London — The speed with which Facebook grew in Africa was startling but the story is now well-known. Latvian social network Eskimi is designed for low-end handset users and in a little over 18 months it has gone from nothing to 2.5 million users....

Pilot SMS-based service is sending individually tailored irrigation advice directly to cell phones to help Moroccan farmers save precious resources. For the first time in Morocco, messages like this, translated from French, are helping to shape good...