No Rice, No Water-- Can You Hear Me Now?

When Haitian president René Préval recently dismissed complaints about food prices by wondering out loud how so many of his countrymen could afford cell phones and yet claim to be starving, it was widely viewed as an insensitive and impolitic remark. After all, his country was in the throes of a crippling food crisis that subsequently led to deadly street riots.

The vocal criticism that followed the president's remarks was richly deserved, but he wasn't the only one who noticed how ubiquitous cell phones have become in Haiti. I've wondered myself how so many people in so poor a country can have cell phones, although I've never assumed that those living on less than $2 a day were spending their meager earnings on cell phone minutes rather than rice.

Obviously most of the people buying the phones can afford them. Others likely scraped, scrimped or borrowed money to buy them – and with good reason. The phones are helping people climb out of poverty, spurring small-scale entrepreneurship, promoting development and even helping farmers and market women work more efficiently and earn more money.

The story of what is happening in Haiti is part of a larger trend taking place in developing countries around the globe, particularly in Asia and Africa. The world is witnessing a seismic social, cultural and technological shift that is changing how people work, live and thrive – all because of cell phones.

According to The International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, people in rural areas of poor countries are letting their neighbors use their cell phones for a small fee. Others have turned their phones into mobile banks by letting people use them to receive foreign remittances attached to bank accounts or debit and credit cards of relatives living overseas.

There are now at least five times more mobile than fixed-telephone subscribers in Africa, according to the World Bank,and 80 percent of the world's population now lives within range of a cellular network, double the 2000 level. By the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world's mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.

Landlines financed and maintained by governments and dependent on expensive government infrastructure, financing and maintenance, are viewed as constrained and are increasingly being abandoned in many countries for cellular networks run by private investors who pay to put up new cell phone towers.

While the poorest of the poor in Haiti could never dream of owning cell phones, they are, nonetheless, benefiting from the increased numbers of phones. They no longer have to walk for hours or pay for transportation to go to city centers to pick up money sent from relatives at wire transfer offices where the fees are higher. They now also have other options to government-owned telephone call centers. They can do business with rural neighbors rather than with sometimes-crooked city strangers.

More broadly, cell phones are also playing an important role in tackling global health, humanitarian assistance and environmental and development challenges in poor countries.

The phones "connect families separated by disaster, help emergency relief workers respond more quickly, empower farmers to ask for better prices in markets, and help track the impacts of climate change, and so much more," according to a report by the United Nations Foundation.

In Uganda, cell phones helped connect city health clinics and remote health care workers and were used in the delivery of food aid to Iraqi refuges in Syria. Cell phones were employed as a violence prevention tool in Kenya; used to provide access to public health data in Zambia, and to conduct environmental monitoring in Ghana.

When my parents moved to the United States in the 1960s and left me and my four siblings behind in the care of relatives, very few Haitian households had telephones. We missed our parents terribly, but our one consolation was the regular telephone calls from Papa and Mamma in New York. My uncle would drive us to the building that housed Teleco, the government-run telephone company, and we would squeeze into one of the closet-sized booths lining the wall to take their call.

Papa would tell us all kinds of stories about Les États Unis and its tall buildings and synchronized traffic lights and underground subway. America was so technologically advanced that they even had special machines that allowed him to see us through the phone as we talked, he'd lie. He'd go on and on, exaggerating here and there for effect, delighting us with tall tales that we accepted as fact.

During the two years we lived apart from our parents, I looked forward to piling into Papa's beloved 1956 Chevy Bel Air and being driven to the Teleco building. I loved hearing Papa's and Mamma's disembodied voices magically come through the telephone lines.

I could have never imagined wireless telephones, camera phones, phones with Internet access and Global Positioning Systems, much less phones with video capabilities that allow a little girl in one country to see and talk to her parents in another country, in real time.

It's easy to think of a cell phone as an unnecessary luxury in a country with so much more pressing needs. But it comforts me to know that when there is civil upheaval back home, or a terrible hurricane, or when I just want to check in on a loved one, I can just dial up their cell phones without spending anxious days wondering if they are okay. I'm also comforted knowing that poor Haitians are finding ways to profit from their phones so that they can afford to talk on them and eat.

Marjorie Valbrun is a Washington, D.C. based journalist.