Nairobi — A month ago we spent a few days in Mwanza's giant informal settlement of Mabatani and Bulamba, a rural fishing village in Bunda District.

Our host in Mabatani was a gregarious primary school teacher, let's call her Mama Machapu, still mourning the passing of her husband six months earlier; and in Bulamba, Mzee Soja, an elderly ex-serviceman in the Tanzanian army, and his middle-aged wife, Mama Taifa.

Mama Machapu was a mother of seven children, five of them living in various Tanzanian cities.

She lived with her two teenage schoolgoing sons, a shy, polite granddaughter and a young house-help.

Mzee Soja and Mama Taifa had had 13 children but five died of illnesses.

The eldest two were living in different Tanzanian cities with relatives who supported them through school.

Of the six at home, the oldest was a girl, 11, and the youngest a boy who was barely one.

Active mobile phones

Mabatini is not what Mathare is in Nairobi -- the sense of menace is lacking -- but it is as poor as Mwanza gets.

Mwanza the lakeside city is what Kisumu should have been -- growing rapidly, clean, full of commercial and cultural vibrancy.

Bulamba is like any Kenyan fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria: largely quiet, occupied primarily in illegal small-scale fishing.

Our hosts were typical Tanzanians: proud without being arrogant and deeply polite.

What struck us immediately was the number of working and active mobile phones these poor families owned.

For the Mabatini household we counted seven and in Bulamba two.

For Mabatini, different phones accessed different networks to take advantage of cheaper intra-network calling rates.

The Bulamba couple kept a stack of sim cards each and swapped them.

Conversations on phone were short and to the point -- almost mzungu in character, facts only! -- to save money.

"Hallo! You arrived?"

"Yes."

"OK."

In Mabatini, the text messaging was frantic, an abbreviated language that it seems only teenagers can decipher, and the phone was also a camera, a web surfing computer and an entertainment gadget.

For Bulamba that pattern was pithy, straight-to-the-point calls -- and "beeping" ("flashing" in Kenya), where callers dialled but hung up before the call was answered.

"This works when we have no credit on our lines and the other person knows our situation -- so they call back," Mzee Soja said.

What also struck us in Mabatini was the extent of youth surfing the Internet.

They focused on the East African TV, whose youthful presenters spoke in a style that chimed with the texting and the lingo on the Internet and in their daily chitchat.

They were following Tusker Project Fame closely and knew all sorts of details about the region's top pop stars and rappers.

The youth pages of the Sunday Nation and those of their popular papers were talking about the same people in the same way.

A consistent narrative of youth, with a common language and powered by the same platforms -- Internet, mobile phone and the media -- has taken root.

Its democratising effect is profound and untapped.

The language of popular culture in this Information Age is changing the meaning of poverty, which may come to mean inability to access information, or own and control information channels.

Missing link

The families in Mabatini and Bulamba did not feel 'information-poor' as they could get all the information they wanted right in their hands, in much the same way a savvy corporate executive in Dar es Salaam or Nairobi could.

As we saw there, East Africans do not need intermediaries to control how they communicate and what information they seek or exchange.

The power of available mass communication and information pathways and platforms is phenomenal.

With its exponential growth in access and use, mobile telephony can be used creatively to foster self-driven change in East Africa.

Perhaps the notion of information poverty is the missing link in attempts to explain endemic corruption, lack of government accountability to citizens, poor quality and inadequate public service delivery, and impunity.

John Githongo is founding trustee of Zinduko Trust and head of Twaweza Kenya. James Nduko is programmes co-ordinator of Twaweza Kenya.