Unplanned Obsolescence

Enlarge

Hot Phones At Dhaka's Eastern Market, one floor is packed with vendors selling handsets, many of which have been smuggled into the country.

Related Stories

• The Phone Ladies' Conundrum
  

At first, they all came. Not the beggars, of course, but villagers of every other sort, including many of the poorest. Most came in rickshaws, but some walked long distances across the rice paddies to line up at the door of a mud-walled home, waiting in the dust and the dung, with the chickens and the cows, even during Bangladesh's monsoon season, when the rain on the metal roof could make it difficult to hear.

And then, one by one, each talked on Laily Begum's wondrous new possession, a cellular telephone. A caller might come to check on money that her husband was supposed to send from his job as a day laborer in Dubai, or to keep tabs on the son who had moved to Chittagong in hopes of finding seaport work, or merely for gossip and the novelty of talking with someone far away.

But that was in the beginning, a decade ago; these days, cell phones are so commonplace that most visitors come only for a haircut, a shave, groceries, or a place to sleep, all of which Begum offers now. The few wireless calls are no longer made from her home but from one of her nearby shops--usually the one with the barrels, drums, and cans of motor oil out front and lining its walls. In March, when I visited her home in Patira, a stretch of dusty intersections 90 minutes northeast of Dhaka, she told me, "Hardly anyone uses my phone anymore."

On March 26, 1997--chosen because that day was the anniversary of Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan--Begum became the first participant in GrameenPhone's Village Phone Program. Now widely known, the plan offers small loans, or microcredit, that enable people in one of the world's most impoverished countries to buy cell phones and rent them, call by call, to neighbors who can't afford telephones of their own.

A compact, 44-year-old former seamstress with a skeptical look, Begum previously had borrowed and repaid lesser amounts to buy a cow, then another cow, and then to open a grocery store and tea shop for her husband. Next, she borrowed 25,000 takas, the equivalent at the time of about $580, to purchase her mobile telephone, a tall antenna, a heavy-duty battery, and some marketing materials. Almost immediately, she began earning more than that in monthly profits-- approximately $800, or nearly twice as much in a month as the average Bangladeshi, even today, makes in an entire year.

A decade later, instead of begging on the streets and sleeping with cattle as she once had done, Begum shares a two-room brick house with her husband, two sons, a daughter, a television set, and a refrigerator. Next door, she has built a barn, shops, and temporary housing that she rents to five poor families. Today, her banker estimates her net worth at $145,000, which may be more than everyone else in her village combined.

Begum's success has become legendary, embraced by the media and the world of economic development as an example of how microcredit and technology can help those born in poverty escape it, largely through their own entrepreneurship. The Grameen organization continues to boast that its Village Phone Program "has been incredibly successful … establishing a clear path out of the poverty cycle" and in June published a manual, featuring a photograph of Begum, instructing microfinance lenders elsewhere how to follow its lead.

But as it turns out, the legend is far out of date. The proliferation and democratization of technology has bested the economics of microenterprise. In Bangladesh today, the only one making real money on GrameenPhone's wireless service is … GrameenPhone.

GrameenPhone is a for-profit joint venture between Norway's Telenor and Grameen Telecom, a telecommunications affiliate of Grameen Bank, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year together with its Bangladeshi founder, Muhammad Yunus. GrameenPhone shares Grameen Bank's fundamental philosophy--that targeted loans of modest sums can be profitable and bring millions out of poverty. In fact, it has overcome risks--spending $1.2 billion, for example, on communications infrastructure in an impoverished land--that few others would have considered and has improved the lives of countless people.

All this has occurred in one of the most desperate nations on earth. Those of a certain age may remember Henry Kissinger's description of Bangladesh as a "bottomless basket," or George Harrison's all-star benefit concerts in the summer of 1971 as hundreds of thousands were dying in the war of independence from Pakistan. Usually, if we think of Bangladesh at all, we think of its poverty, violence, corruption, and disasters--its cyclones, droughts, and floods, its nationwide strikes, stalled traffic, militant bombings, pollution, erratic electricity, and beggars. Two out of every five Bangladeshis are officially classified as poor.