?
Firstly, the most significant barrier is the total cost of ownership and use, i.e. cost of device, airtime, charging, etc. The cost of communication must go down – SMS is very overpriced and so is voice and data traffic.
Secondly, many applications and services never reach out to the masses due to poor marketing and the non-existing meta data about the available applications. Subscribers must know what solutions are available, why and how to use them. This will lead to volumes which will eventually lower the price of the particular service. In other words, there is a huge need for marketing (of the product) and education (for the end user) in order to make mobile applications sustainable.
Thirdly, many interventions are not designed with scale in mind. Many of the existing SMS based applications that could benefit the poor the most are still in their infancy in the region. A few successful cases, namely mobile money transaction systems and various health related solutions are being used at scale, but the fact remains that the number of scaled-up mobile services are still few and/or limited geographically. Few implementers are familiar with all the costs involved and seen from a technological point of view, the requirements on networks and different requirements on handsets and end-users that mobile applications have must be understood better.
Other barriers include lack of electricity, illiteracy, language, privacy issues, gender, and concerns about security (e.g. phone theft).
