As someone who's spent the last 3 years in Africa, if there's one thing I learnt here is that if it can be fixed, they'll find a way to fix it.
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
Industrial dishwasher breaks down? You need to get an electrician there ASAP.
Cell phone breaks down? Throw it away and buy a new one.
Brazil has very low salaries for skilled workers, so it makes sense that it's cheap to find somebody to fix your phone.
Like 50%+ of all repairs are mobile phone repairs
It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.
Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.
Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.
Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.
But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.
You need to be able to fix microscopic flaws in soldering.
There are locked-down components that you cannot replace.
Here is a referenece: https://www.ipadrehab.com/index.cfm?Page=About
If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.
It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.
I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).
The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.
This was a village of 8,000 people.
Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...
Edit:
The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!
The "modern world supply chain" just doesn't go into africa much or at least not in a way that general commerce has easy access to.