Thanks for the plug. :)

Actually I was chatting to Carey Eaton who is Director of African Associates and writes and runs this site: http://www.africanoz.com.au/. He is originally from Kenya and his family still live there. He told me that during the recent riots prepay mobile phone credit BECAME currency. ATMs ran out of money, and therefore no-one had money for food. No one had money for phone credit either. However, some bright spark came up with the idea of allowing people to pay for phone credit on the internet. So for instance the guy I was talking to used his credit card to purchase phone credit for is parents. The credit was SMSed to them and they could go to a shop and swap the SMS for credit (not sure of the exact details on how this part worked). Anyway, this became currency as many people swapped their phone credits for food.

He argued the mobile phone usage is more advanced in Africa than here in Australia. It is CORE to their lived. Nomadic herdsmen for instance, will send an SMS round their tribe then they spy rain, so everyone knows where to heard their animals to. They will also phone in to town on market day to see whether the current price for selling produce was valuable enough to make the trek in. If it is, they will head in to town, and while they are there they will put their phone in to the phone charger shop to charge up… as they are nomadic and therefore don’t have electricity themselves.