Can Cell Phones Save the World? -----> Share

Share In Mobile Message, a new series of blog posts for Nat Geo News Watch starting today, innovator, anthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Ken Banks shares exciting stories about how mobile phones are being used throughout the world to improve, enrich, and empower billions of lives. This first post sets the stage.
By Ken Banks
As a child I had a fascination with the natural world. It helped being brought up in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands between the English and French coasts where Gerald Durrell set up a zoo in the late 1950s that would become famous for its pioneering work, captive-breeding endangered species. It also helped having grandparents who were ardent amateur naturalists, and a mother who followed closely in their footsteps.
I remember flicking through old National Geographic magazines in awe, scissors in hand, and being fixated by David Attenborough's natural history programs on the BBC, wondering what it would be like to visit "deepest darkest" Africa and see the wildlife first-hand.
Looking back, I really wasn't that different to many children my age. Only, my dreams came true.

1993 was a big year for me. I was already beginning to turn my back on a career in information technology when I was selected to be a team member for a school building project in northern Zambia. Those five weeks changed the course of my life as I became hungry to learn more about the developing world, and the tensions between wildlife conservation and human development.
Another trip to Africa followed in 1995, this time to Uganda. Later the following year I left Jersey and my journey was well and truly underway. The next few years took me to Sussex University to study Social Anthropology and Development Studies, and then back to Africa to run a primate sanctuary in Nigeria. It's safe to say that after all this I was well and truly hooked. 
Today, with over 500 million subscribers across Africa alone and more people around the world owning a phone than not, mobile phones seem to be everywhere.

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