It's hard to overstate the impact mobile technology has on global development efforts. The spread of mobile cellular and data networks, coupled with the falling cost of mobile phones and other devices, has allowed governments, NGOs, and mobile operators to provide information and services — including education, health, and financial services — to people in even the remotest areas.

A new study of global data from the Gallup World Poll with the GSMA, the organization that represents the worldwide mobile communications industry, released yesterday, addresses this question by looking at the relationships between people’s use of mobile phones and the internet, and their self-reported ratings of their lives — which researchers refer to as subjective well-being, or SWB. The study finds that, even after accounting for income and a range of other potentially confounding variables, mobile phone ownership supplemented with internet access is associated with improvements in one of the most common measures of SWB, the overall rating people give their lives.

At the global level, the results suggest the power of mobile phones to improve lives is largely linked to their status as the primary device that most of the world’s residents use to access the internet. In the absence of internet access, those who have a mobile phone give similar life ratings as those without one.

In a few regions, however, a significant increase in life evaluations is associated with mobile phone use only even without internet access. These include sub-Saharan Africa, which has historically lacked widespread fixed-line communications infrastructure and where socio-economic development efforts have sought to provide vital services and information via the more prevalent cellular-only phones.

Read the full article about access to mobile phones by Julia Burchell and Steve Crabtree at Devex.