“My co-wife can borrow my mobile phone!”

Abstract

A unique census of cell phones in a Western Kenyan village reveals gendered dimensions of access, intensity and breadth of cell phone usage related to contemporary long-distance households and livelihoods. Women bound to marital homesteads far from their birthplace praise the freedom to communicate with family across the country; a housewife uses scarce resources to send ‘greetings’ and ensure peace of mind. Women link with community groups and distant menfolk, spanning rural/urban spaces to manage their increasingly busy and insecure lives. Older women blend these new technologies into traditional agrarian livelihoods and community activities; younger women are eager to navigate into the twenty-first century and away from farms. For cash-strapped rural housewives, their frugal, ingenious, yet constrained uses of “mobile” (stationary) cell phones help them achieve many freedoms. Findings from this village census of cell phones add to a growing body of nuanced research on the social shaping of cell phones and their uses for human development. Research reveals the intersections of adaptive uses with contemporary gendered patterns of poverty, inequality, and deagrarianization. They serve simultaneously as potentially transformative and emancipatory as well as divisive forces in sub-Saharan Africa.