3. To What Extent Are the Poor Engaged with Mobile Telephony?

The question posed by the title of this chapter is a fundamental one because of the need to establish that the poor are actually engaged with mobile phones to more than merely a minor extent. Most of the evidence on this question is available for Africa and Asia and is drawn mostly from surveys of the BoP in these regions (the African survey data are especially helpful in this regard). It turns out that with some notable exceptions, mobile phones are adopted quite widely at the BoP even in notably low-income countries and even among some of those at or near the very bottom of the pyramid. Thus, there is good reason to examine not just the association between mobile phones and the poor but also the impact of the former on the latter. Country differences are ascribed, tentatively, to deviations in income levels and government policies towards prices and taxes on handsets. There is also some African evidence in this chapter that the mobile penetration rate is significant in a regression with the Gini coefficient as the dependent variable.