Can a phone company reshape our lives?

Not long ago, I paid a visit to a place called Barik Ab. The place is a land allocation site, north of Kabul, designed to be a home for people who have lost their home across decades of war and flight. It’s a desperate piece of land, stuck against mountains at one side, dry land on the other side. The quietness of the place is frequently cut by rotor blades from black hawks that patrol the sky between Bagram and Kabul, and military tanks that speed on the narrow road between Bagram and Kabul, past Barik Ab. Despite the high tech military equipment that inhabits the air and land around Barik Ab, there is little that reminds of technological invention inside Barik Ab. The place is cut off from power supply, roads are impassable most of the time around the year, and school is held in the open space in the center of the town. Few shops sell sweets and sticky orange juice in dusty packages to those who can afford. Can a mobile phone company reshape the lives of those in Barik Ab? I asked the owner of the shop where he got the sign board from. He didn’t remember. What counts for him is that it protects his shop from wind, sun and rain. So in one way, the mobile phone company does reshape lives. In this case just not through communication, but through a more hands on support.
Note: ROSHAN is one of the biggest mobile phone companies in Afghanistan, owned as far as I am aware by the AGA KHAN network.