Phone fixers thrive in Burkina mobile boom

OUAGADOUGOU – Tongs in one hand, soldering iron in the other, Moumouni Tiemtore draws sparks from the dismantled carcass of a mobile phone. ‘It’s a circuit fault,’ he says. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
A former medicine student and accountant, Tiemtore, known as Mouni, turned instead to mobile phone repairs – a nice earner in Burkina Faso, where, as in much of Africa, the sector is booming.

Tinkering away at his stall in Ouagadougou’s main market, the 34-year-old can earn 15 000 Central African francs (about 23 euros, US$32) a day – about half the average monthly salary in Burkina Faso.His neighbour Ibrahim Soukoundou said he gave up his old job as a clock maker to repair mobile phones. ‘The clock business isn’t working like it used to,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to change.’A study published last month said that mobile phone subscriptions in Africa rose by 41 per cent in 2008, far outstripping the number of fixed line users there.The study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said investment in Africa’s telecom industry remained unabated despite the economic slowdown, with international providers set to increase their presence there.Another survey by business consultancy Ernst & Young said the African market for mobile telephones has shown the ‘fastest growth rate in the world’ since 2002, expanding by almost half.The surge was driven by ‘a boom in raw materials and the increased liberalisation of markets,’ said Serge Thiemele, who heads the African sector of the Global Telecommunication Center, behind the Ernst & Young study.To cash in on the boom, Internet giant Google last month unveiled a new service to provide information via text message to mobile phone users in Africa, where mobile phones are prevalent but Internet penetration is low.Google noted that Africa has the world’s highest mobile phone growth rate and that mobile use on the continent is six times higher than Internet penetration.In Mouni’s West African home state, the number of subscribers to the three mobile telephone operators has multiplied by 100 in eight years to some 2,5 million. Now stalls in the market where he works do a roaring trade fixing batteries, ear pieces and overheating handsets.The telecom regulator Artel says the mobile phone sector has directly created 1 800 jobs since 2007 and ‘tens of millions’ indirectly, spawning shops selling mobile top-up cards as well as repair services such as Mouni’s.He compares his lucrative new trade with the medical disciplines he studied at Ouagadougou University. ‘To repair a mobile phone you have to open it… You have to operate,’ he says. ‘You could call it mobile surgery.’-Nampa-AFP