Mobiles and impoverished households in Jamaica

How do mobile phones affect low income households? Has this technology spread so far that it can now create a development impact right down to the poorest families?

Researchers from the Information Society Research Group studied these questions. They lived with low income households in one rural and one urban Jamaican community for 12 months, conducting ethnographic research. Fixed-line access is often limited, but nearly 100 percent of households have a mobile phone.

Mobile phones are significant for the day-to-day survival strategies of poor people but their economic value is not exploited as expected. Mobile phones are not used for job-hunting (most believe this requires face-to-face meetings instead). And very few use them for business purposes:

• Only those few in certain specific forms of employment, such as taxi drivers or musicians, use mobiles to get more custom or talk with existing customers more easily.
• Some women who already sell goods (such as chickens) from their homes have also started selling pre-paid phone cards. This funds their own phone use and perhaps some of their children's educational costs.

But around one-third of those interviewed had no income from any type of labour or sales. They use their phones to seek money from others in their social network, including remittances from family and friends overseas, sometimes linked to specific health or educational needs. The poorest people therefore use the mobile phone not to make money but to get money: it is a means of moving money from those who might otherwise save or expand businesses, to those who have no other income.

Mobile phones also have a social value:

• Crime and fear of crime are major factors in poor people's lives. Mobile ownership increases their sense of security and their ability to report crime from the privacy of their homes.
• In the absence of an ambulance service, access to taxis by phone provides transport during health emergencies for the first time.
• Some Jamaicans reported feeling 'pressure', which includes elements of loneliness, depression and boredom. In the absence of formal help, mobiles are used to reach out to others for advice and support.

Overall, the poorest people use mobile phones to strengthen their close social networks of immediate family and friends. They also use mobiles for 'link-up' – short calls averaging 19 seconds – to broader, more extensive social networks. These short calls sustain connections until a more specific reason for contact emerges: a visit, a problem, a request for money or information, or beginning a friendship or sexual relationship. These broad, shallow, technology-enabled networks are central to meeting financial, emotional, sexual and social needs.

Development practitioners must recognise that mobile phones are now impacting the very poorest members of society. Jamaica's pricing and regulatory regime – a mix of intervention and liberalisation – has been central to this. To understand the impact of mobiles on such groups, policymakers cannot just look at the experiences of richer users, or of other countries and regions. They must understand the specific effects of mobile phones on their own populations; for example through long-term ethnographic research.

Daniel Miller
Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, UK
d.miller@ucl.ac.uk

See also

The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication, Berg: Oxford, by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, 2006

Jamaica – Summary Findings, Information Society Research Group: London, by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, 2006
www.isrg.info/Jamaicasummary.doc

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