&gt; They either have running water and some semblance of infrastructure like roads and power, or they don&#x27;t.<p>That really doesn&#x27;t apply to subsistence farming communities, for example in sub-Saharan Africa.  Population will be much more dispersed than in more urbanised developed countries.  You can have tiny farmsteads with a dozen people every 100 yards covering thousands of miles of apparently rural land.  Connecting mains water or electricity is impossibly expensive, but cell phones can still be widely used  though communal charging.