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Philadelphia is taking the city back to the past by reinstalling pay phones

No quarters required!

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

Philadelphia is taking the city back to the past.

Remember when calling your parents, a tow truck or a friend when you were out and about meant digging in your pocket for a quarter to make a pay phone call? Well, a Philadelphia-based collective, PhilTel, is jumping into the past with a modern twist, by installing free-to-use pay phones throughout the city.

Of course, the pay phones that many of us grew up were removed from public places years ago. There no longer seemed to be a need for them when most people had a phone in their pocket or in their hand. But it's easy to forget that not everyone has or wants that luxury. For some people, staying that connected all the time can be too much and for others, it's simply financially impossible to own a cell phone.

Cell phones are expensive, and when you add the cost of a phone plan or paying for minutes, they quickly become out of reach for many people on fixed incomes or those experiencing homelessness. PhilTel's aim is to help close this gap by making phones accessible to all. There's only one catch: You have to leave the quarters at home!

person holding black android smartphonePhoto by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

That's right, the phones will be free to use and that includes making nationwide calls. For the people of Philadelphia, that means a lot less asking strangers to use their phone if your battery dies or you accidentally lock your phone in your car. According to opensource.com, Mike Dank, the co-founder of PhilTel, said, "Philadelphia in particular has a lot of payphone use, even as payphone companies have been steadily removing phones from service year after year."

Dank continued, "Residents who rely on these phones are being increasingly marginalized and if this trend continues, many will be left without a communication platform they need to carry out their lives."

This isn't the first time pay phones were added to a city in the age of cellphones. PhilTel was inspired by a company called Futel in Portland, Oregon, that has a similar program.

men in black coat using a pay phonePhoto by arj. on Unsplash

The phones are not new, they're actually refurbished pay phones and will use a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service to connect callers. If you're in Philly, you'll be able to use one of these free pay phones as soon as December 17, when the first one gets installed at Iffy Books.

While this is a wonderful solution for those that need access to pay phones for day-to-day life, one has to wonder if the name will get updated. I mean, they're not really pay phones anymore. They're free phones or just public phones. I don't know about you but this little detail is going to live in my head rent-free for a while.

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Heroes

How an app for tractors is actually changing lives for some farmers.

The plight of farmers has never been more real.

Erosion caused by drought. The increased scarcity of water ... caused by drought. Lack of resources, from equipment to information. Ever-increasing energy costs. Increasingly unpredictable weather. The list goes on and on.

Image via iStock.

According to Tech Times, drought conditions and heat waves caused by an ever-warming planet have led to a 10% drop in worldwide cereal harvests in the past 50 years alone and could result in as much as a 30% loss in total global crop production by the year 2080.

With fewer resources, financial support, and social safety nets to lean on, the harsh reality is that underdeveloped countries will face the greatest setbacks as the effects of climate change continue to increase.

"People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalised are especially vulnerable to climate change," reads a 2014 report by the UN's climate panel.

Image via CIAT/Flickr.

In countries with agriculturally based labor forces like Nigeria, these hardships often force farmers to outsource their labor in order to harvest what few crops they have.

Those who can't afford to pay for seasonal labor, however, are left with little choice but to underuse their land and lose out on the potential income that comes with it.

Image via South African Tourism/Flickr.

While something as simple as a tractor could be a huge help to addressing their financial woes, it's also something that many farmers can't afford because of said financial woes. Not to mention that most commercial banks in Nigeria charge a 30% interest rate and require loan repayment within a year.

This is exactly the kind of fiscal dilemma that apps like Hello Tractor are hoping to solve.

The brainchild of founder/CEO Jehiel Oliver, Hello Tractor is a revolutionary mobile app that connects tractor owners with nearby farmers in marginalized areas of sub-Saharan Africa for the purposes of renting out their equipment and skills.

With a simple SMS text message, a farmer in need can send a message requesting tractor services to the app, which will then connect to the nearest Smart Tractor (a tractor embedded with Oliver's low-cost GPS/telematics system) using local and cloud-based data to connect them.

Image via iStock.

Hello Tractor's system provides a quicker and cheaper alternative to hiring manual laborers and is off to a promising start.

According to TakePart, "Since Hello Tractor launched in the summer of 2014, farmers who participated in the beta period saw their yields increase by 200 percent using a machine that’s 40 times faster than manual labor."

Can't afford to rent a tractor? Hello Tractor's got your back on that, too!

In parts of the developing world with few banks and fewer credit unions, getting access to enough capital to buy a bag of fertilizer presents a difficult challenge in and of itself, let alone renting a tractor.

"The farmers operate on small plot sizes, which means they don't make enough money to invest in a big piece of machinery," Oliver told Fast Company/Co-Exist. "There also aren't bank loans for farmers, so it's pretty difficult to finance a tractor."

While one of Oliver's Smart Tractors can be rented out for just $75 per hectare (roughly 2.5 acres) farmed, Hello Tractor also takes things a step further by connecting farmers to microfinancing companies that can offer lower interest rates as compared with the nationally backed banks.

Hello Tractor is also opening huge doors for female farmers in Africa.

Image via iStock.

A report published by the World Bank last year found that farm plots harvested by women yielded 13% to 30% less crops per hectare than those produced by men. The biggest reason for this disparity lies not in the skill level of female farmers but the "more than unequal access to inputs [and] unequal returns to the inputs they have."

Hello Tractor, on the other hand, is using the anonymity of its users to narrow the culturally fueled wage gap between men and women.

"Uber has made it easier for a black man in New York to hail a cab. You request something through the cloud with no face, and that request is paired with the closest car. It sort of circumvents racism," Oliver told TakePart.

"The same is true of Hello Tractor: When they arrive with that tractor, you’re going to still want that service. This was our way of circumventing the negative gender stereotypes that exist in Nigeria — and they’re really entrenched here."

Image via iStock.

An app helping to end both poverty *and* inequality in the parts of the world that need it the most? Talk about a game-changer.

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