Paper short abstract:

Youth are now actively building networks through the mobile phone which extend not merely across their own school, neighbourhood and city but to other regions and other countries, South and North. This paper considers the gendered and generational implications of the new connectivities emerging.

Paper long abstract:

The expansion of mobile phone use in sub-Saharan Africa has been remarkable in terms of both speed of adoption and spatial penetration: numbers are growing faster than in any other world region (Etzo &Collender 2010). In Ghana, whether through informal call centres, phone sharing or personal phone ownership, even very poor young people have access via mobile phones to a dramatically expanding network of social contacts. Not surprisingly, the mobile phone [in its increasingly sophisticated guises] has also itself become an essential requisite of youth style: an object of desire and a symbol of success. This brings to the fore important questions regarding the transformative potential of the mobile phone for improving young people's lives and life chances and also the destabilizing potential of previously unimagined levels of connectivity. The (gendered) developmental implications of rapid uptake among a young and possibly vulnerable population are still unfolding but youth are now actively building networks through the mobile phone which extend not merely across their own school, neighbourhood and city but to other regions and other countries, South and North. This paper focuses on preliminary findings from a new study to consider the gendered and generational implications of the new connectivities which are emerging.