LONDON - Maryam's husband was so outraged when he discovered the device she had smuggled into their Kabul home that he beat her with his fists and a whip. The contraband was a cellphone.
"My husband's family is very traditional," says Maryam, a 24-year-old sheathed in a blue burqa who declines to give her last name. "They are very much against mobile phones and freedom for women."
The connection Maryam sees between women and wireless is apparent to the world's biggest telecommunications companies, which have begun a push to bring female customers in the developing world to the same level as men.
The United States and Australian agencies for international development are backing the effort by Vodafone Group, France Telecom and others with $1 million to fund research into how to find and keep women like Maryam, and to persuade men that handsets aren't a threat.
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For women in emerging markets, cellphones can be life-changing, offering banking services to free them from the dangers of carrying cash, texting when the communal water tap will open or sending instructions in prenatal care.
For the wireless industry, signing up 600 million female subscribers in the developing world by 2014 could be a revenue bonanza of $29 billion a year, according to the London-based GSMA, formed in 1982 as the Groupe Speciale Mobile to design a pan-European mobile technology.
"We are not ashamed to say that this will benefit business, too," says Trina DasGupta, director of the GSMA's MWomen program, whose members include AT&T in the United States and Bharti Airtel in India.
The U.S. is helping fund MWomen to bring women's handset use on par with men's and change "the all-too-common belief that cellphones afford more freedom to women than they deserve," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at an Oct. 7 press conference.
Companies have made inroads. Afghanistan's biggest wireless provider, Telecom Development Co. Afghanistan, started a campaign called Aali for Mother (Aali means "the best") with ads portraying men as gift bearers and the phones as tools that benefit the family.
After the ads appeared, women grew to 23 percent from 18 percent of all new customers, according to the company, which operates under the name Roshan.
In Qatar, where it's often taboo for females to interact with strangers of the opposite sex, Vodafone created Al Johara so women could sign up for service without having to enter stores.
Women using wireless phones aren't viewed with as much suspicion in Kenya. Still, just 34 percent of women have handsets, versus 44 percent of men, according to the GSMA.
A cellphone's importance can't be overstated, says Salome Mukuhi Kamau, who sells mangos, papaya and peppers along a road near Nairobi. She says the device may have saved her life.
When she carried cash, she was robbed three times by thieves who threatened her with knives and guns. Now she deposits daily earnings with an agent from Nairobi-based Safaricom's M-Pesa mobile money system, who works out of a shack across the street from her stand.
When she has to stock up on goods, she takes the bus to the main market about three miles away, and gets the funds she needs from an M-Pesa agent there.
"I store the money here and then withdraw it when I want," Kamau said. "There is no fear that I will be hijacked."
"I store the money here and then withdraw it when I want. There is no fear that I will be hijacked."
Salome Mukuhi Kamau,
speaking of using Nairobi-based Safaricom's M-Pesa mobile money system to prevent being robbed
