The Phones Keep Ringing In World's Poorest Country

This article begins with the statement, "Somalia is a country in ruins." According to the UN, more than 70% of Somalis live below the poverty line, earning less than US$1 per day. Life expectancy is 48 years. Here, where international relief is largely cut off by civil war, "survival is a full-time occupation." According to trends traced in this article, telephone services in this country are "strangely in order".

Specifically, "Telecommunication now reaches all 83 main districts as well as 18 regional capitals in a place the UN describes as a 'failed state'. "Every week and every month we are setting up telephone centres in a new town and village," says Abdulkadir Diini, head of technical development for Nationlink, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Somalia."

The author explains this trend by pointing to developments in the Somali history. Namely, the telecoms infrastructure was the first to benefit when returnees from Norway installed satellite-based telecoms links in partnership with Norwegian telecoms company TELENOR. (There were no landlines, so this was the easiest way to proceed). Returnees from Gulf States and America then set up an earth station gateway (a monitor and control system that is used from one remote location to another using a second workstation). Within a few years, that initiative turned into a multi-million dollar business. Another telecommunications venture, Al-Barakaat, then began partnering with the American telecoms company AT&T.

Initially, calls to Europe and America cost US$4 per minute, with rates to other countries reaching US$7 per minute - out of reach of most Somalis. But as more companies arrived and telecommunications spread, prices dropped. Telephone calls from Somalia to anywhere in the world now cost no more than US$0.5 a minute - reflecting a 88-93% fall in less than 9 years. The number of telephone lines operating in the country is estimated to be 100,000 (pop.: about nine million). Although most of the phones are located in the capital city of Mogadishu, they are still more than 10 times the number that were present in 1991. By comparison, Ethiopia had 263,000 lines for 66 million people and Kenya 307,000 lines for a population of nearly 31 million in 2000.

However, the author cites sources who caution that there is an "underlying problem of trying to run an industry without a formal government: since there's no one to regulate and licence the industry or administer tax collection, abuses are rampant. For instance, according to Osman Ali, a switchboard operator in Mogadishu, "Those friends and families who have got lines from the same company can call each other freely...But if you have Nationlink line and want to call your neighbour who is with ASTel you get charged the price of an international call." According to the author, as a result "rich investors prosper, while the poor remain without access. And since there's no tax collection, almost every dollar made by foreign telecoms companies is a dollar that leaves Somalia - this in a country that desperately needs revenue for even the most basic development of infrastructure."

Click here for the full article on the Panos London site.