Appropriation of mobile telephony at the bottom of the pyramid

The use of mobile telephones can provide rural communities in emerging markets with access to information and thereby can enable them to enhance their quality of life (Heeks and Jagun, 2007; Chigona et al., 2009). This argument, although it emanates from the development informatics literature, concurs with Prahalad’s (2004) Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) concept at a time when multinational companies’ current and potential interactions with the world’s poorest communities have gained significant research attention (Karani, 2006; Subrahmanyam and Gomez-Arias, 2008; Rashid and Rahman, 2009).