by Jared Cohen
As recently as the early 2000s, post-conflict reconstruction wasn’t so much about telecommunications revival as it was telecommunications installation. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had any semblance of a mobile network prior to regime change. The Taliban government violently opposed almost every form of consumer technology (although it had a small GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] network limited to government officials) and Saddam Hussein banned mobile phones entirely in his totalitarian state. Once those regimes fell, the populations were left with virtually no infrastructure or modern devices; combatants in the ensuing conflicts were the only ones with some form of portable communications (typically radios).
When American civilian reconstruction teams entered Iraq in 2003, they found themselves in a telecommunications desert, and initial efforts to use satellite phones floundered as they discovered that the phones worked only if both users stood outside—needless to say, an inconvenient feature for a war zone.1 As a quick fix, the allies’ Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) gave MTC-Vodafone, a regional telecom company, a contract to install cell towers and establish services in the south of the country, while another telecom, MCI, got the nod in Baghdad. According to one former senior CPA official we spoke with, the towers were put up all over the country literally overnight, with officials and U.N. staff receiving thousands of mobile phones to distribute to important local political players. (Oddly enough, all the phones sported a “917” area code, sharing that distinction with New York’s five boroughs.) These efforts jump-started a moribund telecommunications industry in Iraq by building the physical infrastructure required, and within a few years, the sector was booming.
In Afghanistan, where the U.N. established a mobile network soon after the fall of the Taliban (with free service as an incentive for users), the mobile market has grown significantly in the past decade, thanks largely to the Afghan government’s decision to issue licenses to private mobile operators. By 2011, there were four major operators in Afghanistan, claiming some 15 million subscribers among them. The reconstruction teams who arrived in Iraq and Afghanistan found a blank canvas: poor infrastructure, no subscribers and dubious commercial prospects. Given the rate of mobile adoption around the world and how the telecommunications industry is expanding, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever encounter a similar blank slate again.
In Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the primary communications task was not installation but widespread restoration of a badly damaged telecommunications infrastructure. Despite the devastation throughout the country, getting its communications networks up and running was a relatively fast process. The mobile infrastructure was badly damaged by the earthquake and aftershocks, but due to quick thinking and cooperation between local telecoms and the U.S. military, the carriers were able to restore functionality within only a few days. Ten days after the earthquake, the two largest mobile phone operators, Digicel and Voilà, reported that they were able to operate at 70 to 80 percent of their pre-earthquake capacity.
Jared, who was then with the State Department, remembers reaching out to the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia shortly after the Haitian earthquake for a debriefing on lessons learned after the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people in fourteen countries in Southeast Asia. The message was clear: Get the towers up, get them running and overrule the people who think that telecommunications are secondary to emergency rescue. Fast networks aren’t secondary; they’re complementary.
Because the vast majority of cell towers in Haiti, even prior to the earthquake, relied on generators instead of electricity for power, maintaining coverage was often more a question of fuel than infrastructure. Donated cell towers had to be guarded lest desperate people try to steal their fuel. Still, the ability to maintain service despite the destruction and chaos proved vital in coordinating and sending aid organizations to areas and people who needed help most, as well as providing a way for friends and family to contact each other within and beyond Haiti. Some of the first images to come out of the country after the disaster were indeed taken and sent by Haitians using their mobile phones. Everyone involved in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake recognized how crucial working communications were in the midst of widespread physical destruction and human suffering.
The uprisings in the Arab world that began in 2010 represent another recent example of the advantages of a communications-first perspective. Vodafone’s speedy restoration of service in Egypt just before Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president foreshadows a more agile and shrewd telecom sector. Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao told us, “We had people sleeping in the network centers in order to make sure that we could be the first to offer service once the shutdown ended. We had food and water; we’d rented rooms in nearby hotels and we protected our premises, to make sure nobody could come and [disable] the network.” As a result of its efforts, Vodafone was the first operator to resume service—an important “first” for a company trying to reach a large Egyptian market that suddenly had a lot to talk about. Colao described a smart and empathetic strategy on the part of Vodafone to demonstrate value to its Egyptian customers: “We gave credit to our Egyptian customers so that they could call people at home, as a giveaway.” Vodafone also shaped the traffic load (that is, freed up space on the network for Egyptian users), “so that when the network came back up, we could make sure the first people using it could [make] twenty euros’ worth of calls to let relatives know [they were] safe.”
Today’s reliance on telecommunications is a reflection of how important this technology has become in even the poorest societies. In most cases today, when we talk about restoring the network, we’re specifically talking about voice and text services—not Internet connectivity. This will change in the next decade, as people everywhere begin to rely more on data services than on voice communications. After a crisis, the pressures to restore Internet connectivity will dwarf what we see today with voice and text, both for the sake of the population and because a fast data network will help reconstruction actors achieve their goals. If necessary, aid organizations will deploy portable 4G towers meshed together into a low-bandwidth ISP. Data can hop from a mobile device to the nearest tower, then from tower to tower until it reaches a fiber-optic cable connecting to the broader Internet. Browsing speeds will be slow, but such portable deployments will provide enough connectivity to accelerate rebuilding.
Dedicated leadership by the telecommunications industry will be a feature of the reconstruction prototype, with telecoms leading the way as nationalized entities or coalition partners if they are in the private sector. Today, Bechtel and other engineering corporations are often tasked with rebuilding physical infrastructure through government contracts, but as the world adopts a communications-first outlook, the telecoms will be first in—and, like others, they’ll come to make money. In postcrisis societies, solid networks are needed as soon as possible to coordinate search-and-rescue efforts; engage with the population; preserve the rule of law; organize and facilitate aid-distribution efforts; locate missing people; and help those who have been internally displaced navigate their new environment. Telecom companies will have clear and valid commercial motivations to invest their resources in building and maintaining a modern communications network. If the telecom sector is properly regulated from the beginning, the collective benefit for all parties will be quite high: The companies will earn revenue, the reconstruction actors will have faster and better tools, and the population at large will be able to access service that is reliable, fast and cheap (particularly if the sector is competitive from the outset).
The long-term benefit of a healthy telecommunications sector is that it promotes and facilitates the growth of the economy, even if the stability is slow to return. In general, direct investments in infrastructure, jobs and services offer more to the economy than short-term aid programs, and telecommunications is among the most universally lucrative and sustainable enterprises in the commercial world. Afghanistan’s largest mobile operator, Roshan, is also t
he country’s biggest investor and taxpayer. Roshan employs thousands in Afghanistan and provides nearly 5 percent of the Afghan government’s overall domestic revenue. This is true despite substandard infrastructure, low incomes and more than a decade of continuous war. In the future, smart actors in reconstruction efforts—governments, multinational organizations and aid groups—will recognize the telecoms’ value immediately and prioritize network building accordingly, rather than considering telecoms to be competitors or afterthoughts.
Because telecommunications is a profitable business (and never more so than after a crisis, when activity levels are unusually high), there will be ample opportunity for local and transnational entrepreneurs to participate. Talented local engineers will use open-source software to build their own platforms and applications to help the nascent economy, or they will collaborate with outside companies or organizations and contribute their skills. Much of the investment in the telecommunications space will be straightforward transactions and efforts to provide helpful services to the population, but there is some risk that the business leaders who emerge will come to constitute a new digital oligarchy. They might be well-connected local businessmen, taking advantage of the post-disaster environment to capture a key industry, or foreign executives looking to expand their empire. Regulation, again, will be key: As with all reconstruction efforts, those in charge will have to be wary of such maneuvers in a chaotic and highly malleable environment, and use their oversight effectively.
Mixed with entrepreneurs and digital oligarchs will be another group of foreign investors, members of the country’s diaspora and others whose interests are personal rather than simply financial. In the future, investors looking to connect with new countries will find that global connectivity produces a much deeper and more multifaceted type of engagement. Real-time news alerts, active social networks and instant language translation will enable investors to feel much closer to the countries they operate in, akin to the deep knowledge possessed by diasporic communities around the world. This will lead to better and longer investments and a more fruitful relationship for both the investors and the societies with which they interact.
Few understand this better than Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecom magnate and currently the world’s richest person. Slim is also a part of the fifteen-million-strong Lebanese diaspora—his father emigrated to Mexico from Lebanon in 1902, fleeing the conscription of the Ottoman Empire army. Today, through a variety of companies, Slim maintains business interests around the world (including an 8 percent stake in The New York Times). He described to us how his experience as a child of immigrants has shaped his perspective. “I think that more than feeling just Lebanese, I feel I am part of the world altogether,” he said. “Today, I feel I am a compromise between being Lebanese and relating to the challenges there, but also being a businessman in Latin America and with the responsibility I feel towards countries where I am doing business.”
His experience is not unique, he explained, and in the future he predicted that everyone will become “more global and more local,” with overlapping regional interests born from personal heritage, business opportunities and plain curiosity. He described himself as part of a new group that he calls the “business diaspora,” where, as a transnational businessman, he believes, “We are not going to countries just to put money in and pull it out. We are making business to stay and be part of the development of the country.” You can look at this as something “romantic,” he added, but it’s also smart business: “The reality is that business gets better if you grow the market, the demand, the customers and the possibilities.”
As entry barriers lower for business in an increasingly interconnected world, the experience of being a member of the “business diaspora” will not just be reserved for those with the means to invest large amounts of capital. Imagine, for example, that a computer-science student in Indiana develops a game for a popular social-networking site that suddenly takes off among users in Sri Lanka. The student and aspiring entrepreneur might not even have a passport (much less know anything about Sri Lanka), yet his game becomes highly profitable, whatever the reasons. His curiosity piqued, the student adds Sri Lankan friends on Facebook and Google+, follows local news on Twitter and begins to learn about, and travel to, the country. In short order, he develops a digital kinship with the country, which will last for years to come. Millions of entrepreneurs, apps developers and businessmen will experience something similar in the future, because the markets online will be bigger and more diverse than anyone truly anticipates.
In a reconstruction setting, this outlook is of course encouraging, but even the most organized and well-meaning telecom companies will never supplant the heavy-duty work of governing institutions. There are basic goods and social services that only a government can provide to its population, like security, public-health programs, clean water supplies, transport infrastructure and basic education. Connectivity and telecommunications will improve the efficacy of these functions but only in partnership with institutional actors on the ground, as the following example shows.
With its initial collapse, in 1991, Somalia became the world’s premier failed state. Famines, clan warfare, external aggression, terrorist insurgencies and regional fragmentation have foiled transitional government after transitional government. Over the past several years, the growth of mobile phones in Somalia has been one of the few success stories to emerge amid this anarchy. Even in the absence of security or a functioning government, the telecommunications industry has come to play a critical role in many aspects of society, providing Somalis with jobs, information, security and critical connections to the outside world. In fact, the telecoms are just about the only thing in Somalia that is organized, that transcends clan and tribal dynamics, and that functions across all three regions: South Central Somalia (Mogadishu), Puntland in the northeast and Somaliland in the northwest. Only one commercial bank exists in Somalia (founded in May 2012), and until there were mobile phones, in order to move money Somalis had to rely on informal hawala networks, in which no transaction records are kept. Today, mobile money-transfer services allow hundreds of thousands of Somalis to move money around inside the country and receive remittances from abroad. SMS-based platforms allow subscribers to use e-mail and receive stock tips and weather information.
Foreign NGOs and companies regularly launch mobile-technology pilot projects to improve the prospects for the Somali population in small ways; we’ve seen attempts to build SMS-based job-matching platforms and remote-diagnosis mobile health-care systems, among others. Yet most are unsuccessful in establishing a foothold—unsurprising, given the exceptionally hostile security and business environment. So most of the innovation that comes from Somalia today comes from the Somalis themselves; in this as elsewhere in the developing world, the most creative solutions emerge at the local level, driven by necessity more than anything else.
The absence of government in Somalia has meant that the telecommunications sector is unregulated, which drives down prices because entrepreneurs can step in and build a network if they see an opportunity (and have a sufficient appetite for risk). This is a common pattern when a government stops functioning. In the weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, a Bahraini telecom tried to expand into southern Iraq and capitalize on sectarian ties between that area, which is largely Shia, and Bahrain, which has a Shia majority, to win new customers. The occupying military forces, concerned about inflaming sectarian tensions, ultimately blocked the telecom’s venture.
The extreme laissez-faire business environment in Somalia has produced some of the cheapest local, international and Internet rates in Africa, making mobile usage far more possible for a deeply impoverished population. When members of the Somali diaspora in the United States call their family back home, their relatives will often hang up and call them back. Without a government demanding taxes, charging for licenses or imposing regulatory costs, telecoms can keep costs low to expand their subscriber base while s
till turning a profit. Somalia’s mobile penetration is much higher than one might expect, hovering somewhere between 20 and 25 percent. The four main telecom operators offer voice and data service across the country, and sixty to seventy miles into neighboring Kenya as well.
Despite these achievements in communications, Somalia remains an exceptionally insecure country, and insurgents have used the country’s connectivity to further this volatility. Al-Shabaab Islamist insurgents send threatening calls and messages to African Union peacekeepers. Islamist radicals impose bans on mobile banking platforms and sabotage telecommunications infrastructure. Pirates on the Somali coast use local telecom networks to communicate because they worry their satellite phones can be tracked by international warships. In a February 2012 report, the United Nations Security Council added the head of Somalia’s largest telecom, Hormuud, to its list of individuals subject to a travel ban after identifying him as one of al-Shabaab’s chief financiers. (The report also said the man, Ali Ahmed Nur Jim’ale, set up Hormuud’s mobile money-transfer system in order to facilitate anonymous funding to al-Shabaab.)
Certainly, the situation in Somalia is complex. But should the country emerge from its cocoon of instability anytime soon, the new government will surely find willing partners in the national telecom operators.
Ideally, reconstruction efforts strive not only to re-create what existed before, but to improve on the original and develop practices and institutions that reduce the risk of repeated disasters. The majority of postcrisis societies, while diverse in detail, have the same basic needs, roughly analogous to the basic components of state-building. These include administrative control of territory, a monopoly on the means of violence, sound management of public finances, investment in human capital, ensuring the provision of infrastructure and creating citizenship rights and duties.2 Efforts to meet these needs, while heavily dependent on the international community (financially, technically and diplomatically), must be led by the postcrisis state itself. If reconstruction is not seen as homegrown or at least consistent with the political and economic aims of the society, the likelihood of failure increases dramatically.