ICTworks

Kevin Donovan and Jonathan Donner believe that prepaid ICT access models are more appropriate for poorer consumers and the availability of prepaid mobile data will be a key driver of inclusive mobile Internet usage. To prove their thesis, they’ve complied an amazing Ushahidi Map of the availability of prepaid mobile Internet in Africa.

But rather than just relying on their own observations, they’ve opened their map and their project to your input. You too can add to the knowledge of prepaid mobile data plans:

For the crowdsourcing, we’ve created an editable Google Map with entries for each country. Green indicates existing knowledge that prepaid data is offered by at least one provider. Yellow means we have been unable to determine the presence of prepaid mobile data. And Red suggests confidence that it is not available in that country (though if you know otherwise, please do correct us!).

If you know for certain that prepaid data is available for mobile phones from at least one network provider in one of the countries marked Yellow, you can either email us directly or submit a web formon the African Prepaid Mobile Data map – the more supporting evidence, including links or your name/affiliation, the better.

Now Kevin and Jonathan are not stopping at just a map – this is actually a subset of a much larger research paper on mobile data access and its impact on Africa. Hopefully they’ll share the finished report with us as well.