Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Mobile Phones in Kenya

I'm really trying to find out about handset costs in Kenya and phone & GPRS data plan packages - in the process I found the following:

MIT Mobile Phone Programming course at UON

Safaricom Price Plans
Celtel Price Plans
Safaricom SMS2Email
Safaricom Pocket office - mobile email solution
Safaricom Mobile Office
Celtel - Mobile Business - affordable connection to the Internet
Safaricom current phone deals

Mobile Africa - News about mobile phones in Africa

5 comments:

Kevin Walker said...

Clickatell is a global SMS gateway which operates in Kenya and elsewhere. It is used in this course run at the University of Nairobi.

Kevin Walker said...

Safaricom advertises the latest Blackberry phone in The Nation newspaper.

Kevin Walker said...

Sambaza minute sharing plan from Safaricom

Kevin Walker said...

In June 1999 Kenya had 156,000 mobile subscribers; in June 2006 there were 3.4 million. (For comparison only 200,000 households have electricity.)

Source: Romiszowski, A. (2007) Mobile phones in Africa: Transforming society and (maybe) education. Educational Technology May-June:60-61.

Kevin Walker said...

Because Africa lacks any sort of billing infrastructure, the mobile operators sell pay-as-you-go scratch cards.

Phone sharing is also common: 97 percent of Tanzanians have access to a mobile, and the figure is thought to be similar for Kenya. (Same source as above.)