Cellular phones are a tool that can help women in Kenya achieve economic parity with men, according to the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Cherie Blair, a human rights lawyer, asked an audience gathered at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative to donate to a pilot project to give mobile phones for 4,000 business women in Kenya, an impoverished East African nation where 40-million people survive on less than $2 a day.

I have no doubt that Blair's heart is in the right place. Cell phone use in poor countries is beginning to transform life for the better, especially for women who usually have access to fewer resources than men.

In Kenya, for example, the practice of mobile banking gives people who wouldn't be able to access a traditional bank the ability to send and save money at their fingertips through text messaging.

Getting that type of economic power in to the hands of regular people, as opposed to big, slow, corruption-prone government programs, seems the best way to bring economic freedom to poor people locked in to poverty.

As Kenyan financial analyst Aly Khan Satchu said in a recent interview, cell phone banking "is bringing banking services to the un-banked and the poor. It's very empowering."

The only problem is that other groups around the world have found the empowering nature of mobile phones and are also in line for donations.

Programs already exist to collect cell phones for soldiers around the world and survivors of the Haitian earthquake, and even the Washington, D.C., police has a program to collect mobile phones for victims of domestic violence.

But luckily there are plenty of used cell phones out there, since the average American gets a new phone every 18 months. That means there is a steady supply of used mobile phones out there to bring a bit of relief to people who really need it.