Mobile Technology and Development

In today's world, technology has invaded many aspects of human life. From its gigantic influence on our education and professional development, to the more subtle presence of little gadgets littering our homes, technology is almost everywhere.

The reasons for such pervasiveness would boil down to some characteristics that technology by itself possesses. One such characteristic, which is of major interest to many scholars, is the seeming lack of barriers to the spread of technology. It easily penetrates societies and even to remote communities, and once it reaches its destination and catches on, it becomes seemingly difficult to stop its spread. As a result of this, consumer technology like cellular phones, computers, PDAs, radios and televisions have become commonplace in places like Africa, even with all the barriers one would have envisaged.

Sadly, it does not need much analysis to realize that even though technology usage is growing rapidly in Africa, we still have numerous developmental problems in our continent. This is a situation where advanced technology is coexisting with underdevelopment in Africa. With all the power that technology wields, it will be a useful exercise to study the ways in which it can be used to solve some of those very problems it has come to meet. In essence, using our little gadgets to solve our big problems.

This is the background against which this study is undertaken. Asking whether our problems can be solved at all, then enumerating instances where development projects that utilize technology have been put to work, and concluding by examining the cases and drawing lessons from them.