The Village Phone Program is an innovative initiative that aims to extend access to telephones to rural areas while at the same time promoting entrepreneurship and creating jobs.
The program links IFC’s major telecoms clients with rural entrepreneurs who sell airtime on the companies’ networks in their local rural communities.
The Village Phone partnership model is unique because it meets the needs of all parties. Consumers in rural markets gain access to telephone services; local entrepreneurs, who are known as village phone operators, have an income-generating business; telecom partners deepen their market penetration and meet their mandates to expand access into rural areas.
To emulate the success of Village Phone in Bangladesh, IFC collaborated with the Grameen Foundation and other partners to create a Village Phone Replication Manual--essentially a ‘how-to’ resource for setting up a Village Phone project.
The project has already been implemented in Uganda, and IFC is currently working with partner institutions to support replication in several African countries, starting with Nigeria.
IFC is contributing to program design, partnership development and coordination, local project management, and monitoring and evaluation.
IFC is helping the village phone business evolve to more value-added services by combining it with various applications including m-commerce, health & education, e-government, etc.
For more information contact:
Houtan Bassiri
Communications Officer
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tel: +27-11-731-3179
Email: hbassiri@ifc.org
