Soofc Reviews

You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones are Connecting the World's Poor to the Global Economy
Nicholas P Sullivan John Wiley & Sons Ud, The Altrium, Southern Gate, Chichester PO19 8SQ. 232 pages. 19.99 hardback. ISBN 978-0-7879-8609-4

Bangladeshi villagers sharing cell phones helped build what is now a thriving company with more than $200 million in annual profits. But what is the lesson for the rest of the world? This is a question author Nicholas Sullivan addresses in You Can IHear fi^e Now, by looking at entrepreneur, Iqbal Quadir, the visionary and catalyst behind the creation of GrameenPhone in Bangladesh. GrameenPhone - a partnership between Norway's Telenor and Grameen Bank, co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize - defines a new approach to building business opportunities in the developing world. In the villages were most of Bangladesh's 148 million people are living, GrameenPhone provides access (within a reasonable walking distance) to 100 million people through 250,000 village phones, each of which is owned and operated by female entrepreneur who has taken out a microloan from Grameen Bank. By leasing time to villagers for calls, these 'phone ladies' pay back the loans and make an average of $750 a year, or roughly twice the average Bangladesh's annual income. You Can Hear Me Now offers an account of what Sullivan calls the external combustion engine a combination of forces that is sparking economic growth and lifting people out of poverty in countries long dominated by aid-dependent governments. The "engine" comprises three forces: information technology, imported by native entrepreneurs trained in the west, backed by foreign investors. The book is divided into two parts. In Part One, The GrameenPhone Story' covers the first six chapters. It tells of the story of the formation of GrameenPhone with Iqbal Quadiar's 'connectivity is producitivity' epiphany in Manhattan, before going on to Chapter Two, 'Dish-Wallahs of Delhi' which takes a step back and examines the foundations of Grameen Bank's microlending, village phones in India, and the dish-wallahs of Delhi (satellite-dish entrepreneurs who distributed video feeds) that form the building blocks of the project. The next four chapters describe the relentless effort to attract foreign investment, the company's bid for a license, and the building of the network. Starting at Chapter Seven, 'Wildfire at the Bottom of the Pyramid', the second half of the book is devoted to the transformation through technology, and explains how within a year of GrameenPhone's starting its service in 1997, cellular licenses were being offered in many other poor countries in Africa and part of the Middle East and Asia. By the year 2000, cell phone sales were going through the

NICHOLAS P. SULUVAN

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roof, and people out of range were building tree houses to pick up a signal. In Chapter Eight we are introduced to the concept of 'Cell Phone as Wallet' which show that as cell phone use spreads in countries where vast segments of the population have no access to banks, add-on mobile commence services are transforming social and economic interactions. Following on from this concept. Chapter Nine 'Wealth Creation and Rural Income Opportunities' quantifies the wealth creation and distribution of wealth arising from cell phone companies, particularly the economic gains and income opportunities in rural regions where there are traditionally few jobs in the formal sector. The chapter 'Beyond Phones: In Search of a New Cow' explores whether and how the model of business-driven wealth creation can . be applied to address other unmet human needs such as Quadir's new enterprise. Emergency Bio-Energy, which looks to deliver electricity though generators powered by methane extracted from cow dung - in a process creating a supply chain of microentrepreneurs more complex than that of the phone ladies. The closing chapter 'Eyeing the Dhaka Stock Exchange' describes how the explosive growth of cell phones sparked by foreign investment has begun to create new domestic capital markets where private money is invested and traded, enforcing the notion that private parties have the same stake as governments in a country's development and progress. Ultimately, GrameenPhone's successful effort to provide universal telephony in a country that had virtually no phones, using microloans confirms the power of bottom-up development, which is creating millions of income opportunities for the rural poor and billions of dollars in national income. With similar success stories in other poor countries - such as those of Celtel, MTN, and Vodacom in sub-Saharan africa, and of Globe Telecom and Smart Communications in the Philippines - cell phones are spreading like wildfire across the South and are helping to bridge the digital divide. You Can Hear Me Now describes an inclusive capitalism that engages and enables many of the three billion people living on $1 a day, at the base of the economic pyramid. Matthew Drake

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