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funky characters
I think you can be mixing up more than one issue here:
1) ability to transmit accented characters through GSM,
2) ability to display them using a cellphone,
3) ability to enter them using your cellphone.
Let's start wit the first one – it has been solved for quite some time – most phones have been supporting Unicode in text messages for quite some time now (especially Nokias, who I think did that as far as back in 2000). For example, I can send my friend a message with any Lithuanian character, and it's (almost) guaranteed to be processed correctly. There is a downside to this: since messages are sent in UTF-16, instead of squeezing 160 characters into single message, now you can only fit 70, thus making each letter cost you more.
I think it also requires support from the GSM operator, but I'm not an expert on that, and at least here in Lithuania, all operators support UCS messages.
Now the second issue: display. I just used Nokia PC Suite to paste text "šŠ ë ýïû ??????????" into a message and saved it as a draft. Only the Venda characters ("??????????") failed to be displayed (I got squares instead), meanwhile all others were perfectly correct. And don't forget that this phone targets Lithuanian market. If manufacturers would care to put support for different characters in their African variants, this would not be a problem.
And the last thing is entering those symbols – this is basically just a part of the phone's localization, easy to implement etc.
So, the actual problem is not GSM standards – it's in the market size, as you correctly noticed in the last paragraph of this post. However, problems like that actually aren't carved in stone. If you really want them solved, you may start by contacting local representatives of Nokia and other manufacturers. They surely have enough voice to promote the problem upstream. We tried it here, and it works. ;)