This USAToday.com article about the explosive growth of mobile phone usage in Africa — and the way people are using it to make a living — is a window into the changes brought by information access to the lives of some of the less wealthy people in the world:

NAIROBI, Kenya — Amina Harun, a 45-year-old farmer, used to traipse around for hours looking for a working pay phone on which to call the markets and find the best prices for her fruit. Then cellphones changed her life.

“We can easily link up with customers, brokers and the market,” she says, sitting between two piles of watermelons at Wakulima Market in Kenya’s capital.

Harun is one of a rapidly swelling army of wired-up Africans — an estimated 100 million of the continent’s 906 million people. Another is Omar Abdulla Saidi, phoning in from his sailboat on the Zanzibar coast looking for the port that will give him the biggest profit on his freshly caught red snapper, tuna and shellfish.

Then there are South Africans and Kenyans slinging cellphones round the necks of elephants to track them through bush and jungle. And there’s Beatrice Enyonam, a cosmetics vendor in Togo, keeping in touch with her husband by cellphone when he’s traveling in the West African interior.