This week, I visited a respondent in a low-income neighborhood in Nairobi. I was interested to see that she and her husband had home wi-fi in their one-room flat. The trouble is, they only pay enough to get online a few days each month. When I asked about how the wife—a tailor—gets her news, she said that mostly her husband fills her in when he’s home from his boda boda riding each evening.
Another respondent of ours this week was unreachable several days in a row. We would call, and the number would ring and ring and ring. It turns out, she has an M-Kopa smartphone. When she hasn’t paid, she has no phone at all. We couldn’t reach her to schedule and interview; employers can’t reach her to offer her casual work.
My housekeeper—like many women I meet lately—has a smart phone…sometimes. Her old smartphone was a hand-me-down and eventually stopped working. She switched to an old kabambe (button) phone. After saving up, she bought another smartphone, but it was stolen from her handbag on a matatu after only a few months. Back to kabambe. Farewell to WhatsApp.
More and more—whether it’s up in the pastoralist North, or the informal settlements of Nairobi—I meet people with two phones: both a smartphone, with its high functionality, limited battery life, expensive data costs, hardware fragility, and high replacement costs as well as a kabambe phone, purchased at Ksh 500 with low-cost airtime, low risk of theft, high durability, long battery life, and often better reception for calls. Smartphones are not simply replacing kabambes, but supplementing them with intermittent access to more complex features. It seems like kabambes are even more popular than five years ago, with kiosks selling them every 300 metres or so in places like Kayole and Kawangware.
We often think about access to connectivity as a binary – a yes or no – when the reality is that most people have intermittent access. Access at all has been enabled by pay-as-you-go models. That means that many people now do have a smartphone or other data connection, but only when they can afford it.
And that affordability has many dimensions – the affordability of daily payments, data bundles or wi-fi, airtime, and handset replacement costs when smartphones are stolen, broken, or just very old. It seems to me based on my recent fieldwork that women in particular move frequently between having and not having a smartphone, unable to replace them quickly.
The supplementary behaviors we see signal to me that even intermittent access is highly valued. In the two households I interviewed this week, the smartphones were 23-25% of the value of the entire stock of the household’s physical assets. (We will look at this more broadly as more data come in over the coming months.)
Still, intermittent access means that many people are missing out on some of the strongest livelihood and other gains of connectivity. If we pay more attention to the ways that access is spotty and incomplete, perhaps we might help digitization deliver more for ordinary people.
What if much more effort went into bringing down data costs and providing public wi-fi?
What if smartphones might be rethought to offer 5x more battery life, greater durability, and easier abilities to toggle data usage so that every MB stretched further for the applications low-income people value most?
What if law enforcement took phone theft more seriously and drove down the rates of loss of these key assets?
What more might we do to make connectivity more continuous and beneficial for ordinary people?
For regular readers, I know it’s been a minute. We have a lot of ideas in the pipeline coming out in the next few months. We’ve just been busy starting up a big new diaries project. We are super excited about it, but it’s pretty all consuming at the moment.
Interesting read.
What if MKOPA allowed 2-3 minutes of communication on the days they have not paid? I'm thinking about the pregnant respondent.