For years, in the "North-West" (that is industrialized countries - usually understood as North vs. South and West vs. East), we've been babbling about the "digital gap" that is supposedly the new line of division, usually understood as running along that of economical and political development. We often have quite a simplistic idea of the situation, imagining countries that are like technological deserts, on top of being devoid of everything essentials for a normal life (that is one car per family, two TV-sets per household, all with at least 40 channels, and 4-weeks vacations in the Bahamas or in the Swiss Alps per years). We tend to forget the forest of satellite dishes that are ornementing most cities and even village buildings in what we used (politcally) incorrectly call "third world" countries. And a recent article from the Mail & Guardian, translated in French in the Courrier International, just reminds us how wrong we often are about the appropriation of "our" modern technologies by people in these countries.

In 2004, I was lucky enough to attend one of the sessions at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where the topic agitating the delegates was the famous "digital gap" between Industrialized and developing countries. After about 30 minutes of witnessing representatives moving in and out of the room, reading the newspapers, eating under their desk and repeating the same arguments about the digital divide that we had been hearing for 10 years already, I kind of got really bored. Obviously, the discussion was going nowhere, as two completely irreconcilable camps were opposed on what should prevail: new technologies or basic goods such as water, food, electricity. Of course, the old argument goes, you aren't going to run much modern technologies without electricity and telecommunication infrastructures.

However, the intervention by a member of the Senegalese delegation woke me up. He said that it had become a sort of national know-how in his country to tinker with European and American cell-phones to adapt them to the African networks. He explained how you could find young men or even kids everywhere in Dakar who will do the job for a just a few dollars. And it does work! Moreover, if you are going back home, you can ask them to revert the process so that the phone will work again on European or American networks. And again, it works!

A few years later, I read somewhere (can't remember exactly in what newspaper unfortunately), that the idea behind Skype actually originated in African and Indian Internet cafés, where clever users found a way to connect cellphones to the computer so that they could make almost completely free phone calls through the Internet connection.

And now, we can read that ingenious Zimbabwean expats have found a quite original way to help their fellow countrymen, friends and relatives who have stayed in Zimbabwe thanks to the Web and cell-phone technologies. As the journalist says, these Zimbabweans perfectly illustrate the proverb that says that adversity makes people inventive.
If ZimCargo.com offers quite a usual (but extremely useful) online platform to make cargo shipping of goods from the UK to Africa, and especially Zimbabwe, easier for individuals, platforms like YesZim or Mukuru.com offer a good example of this originality. Both use the Web as a shop windows where people can place orders and pay for goods that are actually stored in Zimbabwe and which will be collected by their friends or relatives living there thanks to vouchers sent to them over SMS. The transaction information is sent from England to local agents with whom the founders of Mukuru and YesZim are working and thus, so the whole process is monitored to make sure that money and goods aren't lost in-between. Thanks to this system, someone in England or South Africa (where lots of Zimbabweans have emigrated) can, for example, buy a 100 liters of gazolines for relatives stayed home. They receive the voucher code on their cellphone and go to the agent with this code and their ID information to redeem the voucher and get their gasoline. Mukuru also offers a post service that works for those expats whose family doesn't have access to online technologies or don't have cell-phone as follow: write your letter online, give the address of the recipient and click send. The letter is printed in Zimbabwe and posted there, so that it can be delivered in a reasonable time. Quite simple, like all brillant ideas!

Here are therefore examples where new technologies actually fill the gap where older technologies and infrastructures have been non existent or simply malfunctioning, especially fixed phone lines or post services. Indeed, an object like the cellphone has become key in the lives of most Africans, as there are whole geographical area that aren't covered by phone networks, as Younghee Jung showed in her presentation at LIFT'08. They use the satellite communication, which although somewhat expensive, can still be a life-saver. So, yes, there is undeniably a technological gap between more or less economically developed countries, but it doesn't have the same width through and through and it certainly doesn't systematically run along the same line as the North vs. South or West vs. East oppositions.