"Dead China-make" phones off the grid: investigating and designing for mobile phone use in rural Africa

ABSTRACT

Mobile phone users in rural parts of the developing world, especially Africa, adapt to lack of electricity, poverty, remote locations, unpredictable services, and second-hand technology. Meanwhile, the technology developers are forging ahead, designing for "smartphones," high-speed data packets, and Internet access, not the "dumb" phones and parsimonious voice calls of the rural householder. We draw from fieldwork in Kenya with mobile phone owners to relate specific practices and issues facing rural users. Problems such as "spoiled" phone batteries and "China-makes" suggest larger design implications. We use our findings to motivate a design agenda for the rural poor built on the assumption of off-grid use and limited power, simple cheap phones, and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol. A key part of this agenda calls for developing usable technologies aimed at the infrastructure rather than mobile phone interface level.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing