More Phones Than Radios In Pakistan

For low income households (aka bottom of the pyramid, BOP) in Pakistan, phones are more popular than radios but haven’t taken over TVs yet. This is from research conducted by LIRNEasia, a Sri Lanka-based Asia-Pacific information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organisation. The study said that in Pakistan, a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households now had 68 TVs, 39 phones, 24 radios and 3 computers. As comparison, for a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households in India, there were 50 TVs, 38 phones, 28 radios and one computer.

This goes against the common held belief that radios were more important for low income households. It also shows that phones can be a great way to educate and help these low income population. The LIRNE Asia blog quotes Richard Heek’s paper (ICT4D 2.0: The Next Phase of Applying ICT for International Development) and I re-quote from the pdf document below.

Finally, some have asked if the Internet should be the focus or if developers should look at where the poor have already “voted with their wallets” and see whether the simpler, cheaper technologies already in use can deliver sufficient ICT functionality to make a difference. Rather than wait for handset and bandwidth upgrades to allow mobile Internet access, we must determine what can be achieved for development through calls and SMS and, possibly, older technologies. Access figures are hard to come by, but we can estimate that something like 80 percent of the population in developing countries has access to a radio, 50 percent to a television.2,3 Early in ICT4D’s history, these statistics prompted the swift reinterpretation of ICT to incorporate radio and television, and foreshadowed the role convergence would play in ICT4D 2.0. Looking at the technologies that already penetrate—mobiles, radios, televisions—developers must now seek ways to add computing and Internet functionality.