For CNN
LONDON (England) CNN -- One afternoon late in 2002, Mukhsin Alhassan Kadir drove his taxi from the busy streets of Accra, the capital of Ghana, to a nearby market community to meet a man who wanted to trade a plot of land for two cell phones.
Ghanaian taxi driver Mukhsin Alhassan Kadir once traded two cell phones for a plot of land.
When he arrived, Kadir collected the papers for the land and handed over what would be the first telephones this man and his wife had ever had in their lives.
"During that time, everybody wanted to own a mobile phone, but it was not common to find them in this country," Kadir told CNN.
In less than a decade, cellphones, once the preserve of the very rich, are now ubiquitous in Africa and parts of Asia.
A device that's sometimes used as a fashion accessory in the West has become a lifeline for millions of people in the developing world.
In Ghana, Kadir's phone functions as a portable office that he takes on the road with him during his taxicab shifts.
"Sometimes I am in bed and a customer will call me and I will go and pick him up," said Kadir while driving a client down a highway on a recent morning in Accra. "It has helped my business a lot."
"There is nobody in Ghana who is not using a mobile phone," added Kadir, speaking to CNN on a late model Sony Ericsson that he ordered for around $220 from someone in Italy.
"Even a shoe shiner has his own mobile phone," he jokes.
Numbers from the International Telecommunications Union indicate that since the end of 2006, nearly 70 percent of those subscriptions have come from developing countries.
There are now almost seven million cellphone users in Ghana, up from only a couple hundred thousand subscribers in 2000. The continent's biggest users are in South Africa, with nearly 25 million subscribers, followed by Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco.
However, the figures are startling in the lesser developed and poorer African countries.
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