Business – IPDGC Smart Power

“I get more respect now,” she says. “Before people in the village wouldn’t talk to me but they do now.”

~Jamirun Nesa on owning a business (BBC News, October 2002)

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially mobile phones, can have a huge impacton the business opportunities available to women in developing countries by providing access to markets, conserving time, connecting women with other business owners and fostering empowerment.

A common business opportunity is to sell goods that are either grown or handmade; however, many of the poor, especially women, have restricted access to markets because of time constraints, lack of transportation and safety concerns, among other factors. A cell phone easily addresses all of these issues. Without leaving their homes, women can call to check prices, find buyers for their products or place orders.

Additionally, even if women want to start businesses, they are typically responsible for the bulk of household activities and childcare, which is time consuming. In this respect, the efficiency and time saved by using a cell phone is invaluable. The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), in partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, recently released a report focusing on how connectivity can create entrepreneurial opportunities for women in India. One of the profiled entrepreneurs, Sunita, runs a silkworm breeding business. She not only uses her cell phone for market access, but also to remotely activate a water pump for her silkworm shed – saving her the 3-4 km walk to turn it on and off.

Another benefit of ICTs which is raised in ICRW’s report is that women can connect with other entrepreneurs. Social norms, distance and time constraints that would usually prevent these groups from forming are eased by cell phone ownership. As a result, many women form self-help groups with other entrepreneurs to establish business connections, stimulate creativity, identify best practices, answer questions and serve as a general support network.

Finally, the phones themselves can become a business. In places where cell phones or landlines are scarce, individuals who have a mobile can sell minutes – a modern phone booth. As an example, the Grameen Foundation established a program to give small loans to poor women to start this type of business.

Overall, by allowing women to access markets and making tasks less time-consuming, cell phones lower or eliminate some of the barriers to starting and operating a business. In turn, owning a business leaves many women feeling incredibly empowered. Women entrepreneurs can challenge social norms, gain respect from their family and community, improve their individual confidence and set examples for future generations.

From a policy perspective, programs that focus on increasing women’s access to ICTs are a relatively inexpensive way to address many problems that women entrepreneurs face in the developing world.

On an individual level, you can donate old phones to organizations that reuse or recycle them to provide phones to developing countries. Some organizations, such as Hope Phones, will even accept broken phones and pay for shipping.

One of the most hotly debated topics surrounding the Arab Spring has been what role if any social media have played in the protests and, in a couple of cases, revolutions. Scholar Zaynep Tufekci (UNC) and The Engine Room’s Christopher Wilson have a new piece in Journal of Communication (gated) that looks specifically at the role of social media in Egypt’s Tarhir Square protests. The article appears in a special issue of the journal dedicated to the topic of social media and political change. They find evidence that Facebook in particular seemed to play a critical informational role, as well as mobilizing one. From the abstract:

We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.

The authors used a snowball sampling method – asking respondents to recommend others to participate in the survey – and ended up interviewing about 1,000 people who claimed to have participated in the Tahrir Square protests. The interviews were conducted about two weeks after Mubarak’s resignation. Tufekci and Wilson are upfront about the potential problems with their sample, to their credit.

There is much to chew on in the piece, but I’d like to flag a few things from the study:

Face-to-face interpersonal communication was by far the most common way people first learned about the protests: 48.4 percent cited this as opposed to 28.3 percent that said “interpersonally oriented media” such as Facebook.
That said, traditional media – in this case, satellite TV – was only cited by 4 percent of the respondents as the means by which they learned about the protests.
A major function of new technologies ranging from social media to mobile phones (and both in tandem) was documenting events and spreading them virally.
Women were heavier users of social media than men, and the differences were statistically significant.

Perhaps most interestingly, the authors make a case for thinking of a “new system of political communication” in the MENA region, one that isn’t just about “Facebook Revolutions” but instead sees a complex media ecology that has three, interrelated components:

Satellite TV/traditional media
Information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially social media platforms
Ever cheaper and widely available mobile phones

The piece is an interesting addition to the growing body of scholarly literature in this area and worth checking out in full, as is the special issue.