Grameen Telecom lent women phones to resell calls

In the mid-1990s, Bangladesh had roughly 3 landline phones for every 1,000 people, among the lowest telephone penetration rates in the world, concentrated almost entirely in cities. Getting a private phone connection in a village required capital few rural households had and political connections most didn't, so most of rural Bangladesh had effectively no telephone access at all, and no telecom company saw a commercial case for building traditional exchange infrastructure to serve villages too poor and dispersed to generate a return on it.

Grameen Bank had already built a microcredit system lending small amounts to rural borrowers, mostly women, based on group accountability rather than collateral. The obvious extension, lending money for a phone the same way it lent for a sewing machine or a cow, would just have put one more household asset in one more home; it wouldn't have solved the underlying access problem for anyone else in the village.

Lent one woman enough for a single handset and trained her to resell per-call access, turning one phone into shared village infrastructure that repaid its own loan.

A single phone can serve many users, so one loan creates shared access.

Reselling calls generates income that repays the loan and sustains the business.

Existing microcredit network provided trusted borrowers and repayment enforcement.

Per-call pricing made phone access affordable for poor villagers.

When infrastructure is too costly to build, finance local micro-entrepreneurs to own and resell access to a single unit, using existing lending relationships.

The program grew from 24 subscribers in 1997 to more than 83,000 villages across all 64 districts of Bangladesh, and to over 1.7 million subscribers by June 2016. The 'phone lady' model was replicated in at least seven other countries and received international recognition including the 1998 GSM Community Service Award, the 2004 Petersburg Prize, and the 2005 ITU World Information Society Award; Bangladesh's Village Phone program is now held in Scotland's National Museum as a case study in development innovation.