Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

In my last post, I wrote about the Nokia Open Studio design competition in slums in Mumbai, Rio De Janeiro and Accra.

Over the weekend, I have been going through research conducted by Nokia’s Jan Chipchase, Younghee Jung, Raphael Grignani and others and here’s a selection of their most interesting research on mobile phone usage at the bottom of the pyramid (more research to follow in another post).

Jan Chipchase on mobile phone usage amongst illiterate users at LIFT 2007 conference –

Jan Chipchase and Indru Tulusan on shared mobile phone usage –

- 3.3 billion people out of 6.5 billion people in the world have mobile phones. Another 1 billion people will have mobile phones within two years. Most of them will be from emerging Asia and Africa and will have limited literacy. In fact, out of the 774 million illiterate adults in the world, 270 million are in India (UNESCO Institute for Statistics)!

- Three types of literacies are relevant for mobile phone usage — textual literacy, numerical or arithmetic literacy and ‘proximate literacy’, the ability to rely on others who are either literate or at least sufficiently competent in using the device.

Nokia ethnographers Jan Chipchase and Younghee Jung share their experiences in conducting the Nokia Open Studio design contest in 2007 across three slums around the world — Dharavi (Mumbai, India), Favela Jacarezinho (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Camp Buduburam (Accra, Ghana) –

Ethnographic research methods guide the design research phase for innovation as far as creating opportunities through which we can understand the present living and underlying motivations behind why people behave the way they do. But it often does not let us see beyond the barriers of the present living: people who are not using technology not because they do not need it but because they cannot afford it; people who do not have time or social network to introduce them to new tools. Through open studios, we wanted to lift these barriers and understand how people see the relevance of technology in their lives, sometimes for the future, sometimes in relation to what is lacking today. It is not a marketing tool, and it is not a tool to hunt ideas to implement in products directly. But it is a tool that supports our thinking and projection about the future. (Younghee Jung)

(Cross-posted at my fellowship blog and MobiChange)

I recently came across an amazing study done by ICT4D research organization LIRNEasia on Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Here are the key findings from the 2006 study amongst 8660 respondents (including 6605 SEC D and E respondents) in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand –

- At the BOP, access to phones (more than 90%) is much higher than ownership of phones (20% to 50%) due to heavy used of shared, borrowed and public phones.

- At the BOP, males are heavier users of mobile phones while females are heavier users of household landline phones.

- BOP users make an average of one call per day, mostly local, mostly 2-3 minutes long, mostly to stay in touch with family and friends.

- At the BOP, convenience, in terms of anytime accessibility, is the biggest driver in the purchase of both fixed and mobile phones. The ability to afford the initial cost (up to $50) of getting connected is the biggest reason for not buying a phone even though monthly charges are low (as low as $5).