Equipping pre-teens with web mobes spreads beyond West

Four in five eight-year-olds tote mobiles in Cairo

By Bill Ray, 16th November 2011

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Egyptian parents are most eager to connect their children, with four out of five furnishing their eight-year-old children with mobiles, but the rest of the world isn't far behind.

The figures come from the GSMA, representing the GSM industry, which polled 3,500 families across Japan, India, Paraguay and Egypt to see how children were using mobile technology and what their parents thought about it.

Perhaps most surprising is the news that all these kids aren't using parental cast-off handsets. Across the countries surveyed, four out of five children under 18 who have phones are toting a brand new handset. Although the majority of these gadgets aren't smartphones, these kids are using their mobiles to access the internet and social networking sites, as well as keeping in touch with the folks.

The trend is particularly dominant in Japan, where half the children polled (all of whom were under 18) access the internet on their phone. But Egypt again trumps all comers with 54 per cent of children accessing the internet on the move, probably because they've had a handset since they were eight.

Not that all Egyptian children are squinting at the web on a mobile-phone screen, 18 per cent of them have tablet computers these days: more than three times the next (India) and six times the tablet use in Paraguay. Japan trails in the overly-rich-doting-parent category with only two per cent equipping their offspring with fondleslabs.

Nor are the rest of them dependent on phones: 30 per cent of Egyptian children reckon their games console is their primary point of access to the internet.

The surveys were carried out in urban areas, but the vast majority were done face-to-face by stopping people in the street, so a good deal more reliable than the self-selecting web surveys we see so often. There's a whole bunch of statistics complete with colour charts covering mobile ownership, and use, across the four countries in the full report [PDF, well written but statistics heavy], but what's clear is that the phenomenon of tech-equipped pre-teens is far from limited to Western economies.

It also demonstrates the increasing importance of server-side parental control: as children access the internet from a plethora of devices, desktop filtering isn't going to cut it any more as evidenced by the popularity of TalkTalk's new service that has signed up 200,000 people already. ®

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Posted Wednesday 16th November 2011 15:59 GMT

damien 4

Boolax

Anyone who has ever spent any time in Egypt knows that probably 50 per cent of children feel lucky to get enough to eat.

Urban Egypt, Cairo and Alex I suspect, is also rigidly separated into areas of have and have nots. Yup, probably 50 per cent of children in Zamelek have smart phones while if you went to Islamic Cairo 50 per cent of children are likely to think digital watches are pretty fancy tech.

Posted Wednesday 16th November 2011 16:41 GMT

Laurent_Z

30 per cent of Egyptian children

i call shenanigans...

"30 per cent of Egyptian children reckon their games console is their primary point of access to the internet"

"Penetration and usage

Egypt's Internet penetration rate grew from less than one percent in 2000, to 5% in 2004, and to 24% in 2009.[2] This ranks Egypt 110th out of 203 countries, slightly ahead of its neighbors Lebanon (24%) and Syria (20%) and slightly behind Jordan (26%)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Egypt

=> "30 per cent of THE SURVEYED Egyptian children HAVING RICH PARENTS AND BELONGING TO THE MINORITY THAT HAVE INTERNET reckon their games console is their primary point of access to the internet BECAUSE DAD IS BROWSING THE FULL EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE ON THE COMPUTER"

There, corrected that for you

Not sure about the end, but then if you can say in a article that "30 per cent of Egyptian children reckon their games console is their primary point of access to the internet" I for sure can say that most egyptian dads blow off pressure by reading Hamlet...

Just a question, that could explain the discrepency... Was the survey sent by Email, by any chance ?

At least thank you for proving that it is all Lies, Damn Lies,... and Statistics.

Posted Wednesday 16th November 2011 15:21 GMT

Joe Montana

Crime

And they wonder why crime against kids is on the rise...

When i was a kid, i was lucky to be carrying round under £1 in cash, a few cheap pens/pencils and maybe a few sweets...

Now kids are running around with hundreds of pounds worth of electronics in their pockets. They represent very easy targets for opportunistic thieves.