Mobile Phone Coverage and Education as Means of Farmers' Empowerment: Are they Complements or Substitutes?

This paper explores the impact on farmers' welfare of mobile phone coverage rollout in rural Uganda, one of the first Sub-Saharan countries developing a widespread mobile telephony network. Unlike similar studies, we relax the... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores the impact on farmers' welfare of mobile phone coverage rollout in rural Uganda, one of the first Sub-Saharan countries developing a widespread mobile telephony network. Unlike similar studies, we relax the implicit assumption of homogeneous effects across the population, allowing them to be contingent on household specific level of human capital, aknowledging the theoretically ambiguous relation between modern ICTs' provision and formal schooling. We found evidence of heterogeneous impact of the coverage, that resulted in significant increase in less educated households' cash expenditures, total income and wealth, with relevant implications interms of welfare redistribution. We argue that this is due to the higher benefit of the reduction in search costs to farmers endowed with lower levels of allocative efficiency.
Our empirical results seem to be driven by the increase in perishable crops' sale price. These findings also suggest that human capital does not play an important role in adopting and making a pro table use of mobile phones.