Francis Mwathi's Page

Growing Use of Cellphones for Family Planning
19th November 2009
The growth of cellphone use, particularly in the developing world, is providing health experts with a new channel of communication to provide family planning information. "The number of mobile subscribers is increasing at a dramatic rate with the number of global cellphone subscribers in 2006 being estimated at 2.5 billion of an estimated global population of 6.6 billion," says David Cantor, a senior technical manager of ICF… Continue

With mobile penetration reaching 100 per cent in many developed markets, the mobile phone will soon be in virtually everyone's pocket. Payments and banking are currently major areas of growth in the mobile world and these are set to become even more specialized than they are at the moment.
According to a… Continue

Cellphone operators need to get savvy to thrive in Africa
11th November 2009
African cellular network operators need to sharpen up their acts to make a profit in countries where already poor consumers are trying to cut back their spending even further. Operators must begin sharing infrastructure to cut costs, lobby governments for relief from arbitrary taxes, argue against politically imposed rate cuts and offer locally developed data content to keep consumers interested. That list of cru… Continue

Fibre optic cable carriers are incurring millions of shillings lately as additional cost for security and monitoring off their lines as cases of vandalism are worryingly on a rise in East Africa.

Industry insiders say cable vandalism is fast emerging as avenues of unnecessary expenses and if this continues, operators may even be forced to to pass on the additional costs to the consumers. Companies now have to incur expenses in hiring guards to man the cables with some even being forced to intro… Continue

KASHWESHA Community Resource Centre is a civil society organization committed to promoting the rights of the slum dwellers in a low cost residential area in Nairobi, Kenya. It begun in the year 2001 as a community based organization that focused on the well being of its members through capacity building, by ensuring that its members who mainly consisted of the slum dwellers got the available resources and support. The telecentre serves community members from the adjacent Korogocho slums, KCC slu… Continue