The economic impact of telecommunications on rural livelihoods and poverty reduction: a study of rural communities in India (Gujarat), Mozambique and Tanzania

• telephones are the preferred means of communications for emergencies and family networking – though they are less dominant in Africa than in India
• mass media are the preferred ICTs for general information such as news and weather – the television and newspapers being preferred in India, and broadcast radio in Africa
• face-to-face communications is overwhelmingly the main method of communications for specific information in all three countries, including information about education, farming, business and government services.

In particular the research shows that there was a consistent pattern of telephone behaviour in all three countries. Telephones were:

• considered very important for use in emergencies
• extensively used to maintain social networks, especially contact within the family
• valued more for saving money than for earning money
• valued more by richer and better educated people than by the poorer, less educated or more marginal members of society – especially where financial value was concerned
• considered unimportant for information gathering
• most telephone use in the Indian sample was of private fixed lines and telephone kiosks (however, the mobile market is growing rapidly in India)
• mobile phones were much more widely used than fixed phones in Mozambique and Tanzania
• telephone ownership is growing rapidly and is highly valued. In all three countries, at least 45% of phone owners had acquired their phones within the past year – and at least 33% of those without a telephone said that they wanted to acquire one within the next year.

The analysis suggests that, of the five main categories of livelihoods assets (human, social, financial, natural and physical capital), telephony is most closely associated with social capital.

Other findings include:

• the Internet was not used by any significant number of people with less than 2% of interviewees in the three country samples with any experience of Internet. This was in spite of the accessibility of Internet facilities to interviewees in local towns in most sample areas
• nearly everyone used a broadcast technology with 90 percent of respondents indicating that they either use the radio or TV. Furthermore, information from broadcast technology was the preferred means of information gathering and was highly trusted
• the use of telephony is substituting for mail services.