by SIMON CLARK
Maryam’s husband was so outraged when he discovered the device she had smuggled into their Kabul home that he beat her with his fists and a whip. The contraband was a cell phone.
“My husband’s family is very traditional,” says Maryam, a 24-year-old sheathed in a blue burqa who declines to give her last name. “They are very much against mobile phones and freedom for women.”
The connection Maryam sees between women and wireless is apparent to the world’s biggest telecommunications companies, which have begun a push to bring female customers in the developing world to the same level as men. The U.S. and Australian agencies for international development are backing the effort by Vodafone Group Plc (VOD), France Telecom SA (FTE) and others with $1 million to fund research into how to find and keep women like Maryam, and to persuade men that handsets aren’t a threat.
For women in emerging markets, cell phones can be life changing, offering banking services to free them from the dangers of carrying cash, texting when the communal water tap will open or sending instructions in prenatal care.
For the wireless industry, signing up 600 million female subscribers in the developing world by 2014 could be a revenue bonanza of $29 billion a year, according to the London-based GSMA, formed in 1982 as the Groupe Speciale Mobile to design a pan-European mobile technology.
“We are not ashamed to say that this will benefit business too,” says Trina DasGupta, director of the GSMA’s MWomen program, whose members include AT&T Inc. in the U.S. and Bharti Airtel Ltd. (BHARTI) in India.
Bloomberg for more
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