On 2002, Mozambique was one of the last countries to join the reform of telecom sector that Africa started on 1999. Although mobile networks represent the basis of Mozambique’s telecom infrastructures, the market penetration has remained relatively low.  The main coverage gaps were in the northern provinces of Tete and Niassa, and inland areas of Gaza province in the south.

However, since the national company mCel started the competition with the new entries Vodacom, on 2012, and Movitel, on 2012, cell phone usage has met an incredible growth rate of 20% per year, a constant average in the development of Telecom market in Africa.

Movitel, owned by the Vietnamese Viettel, was recently credited at the last GSMA Conference in South Africa, to have extended in just one year of activity the infrastructural and economical access of mobile networks to rural and low-income groups, accounting for the 80% on new subscribers in Mozambique. 

Having a cell phone for these people means accessing a platform that can carry a wide range of financial and social services at relatively convenient fares. 

Mobile money was one of those, and it has represented a revolution in remote banking. In a recent research about mobile money transfer in Africa, “Introducing Mobile Money in Rural Mozambique: Evidence from a Field Experiment”, Pedro C. Vincente demonstrated that the first service activated by mCel in Mozambique, mKesh, met an unexpected response already in the first year, and it was mainly used for urban-rural transfers.

Aid agencies have been the most active pioneers of SMS capacity.
For example, an efficient service of chlorine distribution was implemented by PSI to overcome the diffusion of cholera in flooded areas. By simply sending an SMS, people can receive a code to get a bottle of chlorine in a local shop. In this way, the system overtakes the issues linked to inaccessibility of supply chains, and enrols local shops as effective partner agents of a business oriented network.  

A completely different cup of tea is mCenas, a SMS system developed by the organization Path Finder to assist youth aged 15-24 with the delivery of stories on reproductive health and contraception and with a responsive hotline.

In Mozambique, cell phones were also shown to improve voters’ education and political participation. mCel recently started to provide a Bulk SMS service allowing mass mailing at a very accessible price. Surveys, educational campaigns, and a reporting hotline, are further SMS based services that contributed to considerably raise people participation at the last general elections on 2009 and 2013.  

However, the post-electoral conflicts of last weeks demonstrated also the theories recently advanced in a 2013 paper from Duke University and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies published in the American Political Science Review, “Technology and Collective Action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage and Political Violence in Africa”. The authors, Jan H. Pierskalla and Florian M. Hollenbach, examines the impact that cell phones have had on violent conflict on the continent. Mobile technology is accused of boosting the capacity of rebels and violent groups to organize conflict events, to spread their campaigns and to monitor and coordinate the in-group cooperation. But they finally conclude:

We do not believe that the spread of cell phone technology has an overall negative effect on the African continent. The increase in violence induced by better communication might represent a short-term technological shock, while the positive effects of better communication networks on growth and political behavior may mitigate root causes of conflict in the long run

It is a fact that meanwhile media keep celebrating with internet, the born of a new global community, half of the world population could not join the appointment, and a different and more interesting ICT revolution is happening in Mozambique and in the rest of Africa.