Exploring what might be possible should smartphones drop greatly in price in the coming years, projects like Dunia Moja, a joint initiative of Stanford University (USA) and partner universities in Southern and Eastern Africa, are exploring how communication and joint research between students and faculty on environmental issues can be facilitated and supported.

While the explosive use of mobile phones in developing countries is well-documented -- and undeniable -- and evidence is emerging that phones are slowly making their way into the hands of teens, just what this might mean for the delivery of education in developing countries is a little less clear. This topic first started to get serious attention among small groups of people in international donor agencies around 2005, with a 'mobile learning' workshop in Tokyo sponsored by ADBI and UNESCO serving as a sort of landmark event for the topic. The workshop report (published as

28% of Africans now have a mobile phone subscription, according to data released by the ITU earlier this year, part of a larger trend that sees two out of every three mobile subscribers around the world living in a developing country. The flagship ITU publication Measuring the Information Society (pdf) notes that two-thirds of the world's cell phone subscriptions are in developing nations, with Africa, which has a 2% subscriber rate as recently as 2000, growing the fastest. And it is not only adults who are making use of this new technology. Survey work at a low-income high school in South Africa's Samora Machel township suggests that mobile penetration among youth in some places might be higher than one might suspect.

Perhaps the most well known, and biggest, program exploring the use of mobile phones in education in a developing country is the text2teach project in the Philippines (part of the larger 'BridgeIT' initiative).