Many Maasai warrior wear digital watches next to traditional beadwork. This man’s Nokia 810 and Android phone are tucked beneath his robes as he cleans his teeth with a traditional toothbrush tree.
Nairobi / Lewa – Maasai villages / Mara North – Maasai villages
Life in Africa revolves around community, with hierarchy in this order: family (starting with the eldest male), village, tribe. Everything is tribal. A tribe can be thousands of people, like the Zulu or Maasai. This underlies most societal structures from governments to families in schools.
This Nairobi shantytown houses over 300,00o Nigerians
Many people here are very poor – the shantytowns in Nairobi are huge, for example there are 300,000+ people in one shantytown. People choose to live there because it is very cheap, e.g. $50/month. TV dishes dot the roofs of these shantytowns, as this has become affordable enough to enable local businesses to install and support them. TV services are not cheap though – something like $20-30 / month for service, a cost equal to a month’s food budget. I wonder if the internet may enter many people’s homes via these TV providers, since infrastructure already exists.
Maasai live a really traditional life. Digital wrist watches are worn. Cell phones are carried (and shared) but used seldomly. To share phones, people swap SIM cards. Each person has their own SIM and they change it out, sometimes sharing a phone in a family or village. This requires taking out the battery, etc, so a simpler way to swap SIMs could be useful for them.
People use their phones to send money in Kenya. Some are still exchanging airtime minutes from carriers to send money, and many use M-Pesa for financial transactions. M-Pesa charges about 1% transaction fee, and the money exchanger (usually a small business entrepreneur at a local market) charges another 2% commission to do an exchange into a fiat currency. There is some interest in cryptocurrency here but no reported uptake yet.
Farmers use phone calls for crop/cow pricing. Weather reports are not important to the people I spoke to. Surprising.
Cameraphones are useful for staying connected to family who are far away. They are hard for the Maasai to get, since there is no handset distribution in rural areas. To get one, they have to give cash to a friend who will buy one in Nairobi (a 10 hour drive away) and bring it back.
Nokia phones such as the 810 are popular in the bush, but they don’t do internet. Popular android phones from Tecno, sell online for $75 for the handset and last 1-3 years. One local told me they can be found for as little as $10. However, utility is limited by the relatively expensive data plans here: data required to watch YouTube the way we do at home is $0.50 / day, about half of a daily food budget. So, people are very sparing with their data usage. WhatsApp may be cheaper than SMS plans, so people may get a prepaid plan for $2 and stretch it to last 2 weeks for WhatsApp messaging only. Unlike Cambodia which has very cheap data plans, the cost of data services in Nigeria do not match the local economics, so adoption and innovation of internet services are very limited.
