Mobile Top Up APIs for the Digital Divide:
The digital divide is most commonly defined as the gap between those individuals and communities that have, and do not have, access to the information technologies that are transforming our lives. South Africa-based mobile giant MTN Group reports to have 221 million subscribers, yet only 70 million are active data users. That mean overs 70% of their customers still don’t have access to the digital world. How can this be in 2018? What are some of the key factors that cause the digital divide?
The problems of digital inequality can be traced back to the late 1960s, which is early than most people’s imagination. In fact, this problem’s appearance followed the term ‘digital time’ with the development of computer techniques. In the beginning of ‘digital time’, due to the limited application of computer and communication techniques, digital divide is not so apparent as today. In the early-to-mid 1990s, the term digital divide was widely used with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore using this phrase in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1996. After that, this problem raised global attentions. More important, many people realized that the divide would not disappear of its own accord because history illustrated that even as new technologies create growth and new opportunity, they can also heighten economic inequalities and sharpen social divisions. Since then, many countries and IT companies investigated on narrowing the digital divide, however very few of these works survived the broken of dot-com foam in the end of 20 century.The process of digital divide’s appearance and evolution means that this issue is a dynamic topic with the development of digital technologies in different period. For example, before the popularity of Internet, the gap was reflected in the ability of using personal computer and the rate of possessing PC. But today, people concern more on the access of Internet. This implies that the there are different factors resulting in digital divide in different periods. The current status is the result of comprehensive function of those factors. Economy, education, bad governance and culture all play a role in contributing to the digital divide. The Digital Divide can be simply defined as the gap between the rich people who benefit from the access to technology and the poor who do not benefit as much from access to technology.
In today’s world, APIs can help bridge the gap of the digital divide by opening up more opportunities for developers to create new applications that increases accessibility and product awareness to the masses. Mobile Operators can play a significant role by opening up their APIs, as mobile phones can play a bigger impact than PCs with the digital divide. APIs allow application developers to enhance their latest creations with tried-and-true network-operator functionalism, including billing support, messaging, top ups and user-location information.
As apps move into the cloud, consumers expect to be able to access their coolest widgets anywhere and from any device, which is why operators need a network-agnostic API platform that can help developers build apps that work across any network or ecosystem. Currently, it’s difficult for developers to work with all the different operators individually, each with its own infrastructure, policies, standards, local regulations, and markets. APIs eliminate the barriers to innovation and the barriers to new, ripe revenue streams. APIs are the highways to greater customer awareness to gain access to products and services.
At Reloadly, we have opened up our mobile top up APIs which can also benefit the 4.5B mobile subscribers around the world. Developers can hop on our code, and deploy innovative applications that will help billions of mobile users to stay connected. Economic levels are the key contributers to the digital divide, simple access to more prepaid balance can be an issue for billions. With our APIs mobile subscribers can have easier access to reload their prepaid balance via different applications built by developers and even relatives from abroad can send a reload which most certainly will entice more data usage. Reloadly allows developers to do just that, to gain access to the Reloadly mobile top up API, simply click on the tab to get your API key.
