Catenating the local and the global in Morocco: how mobile phone users have become producers and not consumers

Over a decade ago, a major intellectual shift occurred in global development thinking, stressing local and ‘bottom-up’ market-driven approaches to poverty alleviation over top-down, statist planning. Many principles of this shift are embedded in a development approach referred to as the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. At the same time, some of the claims and outcomes associated with such approaches have met with scathing critiques. I examine some of these debates in the context of mobile phone use among low-income labourers in Morocco. There is no doubt that access to productive resources and greater access to markets can benefit people with low incomes. As I argue, however, there are a number of factors that limit the success of such top-down interventions, perhaps none more so than the level to which economic actors have the ability to shape the use of productive resources and to build local productive networks via such resources. In this sense, perhaps not surprisingly, economic and social development can never be disconnected from empowerment and participation.