Are mobile operators institutionally incapable of scaling services that are meant to support the poor?
The other day in Addis Ababa I saw some astonishing numbers: since 1st July 2014 there have been over 3 million calls to agricultural value-added service Semanya Haya Simint in Ethiopia . Big numbers for sure, but for how long have Ethiopian smallholder farmers been using this service? It would take years to build a service volume like that, right? Wrong; the service launched on 1st July this year . in just 150 days from service launch there have been three million calls to a hotline that gives information about on cereal, horticulture, and pulse/oil seed crops , as well as a wide range of agriculture-related activities. If you've been to Ethiopia recently, you'll have grappled with a monopoly called Ethio Telecom that provides one of the most frustrating mobile phone services on Earth. Coverage is patchy; a "3G SIM", whatever that is, was unobtainable for much of Feb-June this year. To get mobile data t...