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One afternoon up to date in 2002, Mukhsin Alhassan Kadir drove his taxi from the busy streets of Accra, the superb of Ghana, to a close at hand market community to meet a man who wanted to trade a plot of native land for two cell phones.

When he arrived, Kadir collected the papers for the land and handed over what would be the first telephones this man and his wife had ever had in their lives.

"During that time, everybody wanted to own a mobile phone, but it was not common to find them in this country," Kadir told CNN.

In less than a decade, cellphones, once the preserve of the very rich, are now ubiquitous in Africa and parts of Asia.

A device that’s on used as a fashion accessory in the West has become a lifeline for millions of people in the developing in seventh heaven.

In Ghana, Kadir’s phone functions as a portable office that he takes on the parkway with him during his taxicab shifts.

"Sometimes I am in bed and a customer will call me and I will go and pick him up," said Kadir while driving a customer down a highway on a recent morning in Accra. "It has helped my business a lot."

"There is cipher in Ghana who is not using a mobile phone," added Kadir, speaking to CNN on a most recent model Sony Ericsson that he ordered for around $220 from someone in Italy.

"Even a shoe shiner has his own mobile phone," he jokes.

Numbers from the International Telecommunications Union indicate that since the end of 2006, nearly 70 percent of those subscriptions eat come from developing countries.

There are now almost seven million cellphone users in Ghana, up from only a duo hundred thousand subscribers in 2000. The continent’s biggest users are in South Africa, with nearly 25 million subscribers, followed by Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco.

However, the figures are startling in the lesser developed and poorer African countries.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a population of 60 million, there are just 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million cellphone subscribers. While in Chad, the fifth-least developed country in Africa, cellphone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

"It in reality is rebellious," said Peter Gbedemah, CEO of the pan-African network service provider Gateway Communications. "Previously there were just simply no telephones or there would be a few phones around,"

"Now telephones are ready for the masses, which is a relatively recent innovation in Africa." Share your stories on how cell phones have changed your life.

Today, roughly half of the world’s population has a cellphone subscription and they are being hand-me-down in a begun economists say could dramatically bring down poverty and improve the quality of life concerning some of the world’s poorest people.

In the Philippines, the Grameen Village Phone Program enables very poor women to use microcredit to buy cubicle phones and sell the use of the phones to people living in their villages.

Pelagia Garcia not only makes money by charging members of her community to use her cell phone but also adds extra receipts by renting out the use of a small antenna that improves cell phone reception. Garcia charges nigh 15 cents per use.

A similar program also runs in Bangladesh and plans are underway towards a equivalent scheme in Rwanda and Uganda.

Doctors are now able to send their patients main body text messages to remind them to take medication and fishermen use phones to make up one’s mind which market will offer them the best prices for their catch of the day.

A lack of changeless electricity has not stopped people using their cell phones either, rather a cottage industry of roadside vendors charging mobile phones with car batteries, has grown.

More than a million people in Kenya now use their cell phones to complete simple financial transactions via a mobile-banking service launched by Vodafone last year. The company has started a similar concern in Tanzania, Afghanistan and India.

"I dream there is something quite fascinating universal on here," Nick Hughes, head of international payment systems for Vodafone, told CNN. "If you give people the opportunity to connect and engage with the briefness, they will do so."

A lack of reliable, fixed-line telephone infrastructure is one of the main reasons why cellphones have experienced such exponential growth in emerging markets over the past few years, Gbedemah explained to CNN.

The infrastructure, such as satellite receivers and cellphone towers, needed to support mobile technology is simply much easier and cheaper to install in developing countries than the more traditional networks common to the developed world.

The installation of this new infrastructure is allowing people who live in these regions to "leapfrog" older generations of technology and in some ways become more technologically savvy than those living in the West, said Gbedemah.

"Wireless technology is far more widely used in Africa than in Europe and the United States," Gbedemah told CNN. "Technological adoption has been much more rapid in Africa in the past five years than the days of old 20 or 30 years in Europe."
From: rss.cnn.com

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