As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve grown quite interested lately in the spread of mobile networks within Africa – and the odd marriage of technology and infrastructure that inform this growth.
With mobile phone penetration and use skyrocketing, users on the continent are faced with an interesting dilemma, namely: a significant number of these mobile users live in homes well-removed from the electrical grid.
Per a post last month in Reuters Africa Blog:
Rwanda is Africa’s most densely populated country and 9 out of 10 people there don’t have electricity.
What, then, is an increasingly mobile-enabled population to do when their mobile batteries run low?
One solution, developed by Motorola, is the solar-powered kiosk, capable of charging up to twenty phones at a time. Others turn to local ‘vendors’ – homes with electricity that charge stiff premiums for access to their outlets.
In both cases, however, access to a charge comes at a particularly steep price – transport by foot, bicycle or bus to a charging location, which can often be as far as one hundred miles away in sub-Saharan Africa.
*****
Mrs. Muyonjo, a housewife in a remote village in Uganda, chafed at the idea of a twenty mile trip to recharge her phone.
From the Women of Uganda Network:
“I looked at what was readily available to me and came up with my own charger. I devised this method to enable me charge my battery every day. It works perfectly.”
What she saw when she looked around was an abundance of D batteries used in her village for flashlights and radios. She bundled 5 together, took the plug off her cell phone charging cord, and touched the wires to the terminals of the batteries to charge up.
Astounding to us. Likely more common than we can imagine.
Related posts:
- A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations
- It’s More Fun to Compute
- Mobile Phones and FM Transmitters
- When Patchwork is Comprehensive
- Who’s Going to Own our Preferences?
-
Matt Moore