Phones, feminist issue in Bangladesh
Dressed in a colourful sari, clutching boxes of herbal tea in one
hand and a battered old Nokia mobile phone in the other, Monowara
Talukder doesn't look like the average business executive.
But in just six years, Talukder has built an international herbal tea
empire in Bangladesh that employs 1,500 female farmers, wins orders from
major Western health food chains and has a turnover of 44 million taka
(625,000 dollars).
She was among the first people to sign up for a mobile phone when
they arrived in the country in 1997. The costs were high, but the
48-year-old mother of four says she has never regretted the investment.
"My mobile phone has helped so much with the business - it is
absolutely crucial for distribution and marketing," Talukder told AFP
over a cup of her signature Tulsi, or Holy Basil, tea in the Bangladeshi
capital Dhaka.
"I don't have an office or showroom so people just ring me on the
mobile to place orders. I now have my products in all 64 districts of
Bangladesh and get orders from buyers in Australia, Kuwait and Nepal."
She proudly shows off text messages from an Australian company which has
just placed a major order for tea bags.
"I went to a green trade fair in September and put up posters with my
mobile phone number on. Now I am getting all these orders from
overseas," she said.
But not all women are as lucky as Talukder. The telecoms industry
body GSMA says a woman living in South Asia is 37 per cent less likely
than a man to own a mobile phone - the world's worst telecoms 'gender
gap'.
Traditional attitudes, which mean the first phone in a household will
often go to the husband with the second going to the eldest son, were
identified as one part of the problem.
In a bid to tackle the inequality, Mwomen - a new project backed by
US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Cherie Blair, wife of former
British Prime Minister Tony Blair -was launched in October.
Mwomen aims to get mobile phones to some 150 million women globally
within three years through public-private partnerships.
The project has attracted backing from at least 20 major mobile phone
companies, including giants Nokia and Vodafone.
"Closing the mobile phone gender gap in South Asia represents a 3.6
billion dollar market opportunity for the mobile industry," Trina
DasGupta of the GSMA told AFP.
"And a 10 percent increase in mobile phone penetration rates is
linked to an increase in GDP of 1.2 percent in low to middle income
countries." Another project in Bangladesh is the 'village phone' by
Grameen Phone, the telecoms wing of Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank.
Grameen created 'village phone ladies' by giving poor rural women
loans to buy a mobile phone. Each woman then charges others in her
village to use the phone, giving her a small income and putting the
community on the telephone network. At least 364,000 women have joined
the scheme since it began in 1997, although cheaper handsets and a fall
in calling costs may soon make the model outdated.
One Mwomen partner, Banglalink, the country's second largest mobile
phone company, said Mwomen's approach worked because it combined
development objectives with profit-making.
"The gender gap is an opportunity for us, commercially.
"We were the first people to actually target women with specific
campaigns," Banglalink Head of Communication Irum Iqbal told AFP. In
2005, the company launched a calling plan called 'Ladies First' followed
by a separate advertising campaign featuring a young, female journalist
who gets her big break thanks to a tip she receives on her mobile.
"It is obviously just good business sense for us and has been our
communication strategy since the beginning," Iqbal said.
AFP, Dawn |