Mobile Oportunities: Poverty and Access to Telephony in Latin America and the Caribbean. The case of Brazil

Abstract

This country research report is part of a larger comparative multinational research project carried out by the Inter-American Dialogue of the Information Society (DIRSI) on “Mobile Opportunities – Poverty and Access to Telephony in Latin America and the Caribbean.” which involved the design, implementation and analysis of a unique survey on the mobile telephony (hereafter MT) usage patterns of urban, low-income populations in seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru and Trinidad & Tobago. The project’s main goal is to collect original data and analyze it in order to understand how the, urban, bottom of the pyramid segments of the population make use o MT. A guiding hypothesis is that MT is a useful tool for wealth generation and social network development. A user is defined as a person who made use of MT in the previous three months.