My point is that "it's too expensive for Africans (from an unspecified country, because of course the entire continent of 1.3 billion people has the same socioeconomic status everywhere) to call people in the next
village (and it being the next village is somehow relevant because mobile call rates are tied to literal physical distance, obviously)" is exactly the kind of poverty porn nonsense that Westerners lap up about SSA without thinking, and I make an effort to call it out everywhere I see it.
I am curious about your thoughts on satellites as a particularly cost-effective way to improve mobile telecoms, considering that cellular networks are largely driven by masts that are very much on the ground and (in West Africa for instance), backed by submarine fibre-optic cables.
As an aside, it's extremely interesting to me that in most of my interactions with Westerners they seem rather incapable of finding very easily discoverable primary sources on living conditions in Africa. It would take maybe ten seconds to pull up actual December 2019 call rates and tariff plans from telecoms companies in Ethiopia or Nigeria or Rwanda or Botswana or wherever, but I instead get linked to data that aggregates mobile device and data plan prices from years ago. Then again I suppose that if one unironically believes that people here are stuck unable to call people in the next village it wouldn't occur to them that this sort of information is widely available from Africans themselves.
For example, I use MTN and pay a flat rate of (the equivalent of) $0.0003 per second for calls and $0.011 to send texts. I'm on a 15GB data plan that costs $13.83, and the monthly plans go down to $2.77 for 1.5GB. There are also plans that will give you access to certain social media (Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) for a month for less than a dollar.