OpenRuby.com

11 Nov '12, 11am

The poor in Africa need Bitcoin for their phones. M-pesa is good, but governments want to tax it. #bitcoin

The poor in Africa need Bitcoin for their phones. M-pesa is good, but governments want to tax it. #bitcoin

AFRICA’S “mobile decade”, when telephones at last reached most corners of the continent, has meant a huge improvement in the lives of the poor. But quantifying it is hard. How useful can a mobile phone be to someone living on less than $2.50 a day, the World Bank’s standard benchmark of poverty? Researchers in Kenya have given a partial answer. They find that people will skip a meal or choose to walk instead of paying for a bus fare so that they can keep their phone in credit. The weekly value of these sacrifices averages just over 72 Kenyan shillings (84 American cents)—not a trivial amount, seeing that the daily wage of a Kenyan labourer can be as little as a dollar. The report by iHub, an incubator for Kenyan tech start-ups, suggests that discretionary spending by the poor is now influenced greatly by their expenditure on mobile phones. Interviews conducted at half a do...

Full article: http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/2156...

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