Introduction

This introductory chapter describes not only the contents of the others, but also, and importantly, how they fit together. The main subject of the book is how smart feature phones can bring the Internet to large numbers of poor people in developing countries. As shown for the case of India, this can occur on a vast scale under the right conditions (which include an effectively zero price for the handset due to heavy subsidization by one of the project partners, Reliance Industries). In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, where KaiOS phones have recently been introduced, the price is around US$20, which although still much cheaper than the average smartphone, is far more expensive than the Jio. It is still too early, however, to gauge whether KaiOS smart feature phones in Sub-Sahara have been successful even at the higher price just noted. Much will also depend, I argue, on non-economic factors such as local content, local languages, the presence of the Google Assistant (which allows illiterate users to communicate in voice rather than text) and digital skills, which have been relatively neglected over recent years in most poor developing countries.