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"Boko Haram, the now-notorious terrorist group responsible for kidnapping some 274 school girls from a boarding school in northern Nigeria last month, has made clear its goal of dragging Nigeria away from Western influences. But when it comes to 21st century digital adoption, the kidnappers are swimming upstream; nothing, it seems, can stop Nigeria's impending mobile telecommunications revolution.\nSee also: Stop Sharing That 'Bring Back Our Girls' Photo \u2014 She's Not Nigerian\nBy the end of last year, 65% of Nigeria's roughly 168 million populace had mobile subscriptions, according to Fredrik Jejdling, the region head and president of Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa. Ericsson currently provides mobile communication services for vast swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and manages roughly 80% of the MTN telecom network in Nigeria. \nOf the country's 120 million mobile subscriptions, though, only 27 million are for smartphones. Jejdling explained that the Nigerian phone market, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, is made up of mostly Asian and gray market 2G, feature phone devices.\nCommunications are still primarily limited to voice and text. However, this is changing rapidly as many of the region\u2019s networks upgrade from 2G to 3G and even 4G networks. Mobile subscriptions are, in fact, expected to grow by 10 million this year, per Ericsson; a great deal of the growth will come in the high-speed WCDMA/HSPA and LTE 4G space.\nIn studying the area, Ericsson has found that devotion to mobile technology and usage patterns are not all that different from more developed nations.\nRoughly three-quarters of mobile users in the region believe their mobile phones are the most important piece of technology they own, according to Ericsson. Despite relatively low penetration rates for high-speed broadband and smart phones, almost half of those with phones in the region browse the Internet; 72% send and receive SMS messages. They do use some social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but since those networks are primarily English-based (and some 200 local dialects are spoken in Nigeria), the penetration isn't very deep.\nAs Nigerians adopt more powerful phones and begin downloading apps, they have shown a greater propensity toward more utilitarian pursuits. One of the most frequently downloaded apps is a mobile banking one, Jejdling said, perhaps because of the lack of brick-and-mortar banks in the country. That makes adopting digital ones is almost a necessity.\nTechnology spreads the news\nAs technology in the region changes, a wide variety of local blogs and news sources are flourishing. Most of them, including 360Nobs, BellaNaija.com and KemiFilani.com reported the girls' abduction on April 15, a day or more before Western media picked up the news (DATE). The notable exception: BBC, which seemed to be the first to report the mass kidnapping. \nNigeria's Punch picked it up, and smaller Nigerian blogs followed suit.\nJejdling said it was impossible to draw a correlation between mobile communications technology and the spread of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign in Nigeria. He added, though, that the incident would be less known without mobile technology. \n\"When you have either a feature phone or a smartphone, that allows you to disseminate news more rapidly than before,\" said Jejdling, who is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He traveled to Nigeria last week. \"Less would have been known [about the kidnapping] ... had the technology not been in place.\"\nNigerians spread the news through the aforementioned blog posts and broadcast messages via BlackBerrys, which are still fairly popular in the region, and SMS. As of 2012, half of Nigeria's smartphone owners had BlackBerrys.\nNot all connected\nEven as mobile technology and connectivity proliferates in northern Nigeria, the kidnapped high-schoolers don't have mobile habits like teens in, say, the United States. Boarding school students in Nigeria aren't allowed to have feature phones or smartphones, according to representatives from Ericsson.\nThe girls captors, the very men who wish to wipe out all traces of Western influence, are a different story. According to 2012 United States Institute of Peace (USIP) report on Boko Haram, the group uses mobile phones to communicate between cells: \"Council members are able to travel into and around Nigeria, and they use mobile phones to communicate, meeting face-to-face less often,\" notes the report.\nMultiple reports have indicated Boko Haram's goal of discouraging Nigerian society from adopting Western culture. \"The group's use of mobile phones, video cameras, DVDs, YouTube, chemical explosives, automatic weapons and cars shows it is more than prepared to use the fruits of Western education when it suits them,\" the USIP report continues.\nNevertheless, Nigeria continues to change and accelerate its adoption of globally advanced technology, like mobile 4G connectivity. But Jejdling remained skeptical of the idea that such modernizations could help Nigeria win the struggle against radicals trying to drag the nation backwards; he thought it could generate false hope. \nHaving such tools \"may not change people\u2019s intent and bad will, but you enable communication and it's very much a way of increasing the information flow in a society,\" he said.\nBut knowledge is power, which could translate into fewer people joining the ranks behind Boko Haram.\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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