Hidden at the back of a pharmacy in rural Bangladesh, its rickety shelves piled high with medicines and condoms, is a thriving mobile phone business. The only sign of any kind of technology is a 20-metre bamboo pole, topped with what looks like a television aerial.

But this is the workplace of Jamirun Nesa, one of 50,000 Bangladeshi women making a living as Grameen phone ladies, as they are known.

Villagers flock to her phone booth in the region of Gazipur, two hours from the capital Dhaka, to use a mobile to call relatives, friends or business associates, paying for calls by the minute.

Life-changing

Grameen phone ladies provide villagers with a vital link to services such as hospitals and to relatives both at home and abroad, in a country with the lowest number of phones in South Asia.

The scheme was set up by one of Bangladesh's largest non-government organisations, the Grameen Bank. It offers women low-cost loans to set up a mobile phone exchange in villages where there are few if any landlines.

"I started the business as there was no other phone nearby," said Jamirun. "I saw it as a good business opportunity."

The mobile has literally changed her life.

"I get more respect now," she says. "Before people in the village wouldn't talk to me but they do now. "I also have more respect from my husband and family."

"People who are thinking about committing suicide search Google for 'suicide.' Depending on what they find, they may or may not kill themselves. There are businesses that depend on the kind of results that searchers get from Google, but that's very secondary compared to searches like 'suicide.'"