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Ghana's Digital Dilemma 134

Posted by michael from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
Some random reader writes: "Here is a fascinating Technology Review article about information technology in the West African nation of Ghana. It's an illustration of how new technology relies on, and can be hampered by, old technology. It's also a testament to the ingenuity of the people there who are working to maintain and update the country's IT infrastructure. These folks are working with a terrible phone system and frequent power outages, but they still manage to succeed."
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Ghana's Digital Dilemma More

Ghana's Digital Dilemma

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  • two way satellite (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JohnHegarty ( 453016 )
    Would this not be a problem were two way satellite really would be the best option. One connection would surly be cheaper than a whole town / village of 56k's...

    • Re:two way satellite (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 )
      I have two way satellite, Starband. The upstream is about the same speed as a 56K modem, the downstream is pretty fast (80-100kilobytes/sec). Latency is minimum 600ms.

      It's great for downloading large files, and chatting on IRC, and web browsing isn't too bad.
      It really sucks at certain things, like telnet or ssh, it's tedious to use those over a satellite link.

      It all depends on what you need it for, but satellites in their current high earth orbits are not for every application.
    • I don't think you are understanding just how poor places like this are. They need cheap solutions to problems that took years for other, far richer places to roll out. Also how do we expect places like this to adapt to new tech? A cyber cafe there is a guy with 1 56k line and four 200 Mhz computers. You seem to be talking like a wall street type looking at a bum and saying " You know what he needs? A million dollar stock portfolio."

  • Hmm (Score:1, Troll)

    by ins0m ( 584887 )
    Sounds almost like how things were here in Belgium, phone-wise. Unless you could manage to get in with a serious business that can afford decent connections, you were stuck with dialup that frequently dropped out. Lines went down, took months to come back up, and "the broadband revolution" didn't take hold until about a year ago when phone service became deregulated and Belgacom wasn't the monopoly.

    Sadly, there wasn't any "connivance" or corruption for the loss of phone service; more often than not, it's just sheer laziness and lack of work ethic. All hail free market powers! Huzzah for competition and allowance of innovation!

    Now, if only the fiber-optic lines didn't lock up between Antwerp and Paris; this is killing business.
    • Dunno, but broadband penetration in Belgium is among the highest in the world... There are a gazillion providers providing ADSL, and two or three cable companies. All in a country with only 10.000.000 inhabitants. Not bad, eh?

  • China (Score:1, Troll)

    by beswicks ( 584636 )
    I seem to remember an article in wired an while back sbout how china rolled out fiber to the entire country in the space of a few years.

    The just decided that it would be a good thing so they went for it, as the goverment owns everything they just got the railway workers to all the fiber, and hired an Ex-Pat from the US to run the thing.

    They now have villages with no schools or doctors but with massive IP connectivity, which they hope to use to solve the problems of no schools etc..

    It certainly puts companies like BT with there rubbish ADSL role out to shame.

    c.
    • I do say though, that it's interesting that China would do such a thing, considering how tightly they regulate viewable content. Still, you would have to wonder in Ghana's case if that would be such a wise move, considering that people are hijacking phone lines? Can you imagine how brutal it would get over fiber?

      Sounds to me like there is still a bit of old-school corruption and lack of basic infrastructure to roll the new out. You can build a brand new, $5 million mansion with a great cliff view, but if it's on the San Andreas, you're still gonna end up living in a hole.

      • The thing is that the govenment have rolled out a massive high speed network, it doesn't mean that they have to use it for Internet access, and if it is could be easily censorsed as they 'own' the whole sebang. But its interesting that they had the forsight to do it.

        I think it was mainly an attempt to help them 'catch-up' before they opened themselves upto world markets.

        One of the things it maybe used for is to compeate with the govement owned telephone company (whoops).

        Also its something that only a contry with a stucture like china could do. In a western country the cost would be massive, for china it was not very high (all being relative) because they were just redeploying staff.

        c.
  • One other issue that is prevalent is the cost of upgrading and deploying new infrastructure and then the theft of copper cables [suntimes.co.za].



    Seems like one innovative solution is to 'leapfrog' a generation of technology and just rollout wireless technology.



    http://www3.wn.apc.org/africa/resources.html [apc.org] for some interesting links.

  • Africa Rising (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @07:24AM (#3742720)
    Another interesting article is 'Africa Rising' by John Perry Barlow [wired.com] . His argument is that Africa will sidestep becoming an Industrial country and go straight to being an information economy. The article is a very interesting read -- recommended.

    Now, after I read that I talked with two relatives who had both worked in Africa (the Gambia and South Africa respectively) and they thought most of it was a bit hopeful. I guess all the problems created by colonization still exist and trouble the continent.

    • Well this assumes that the African nations can over come the social problems that plague them (build an infrastructure that works, education the population, remove corruption, slow the rate of AIDS, etc). Not saying that it's impossible, and it would be a truly wonderful thing, but I'm not certain that all the countries can pull it off. Certainly places like South Africa, Gambia, Ghana, and Egypt have the ability to move into an information economy, but are they ready socially for the changes that the move requires?

    • Re:Africa Rising (Score:2, Informative)

      by Kemal ( 160538 )
      If you are interested in helping Africa (in this case local businesses in Acra, Ghana) with your geek skills, take a look at geekhalla [geekhalla.org].

      It is a volunteer driven organisation where you help them close the "digital divide" gap.

    • I've worked in West Africa (Score:4, Interesting)

      by David Off ( 101038 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @08:32AM (#3743051) Homepage
      In 1996 I spent some time in the West African country of the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) working for a company installing Internet access at the Banque Africaine de Developpement (BAD [afdb.org]. Basically Ghana and the Ivory Coast are neighbours, the former and ex-British colony and the latter ex-French. It is quite interesting to compare the two and the legacy of colonialism.

      John Barlow's experiences in Ghana shouldn't be applied to all African countries. Kenya, although slowly being joked to death by corruption and the Ivory Coast had, at the time, relatively good infrastructure.

      The BAD was located in the business district of Abidjan, this is basically a separate part of the capital surrounded by lagoons. The district had a fibre optic network although the rest of the country was on copper wire. Indeed they had just bought a new system from France Telecom - which turned out to be old exchanges FT were ripping out in order to roll out ADSL in France. The Ivorians were not too happy about this and wondered whether some money had changed hands between FT and the communications minister, a common way of winning contracts in Africa. There was also some fibre optic up to the capital city.

      At the time there were at least two ISPs operating in the Ivory Coast: Africom and Africa On-line [africaonline.co.ci]. I remember going out to a shanty town in the suburbs to see one of the IT guys. In his house he had a Pentium 100 with Windows NT 4.0 installed, NT 4.0 had only been released a few weeks previously! He also had an account with Africom and I sent some Emails home from his house.

      However the local ISPs didn't have enough capacity for the BAD and we ended up installing a VSAT dish on the roof with a 2Mbps capacity, 384 kbps was dedicated to Internet use and the rest for teleconference links and LAN. This work was carried out by an company located in Abidjan and they had other contracts too.

      However all this contrasts badly with what was available in Ghana and I believe this has something to do with the more hands-on paternalistic attitude the French take to their former colonies. There is also a great game being played out in French speaking Africa where America is attempting to extend its sphere of influence with costs and benefits to the people... genocide in Rwanda, technical aid to the Ivory Coast. The project I worked on was indirectly funded by a US government department attached to the CIA!

      I travelled extensively in the country... by bus as car hire was too expensive and one either had to pay bribes to the frequent army road blocks or could be hijacked close to the porous Liberian border. Nearly all businesses and bars had telephones and it was never a problem to make a call within the country or from Abidjan to the world at large.

      Like John Perry Barlow I went to West Africa with a bit of the white colonialist bwana attitude but was humbled by the experience. The locals were well educated and extremely interested in technology and were surprisingly well informed about the Internet and its possibilities. They would hold their own in Western companies. Again this is somewhat the fault of the French who imposed their good educational system on the locals in the hope of turning them into good French citizens. There were a lot of Ghanaians at the BAD who said that this was a major benefit compared to English colonialism. In contrast the Ghanaians I met were well educated but often at great expense, either taking English 'A' levels in private school or by correspondance.

      If anyone on this group gets the chance to work in Africa I recommend it, it is a great experience and can only help understanding of this rich but troubled continent.

      David

      • The project I worked on was indirectly funded by a US government department attached to the CIA!

        As an aid professional this doesn't sound right to me. To what department are you referring?

        • Sorry the funding came from some CIA sources apparently. It was a US overseas aid department that set up the project. Can't tell you more, this is what the MD of the company told me at the time. The motivation, he claimed, was to displace the French as the dominant force in West Africa and the Internet was seen as the tool do achieve this.
    • I guess all the problems created by colonization still exist and trouble the continent.

      I was wondering which problems created by colonization you were referring to? While I don't agree with the actions taken by colonizers hundreds of years ago, I really question whether Ghana would be a thriving, modern society if the 'evils' of colonization had never happened.

      It is way too easy to blame the ills of modern day Africa on colonization. I guess "Blame Whitey" is all you can come with for intelligent, well thought out reasons for the problems.

  • The article talked about a Ghanaian man who was interested in IT and who was biding his time in a data entry position, gleaning as much technical knowledge as he could absorb. Along comes some bureaucrat from some NGO saying that data entry is a dead end position and wasting the many talents of the workers.

    I see this as completely backwards. Obviously they don't have either the infrastructure or the technical resources to be a computerized society, but they do have some investment in the form of Aetna putting in a somewhat technically advanced data center where locals can get a job entering data. They aren't going to be able to step up to bat at the IT table until they get the necessary infrastructure and educational systems in place.

    When these NGOs look at a country like Ghana and proclaim that investment isn't enough because more people aren't living at the same level as their Western counterparts, they are looking through their own paternal prizm which is in itself racist.
    • I fail to see any particular racism in this remark - it ir more the normal behavior of advocates. Their job is to work until the Ghanaians acheive parity with the West - a typing center is not Redmond. That is not to say it is not an important step on the road however - but the NGO's do have a substantial point about the infrastructure issue.

      As described, the typing center does little to contribute to the general good of Ghana, aside from marginally above average salaries, and a few incident economic contributions - and it has no lasting presence(as can be seen by the number of these centers elsewhere). The communications link is Satelite based - no benefit to those outside the building. The computer were most definitely not bought in Ghana - probably imported, with maybe a couple of onsite IT staff. The power for the building one would suppose is generator, given the Ghanain power issues - so they contribute some money for gas. In short - their is very little tying the Aetna contractors to Ghana - not the best basis for a growing community, but it is better than nothing

      • In the end it always boils down to simple economics. The reason that Ghana can't compete with the West is that they don't have the infrastructure necessary to tie their economy to the rest of the world. Labor is ridiculously inexpensive, but without the roads, plumbing, phone systems, etc. it is hard to utilize that labor in anything but the pitiful local economy.

        Geeks typically assume that this lack of infrastructure is the root cause, but this is not generally the case. Ghana could almost certainly attract capital. In fact, the article shows several examples of foreign individuals and companies that were willing to invest in Ghana. The problem is that the current political system is too corrupt to make large scale investments practical. As long as Ghana remains corrupt investing in the country is like pouring water into a sieve. The rich and privileged that control the system will derive all of the benefits, and the poor will stay in the same position that they currently are in. Even now the political leaders that are hoping for technology to enrich their nation are almost certainly looking at it with an eye towards controlling the bulk of those riches themselves. It's no wonder that entrepreneurs flee countries like Ghana. They know that if they do manage to make money the politicos will simply extort it from them.

        The investments featured in the story required very little capital. Aetna's little form industry is a prime example of this. With the relatively small expense of a satellite link and a couple hundred used PCs, they are able to save a substantial amount of money getting their forms filled out. If the government decides to expropriate the business then very little is lost.

        However, this type of business is not something you can build your economy on. For one thing, it is very easy to move this type of business. If problems do arise in Ghana the owners of the business can simply pack up and leave. Also the type of work offered is usually the easiest type of work to automate. As U.S. firms move more and more towards electronic forms obtaining electronic information from paper forms is going to become less important.

        In the end, long-term growth is only possible through reforming corrupt political systems and inviting the type of investment that builds the economy. Until the people running Ghana figure this out, they will continue in the same rut as they are now.

        • "In the end, long-term growth is only possible through reforming corrupt political systems and inviting the type of investment that builds the economy. Until the people running Ghana figure this out, they will continue in the same rut as they are now."

          You've just summed up the problem of Africa. The question is - how do we solve it? Certainly the foreign aid and intervention of the past 40 years had done little. So have the African rulers (Mugabe, Amin, Mobutu, etc.) The continent has barely treaded water for the past 40 years - and with the specter of AIDS, there is little chance many of them will move forward. Infrastructure improvements may not be the final solution - but they are a bandage - and a hope for the future. As more Africans realize, through contact with the rest fo the world, how their rulers are holding them back, perhaps they can change their future.

  • Power Outages, Generators and UPS, Oh my! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dlur ( 518696 ) <dlur AT iw DOT net> on Friday June 21, 2002 @07:37AM (#3742774) Homepage Journal
    But one afternoon, as Amaning helps a customer print a document, all of Cyberia's whiz-bang technology vanishes--when the electricity goes out. He tells the customers to be patient, and to stay at their computers. Then he runs down a long flight of stairs to the basement, kicks on a backup generator, dashes back upstairs and reboots all the PCs, one after another. That's not the end of it, though. Since the generator is too costly to run any longer than necessary, Amaning must constantly check on neighboring shops to see when their lights return. When power is restored, he tells his customers to halt their work again and shut down, while he goes back to the basement, turns off the generator and switches the café back to public electricity.

    I'd think with the frequency of power outages that they seem to have, it'd certainly be in their best interests to purchase or build their own(I believe there was a slashdot article on this recently, but the search utility here blows). They already have a generator as far as I can tell. If every computer were wired up to a UPS they could switch from line power to generator relatively seamlessly and limit the amount of damage done to PCs and OSes by improper shutdowns and power spikes/surges from their crappy power company's power.

    • Perhaps they could try to build their own breeder reactor [slashdot.org]. You know, you just need some duct tape and a some smoke-detectors. ;-)
    • And where will they get the money for these UPSs? Maybe MS will donate some as part of the settlement.
    • Dude,

      I've been to Ghana (my parents live there) and lived in Kenya for most of my life... UPSs are expensive! So are generators... this is a little inconvenient, and the damage to computers probably is minimal. Hey, if Win95 (that's what they mostly run there, on Pentium 133's) refuses to start up, just reinstall windows... Easy does it.

      The owner is pretty lucky to have a generator. Most Internet cafes don't. He will not have the funds to buy UPSses.

      Cheers!
    • That was a good comment.

      It's quite unfortunate that in many parts of Africa, power supply is nothing to write home about. Nevertheless, lots of people always come up with ideas on how to improve things - they improvise.

      Here in Nigeria, inverters sell like nothing. Unlike the usual UPS (with limited battery capacity), inverters (though certain models are quite bulky) have higher battery capacity. They are usually made from batteries of automobiles and trucks.

      I've seen particular inverter (using two truck batteries) that can power a system for 5 days. They are more expensive than UPSes but are more cost effective in the long run. It's cheaper to maintain and in some cases better to operate than generators.

  • Interested in helping out in Ghana? (Score:5, Informative)

    by slipandfall ( 580688 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @07:44AM (#3742798)
    My sister just spent four months in Ghana working for a volunteer program called Geekcorps [geekcorps.org]. The way it works is that you work a four month stint with a local company or NGO. One of the projects my sister did involved building the web site for the Ghanaian parliament. So, we're talking significant impact here.

    If you have tech skills, four months to kill and are looking to make an appreciable impact in the future of a nation, check it out.

    • One of my closes friends Jonathan Wong is coming back in a week after a four month stint in Ghana with Geekcorps. He says it is the time of his life and he can't wait to go back. My other friend was there for two months filming a documentary about him for his production company ( shameless plug [shoesfulloffeet.com]). John was also recently profiled in a Canadian National business magazine, you can read his Geekcorps profile here [geekcorps.org].

      If I had the time (and no fiancee) I would love to go. :)
    • I have a great interest on Geekcorps, I would like to know more about their insight experience in Ghana. I've read the site several times and I am just waiting to go at the end next year.
  • it seems that the US is the only decent place to be on the net, here in the UK we are a country full of 56kers, with have only 3 national telcos, and in most places you can only get 2 of theres, some only 1, our telephone system is reliable but we are tired of 56k, to get broadband is choosing the best of the worst

    from the earlier comment belgium seems to be kind of the opposite, they have a unreliable system but have tons of broadband providers

    ghana is being showered with technology but have a crap system and are basically screwed

    china has lots of fiber optics but no hospital schools

    now i know this opinion is stereotypical, but it seems to be an estimate of how the world is internet wise, i only have personal experience in the UK so im summarising everything else
    • it seems that the US is the only decent place to be on the net, here in the UK we are a country full of 56kers,

      Speak for yourself. I live in Barcelona, Spain and companies are falling over themselves to offer broadband services here. I have fast DSL for about £24 a month, and it's never failed. In other European countries the situation is similar. Perhaps it's just the UK that's backward.

      Funny. If you went back in time to the height of Thatcher's reign and told someone from the UK that in 15 years time Spain would have better telecomms and a better health service than the UK, people would have laughed.
    • Our broadband is as inexpensive and as available as our world cup victories.
    • Well, I wouldn't say this.
      There are other decent places, not my country, Austria, where I have cable, but cable means 128kbit (it's limited to that speed).

      But take a look at Scandinavia, especially Sweden, and this is the real paradise netwise, where even the US pales in comparison.
      A 10mbit line (both directions, no traffic limit) for 30 bucks a month. And those 10 mbit are not only on the paper, but reality.
      A friend of mine from sweden and me are running a server on that line (a 10mbit line is a terrible thing to waste, why not get a Terabyte of pr0n traffic per month *g*) and while looged in via ssh I have seen downloads up to 1.1 megabyte/s.

      Add awesome health care, high tech everywhere, and you've got the perfect country. Truly, Sverige är mycket vackert. If the booze wasn'T that expensive, I'd move!
    • Acutally, broadband in Canada is much better too. It is cheaper then american broadband, and readily available in the populated areas.
      Not only that, but the government implemented a program to ensure that all libraries in the country have public access. Not only that, but some communites, like mine have implemented there own community networks, to ensure fast reliable connections.

  • The Digital Dilemma -- Our Exploitation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vengie ( 533896 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @07:48AM (#3742817)
    I think the most important point that /.'ers should take from this article is in the second page.
    "Local Ghanaian supervisors do much the same. Thomas Fabyan, smartly dressed in black suede shoes, khaki pants and a pressed white shirt buttoned to the neck, prods and cajoles his typists to push their limits. Fabyan sits in the corner of a large open room, with tall windows that overlook the city and give glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean. Along with a colleague, Fabyan is responsible for 275 employees who work over three shifts, round the clock. These typists are paid piece rate: the more records they complete, the greater their pay. The fastest workers can earn nearly three dollars a day, while the slowest take home little more than a dollar, still slightly higher than the pay of a local policeman."
    Essentially, we are giving Ghana better technology so we can find yet another way to leverage minimum wage differentials across the globe to increase the profits of an American Company. (Aetna) What are these "high tech" workers using their technology for? They are processing scanned documents into a database; They are doing outsourced data entry work! What normally would go for (at least) 6.00 an hour (more in most places) in the states is happening at _dollars per day_. This has nothing to do with "giving technology to the masses" -- it is a corporate strategy to get more "bang for their buck" -my US $0.02 (In Ghana thats $0.000000002)
    • Fine, I'll bite.

      while the slowest take home little more than a dollar, still slightly higher than the pay of a local policeman

      It's kind of hard to be exploiting someone if they're willingly doing the job - especially if you're paying them more than they would otherwise earn. This is why the so-called sweatshops in Southeast Asia are so popular among the workers there - they get paid a fortune compared to what they would otherwise earn (yes, mothers and fathers in Indonesia, etc. actually dream that someday their kids will make clothes for Nike!)

      Aetna's not exploiting anyone, it's a mutually beneficial situation. Everyone wins, with the possible exception of the person in Oklahoma or wherever that would have been paid the $6/hr (they should work at Walmart anyway, better pay + benefits).

      • I honestly wasn't meaning to troll.
        There was nothing I wanted you to "bite" on. My point was, Ford Motor Co singlehandedly advanced living conditions when it set its wage at 5$ a day. It was an unprecedented move and it raised the living conditions of ALL its workers. Henry Ford was a brilliant industrialist. He knew that if he gave his workers something far better than they'd ever seen or ever gotten anywhere else, he'd reap the rewards.
        Again, corporate America seeing only the short term profits. What if they paid all these people 2$ a day + bonuses for piece work? That would be _more than double_ the police man's salary. Plus, since when have government officials been "highly paid?" New York City police officers (and I have 3 friends who currently are) don't exactly make a fortune. If nothing else, we should take a lesson from our own history.

    • Re:The Digital Dilemma -- Our Exploitation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @09:32AM (#3743448)
      What normally would go for (at least) 6.00 an hour (more in most places) in the states is happening at _dollars per day_. This has nothing to do with "giving technology to the masses" -- it is a corporate strategy to get more "bang for their buck" -my US $0.02 (In Ghana thats $0.000000002)

      You have completely misunderstood the difference in currencies. In the US, you pay $4 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. A cup of coffee in a third world nation costs a fraction of a cent. People aren't working 8 hrs a day to afford a single Big Mac, in their local currency, they are well off! The reason for this is that their currencies aren't "hard", they are volatile, and hence FX market participants who hold hard currencies (USD, GBP, CHF, EUR and JPY) are relucant to exchange them for the local currency. The law of supply and demand means that you can buy a lot of local currency for a small amount of hard currency. Why would you want to? Either you want to spend some money in that country, or you are in that country and want to buy something outside of it. Since that doesn't happen much, relative to the rest of the global economy, hard currencies command a premium.

      You are also forgetting that these workers would otherwise be unemployed, and that they are happy to have the work. They have changed the weakness of their currency from a burden to an advantage by exploiting the comparative purchasing power of their economy. This scenario is win-win: the locals are employed and have revenue coming in, the multinationals get their work done for a lower cost, and can therefore provide consumers in the West with cheaper products.

      Eventually, as has happened in India, local tech skills will develop, and they will move up the value chain from data entry, to technical support, to programming, to complete systems development. Then you will find that these "poor, exploited" people are competing on a level playing field with Americans, and if they manage their economy skillfully, they will be able to do it while still remaining cheaper.
      • I am sick of hearing the win-win line of approach. What about the fact that it takes low level american jobs and exports them for profit. Profit pocketed by a large corporation in lieu of the workers in the US who are now jobless.
        It may be win-win, but what about the fact that it is also lose-lose? Lose to the citizens of Ghana who are being paid less than their services are really worth and lose to the American/Canadians who are unemployed.
        (i didn't really like my karma anyway) *sigh*
        • Incorrect on the following two points:

          1) "citizens of Ghana who are being paid less than their services are really worth".
          Actually, as has been already explained by previous posters, they are being paid at least as much (or probably a lot more) than their services are really worth. IANAE[conomist], but any compensation [ worth of labour resource ], has to be viewed relative to Cost-of-living, not in absolute value.
          If I work as a data entry here in US, I will probably earn enough to have a very modest living with no luxuries. In their economy, they do the same exact job and probably earn way above average salary - and thus can purchase more in terms of necessities of life than I would on the same job in NYC.

          2)"lose to the American/Canadians who are unemployed".
          How are American/Canadians who are unemployed part of this equasion? Neither Ghanans[sp?] who do the work, nor the companies that shift jobs, have absolutely any obligation - legal, moral or otherwise - to employ every single person they can within their [insert locale of appropriate scale - neighbourhood,town,city,state,country)].
          There may be economically beter to keep jobs local on smaller scale - after all, if you don't employ people locally but sell locally, they would have less money to spend on your product. On a national scale, this logic no longer applies with the same strength either.

          -DVK

        • I am sick of hearing the win-win line of approach.

          I suppose you can remain ignorant if you would rather.

          What about the fact that it takes low level american jobs and exports them for profit. Profit pocketed by a large corporation in lieu of the workers in the US who are now jobless.

          Actually what it does is free up skilled American workers for more meaningful jobs than reading scanned documents and filling in the blanks of an electronic form. America currently has very low unemployment, most of the people that are currently unemployed here are not interested in a data entry job that pays $6.00/hour and probably doesn't have benefits. They would rather collect Welfare. So American entrepreneurs replaced about 100 American data entry workers with a handful of American technical workers (do you think the data gets to Ghana and back without some help), and a pile Ghanese typists that are now earning much more than they would have without the foreign investment.

          It may be win-win, but what about the fact that it is also lose-lose? Lose to the citizens of Ghana who are being paid less than their services are really worth and lose to the American/Canadians who are unemployed.

          Everyone gets paid less than they are worth. That's why they are hired. If you were to suddenly make more then you are worth you would lose your job. That's basic economics at its simplest. The beautty of economics is that everyone feels like they are getting a good deal. Otherwise they wouldn't go to work the next day but would instead find something else to do. The folks in Ghana are happy to have jobs that most Americans wouldn't take on a bet. If Aetna had to pay American wages for this work, then they wouldn't go through all of the expense of setting up a network that spanned half the globe.

          The fact of the matter is that it isn't the foreigners that are holding Ghana back, it's the rampant corruption in the local politics. If Ghana would clean up its political system then capital would flow into their country and raise the standard of living across the board. Unfortunately currently the only people that can really get ahead in Ghana are the corrupt politicians.

        • Lose to the citizens of Ghana who are being paid less than their services are really worth and lose to the American/Canadians who are unemployed.

          So how come with all this outsourcing, unemployment in the U.S. has been at a consistently fairly low level? If your job can and will be outsourced, get trained in something else.

          Profit pocketed by a large corporation in lieu of the workers in the US who are now jobless.

          Typically it lowers the cost. Check out the price of cheapo t-shirts at Target and the like. There's no way they could be made in the U.S. for that money, even if the corporation took 0 profit. Most of the savings get passed on to us consumers.

          But if you think the Ghanans deserve more, why don't YOU give more? It's pretty easy to claim someone ELSE should be more generous...
    • Three points of intrest - Out of all of ACS (Aetna) - Ghana has the lowest error rate of workers. The police man would also recive Facilitaion Fee's from the general population. Also the opperations like ACS draw good workers that the country needs to do data processing!!! It is rumared that a couple of PHD's are working there.
    • Heres a question for you: What reduces poverty more: Giving somone a job or giving somone a handout? The answer is giving somone a job. Even if its for what to us would be less than what we wwould make panhandling, in Ghana even 1 dollar a day is more than somone would make being a policeman. In Ghana $3 a day is a _GOOD_ job. And you know what, as more companies move over there the wages and standard of living go up and demand for american goods and services increases. You cant buy a TV if you cant even feed your family. Having jobs is the way to get people out of poverty. Its basic supply and demand. Demand for jobs goes up, supply goes down wages go up.

  • One-Way Satellite (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ShaggusMacHaggis ( 178339 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @08:01AM (#3742879) Homepage
    Internet in Africa is flaky at best. I work on a project called RANET [ranetproject.net] . It is an effort of serveral partners (ACMAD [acmad.net] , NOAA [noaa.gov], and USAID [usaid.gov] to name a few) to make climate and weather related information more accessible to rural populations and communites.

    We use the Worldspace [worldspace.com] Satellite system to send climate information in HTML format (it's a 1 way digital radio system, that when hooked up to your computer, acts as a modem). The villages get the information, then in turn translate it to the local language. We have set up low power FM radio stations and then they broadcast the updated data over the radio waves. Wind up radios made by Freeplay [freeplay.org] have been given to the villages, and they can tune in to the broadcast, and find out if some of the local watering holes have dried up for example.

    I was over in Niamey, Niger a few months ago training users from Ghana, Niger, Chad, and other african countries how to code HTML so then those local countries can upload their climate information to us so we can send it over the satellite system.

    We ran into some interesting problems concerning the interent. The local internet provider charges by time spent on the internet. Well, since they understand they can make some money by doing this, they actually slowed down everyones internet speed so they would be on the net longer, and be charged more. When a local person complained about this, not only did they turn off his phones and internet at his workplace...they turned off his phones and internet at HIS HOUSE.

  • Found the problem... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MarvinMouse ( 323641 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @08:12AM (#3742938) Homepage Journal
    convinced Ghana's government that the satellite would not steal business from the country's national phone company

    Obviously the government is more concerned about holding the monopoly on the telecom then providing quality service to its citizens. I hate to admit it, but when a government get involved with an economy, it always seems to go this way. There is really no easy way to control an economy and still have quality service. (This happens in a laissez-faire economy as well, when rock-solid monopolies form.)

    Basically, if they want better service, they are going to have to deregulate and let in other telecoms, or really get in gear and start developing better business plans. Otherwise they will continue to have this level of quality in Ghana.

    Just my opinion of course. :-)

    • This happens in a laissez-faire economy as well, when rock-solid monopolies form.

      True, but even a monopoly will eventually have to care about its customers or its business will be suffer negative effects. Some examples:

      • Companies moving servers from MS to Linux/Unix (a small but growing number right now, but MS is shitting in its pants to stop it)
      • People dropping standard phones and using wireless phones instead
      • People switching from Cable TV to satellite

      Granted, it took awhile for these competing technologies to develop, but still, they will force monopoly companies to improve service to make it worthwhile for customers to stay with them. One could argue that they would not have been developed if the monopoly provider of the service had been "good enough" so that there would be no desire for a customer to switch in the first place.

      You're absolutely right about government getting involved in running services such as telecom. The lack of a profit motive will ensure that the phone and power networks in developing countries will never evolve to a reliable, stable and usable state. Of course, there are other, more significant problems as well in these countries. The government's running of the phone and power company is most likely a major distraction to its need to solve these other more pressing issues. By privatizing these entities, more resources can be focused on improving things like education, roads, sewage, etc.

  • My Friend's Experience in Ghana (Score:3, Interesting)

    by omnirealm ( 244599 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @08:23AM (#3743001) Homepage

    My old college roommate went to Ghana, Africa last summer to film a documentary [208.186.103.46] on the Burulli Ulcer epidemic. He was there for about 6 weeks, and we made plans to communicate over the Internet. He occasionally went into an Internet cafe in Accra to get to a web site I had set up with a PHP chat server. I hacked the code to send a notification to my cell phone when he happened to get to it, and I would run to a lab to jump in on the conversation. I also set up a web cam so he could see me while we chatted.

    He described both the bandwidth and the latency as horrific. When the chat session refreshed on my screen (about a second), it could take several minutes to refresh on his. Not only that, but they have constant rolling blackouts in Accra, and so he would occasionally suddenly disappear from the chat room when the power went off in the cafe.

    However, from the problems my friend saw in Ghana during his visit, I would say that the telecommunications infrastructure is the least of their worries.

    • The reason for all that is very simple... The developed economies (US+EU) dont provide fair exchange on communications trafic and that just means that for a communication to go to or to come to African countries, the African must pay full value of the communication as there isn't any kind of "split-cost" and "compensation" schema in place... Talks about a more fair communication trade rules have been made but... hadn't produced much from what i could accertain...

      I think African Countries should roll out they own communication infraestructure and charge everyone for interconnecting it...

      Cheers...
  • Plug

    At Wizzy Digital Courier [wizzy.org.za] we are putting together a system that can deliver Internet content in third world countries.

    Read the site for all the details, but in a nutshell it implements bandwidth by carrying data physically on a hard drive instead of passing it down a telephone line.

    Using 802.11b wireless ethernet cards at either end, a vehicle that makes regular trips to rural areas - be it to deliver people, beer, or bread - can become a conduit for Email and web content.

    It uses Linux, UUCP for the transport, and WWWoffle [demon.co.uk] web proxy. The proxy allows requests made at a remote school to be passed back to a well-connected server, which scrapes pages, and passes the content back to back-fill the remote proxy.

    Cheers, Andy!

  • worked in Ghana for five years - mostly up country (out in the rain forest living in a terrapin hut) building bridges for Mabey and Johnson [mabey.co.uk]. When he made it back to the capital, Accra, we could exchange email pretty straightforwardly and without any massive delays. This was back in '98 or so. He really loves the country, in fact he married a Ghanian woman so he's going to be going back pretty regularly for the rest of his life I guess.

  • I'm appauled! (Score:2, Funny)

    by dmarien ( 523922 )
    ...but they still manage to succeed

    Where is the spoiler warning!? The ending is given away right on the front page, too! Now i'm not going to want to see this... erm...

  • Ghana is not a black hole of Tecnology (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sun2day ( 587146 ) <jamespagetemp&yahoo,com> on Friday June 21, 2002 @08:48AM (#3743134)
    In his article G. Pascal Zachary got quite a few of the facts are wrong, and he totally misses the point. Far more important than an American Insurance company having people type for them is the fact that Unileaver, Guinness, Mobil, Total, and most of the other Global Companies that operate in Ghana - use software that has been written and developed in Ghana.

    Where the figure of only 50 coders in Ghana comes from is a wrong - I personally know more programmers than that are based in Ghana. Some are good - some are bad and some are brilliant - in fact two of them are some of the best in world that I have ever worked with. In fact one education faculty produces about 2000 graduates a year in IT related fields.

    I have no idea where he came up with the price of $1,000 to install a phone line - when I was last in Ghana at the start of this month - Ghana Telecoms where not charging for installation.

    While mobile phone calls are unreliable they are not 10 times more expensive than the US - they are in fact about 1 cent more per minute than what I am paying in the UK.

    The high costs are there for international calls- a minute from Ghana to the US will cost you 80 cents - from the UK to the US 3 cents. This makes it very difficult for the local software houses to get business from abroad.

    Yes power is a problem (But is that much different for California)and that is why myself and a group of other African programmers (Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa) are starting a new standard called Tropical Tolerance. This is to set a standard for Software and Hardware that will work under poor power - it useless having a large database if it takes 9 hours to recover from a shutdown - do not try sending multi-media files over the network, or any form of software that relies on a WAN - make it easy to use.

    In the whole this article reinforce the concept that Africa is just a black hole.
    • The writer may have been scaling things to give an "effective cost" to the average person there, given the much lower wages typically earned there. Not sure if this is true, just advancing it as a possibility.
    • I must second the heading: Ghana is definitely not a black hole. I am a Ghanaian and have lived in Ghana till two years ago when I came to the US for college. The article seems to be talking of a time long gone. I can say that seven years ago, this article would definitely be true. Power outages are not so rampant. I lived two blocks from Cyberia and the US Embassy is a block down. The US embassy being so close to us ensured that we hardly ever had any power outages even during the times when the whole country was going through power rationing.
      The phone system is definitely not that bad. The dropped calls he is talking about are calls from ground lines to mobile phones which as you can see from his statistics are definitely clogged. I have been trying to reach a cell phone for a whole week now(well, calling fom the US does not help either).
      I am not even going to talk about programmers, I can say for sure that there a lot more than stated and some are very good. You only need to local at locally produced software to convince yourself of that.

      Africa and definitely Ghana is not a black hole
  • From the article:

    "There's no way we can raise our standard of living rapidly without IT," Somuah says.

    I wondered who the target market for the Segway was... apparently it's Ghanaians earning a dollar a day. Good for them!

    --saint

  • Internet cafes in 1996 (Score:3, Informative)

    by toxcspdrmn ( 471013 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @08:59AM (#3743213) Homepage
    "Two years ago, Accra lacked a single Internet café. Now the city boasts more than 600 of them,"

    Not quite true. I was working in Ghana from 1995 to 1998 putting science equipment and Win 3.1 486 machines into schools to provide local science resource centres [207.96.11.140] for the Ministry of Education and there was public internet access (albeit mostly for ex-pats) at a German-owned bar called Aquarius in Accra.

    By 1998 there were several internet cafes in Ghana including ones in Navrongo and Tamale in the much poorer north of the country.

    I had a dial-up account (my first) with Africaonline [africaonline.com.gh] which was pretty much only usable for email.

  • Often the real problem is insufficient competition (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mike3411 ( 558976 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @09:12AM (#3743313) Homepage
    I think one of the major obstacles for advancement and development in Ghana, and similar countries, is the suppresion of free trade. In a free market, one would assume that if any given company (phone service, power service, isp, etc.) is failing to provide its customers with a reasonable service, the customers will take their business elsewhere. The article mentions "the country's national phone company", indicating that it has a controlled monopoly. IMHO, it is the creation of a dynamic and free market that is most important to long term and widespread technological and economic prosperity. Of course, the same kind of thing exists in many places in the US, the company we got cable tv from had poor signal quality, atrocious customer support, and high rates. Once the service was deregulated and other companies sprang up, we switched to one of them, and now pay 30% for more channels, better quality, and superb customer support.
    • In Ghana there are two local phone companies - one Ghanain Ghana Telecom and the other American Westel. Westel is next to useless - modems will not even work over it. Everything is being privatized including Well Water - thanks to the US crtl World Bank and the IFC. Farmers in Ghana pay more in taxes than they get back unlike US farmers. And all tarifs are lower than 20%. Unlike the US.
      • Not forgetting that Westel failed to meet their contract and now being fined by the government. You should also read the The US Assistant Secretary of Commerce recent statement about it during his visit to Ghana a few days ago. Here is the link to the
        story [ghanaweb.com]

        And maybe the president of Ghana's outrage and reply [ghanaweb.com]
    • Free market is a very nice thought if you can get bread in the table every day!

      Get real... how can you expect to compare a deregulation in a developed countrie like US and a thrieving African countrie like Ghana?

      Free market is nice, but isn't the solution for everything!

      Cheers...

      P.S.- Specially because for it to work you must warrantie free access to the market and a even playing ground for everyone in the long run... something that today is absent in most of developed economies!
  • After I finished highschool, I worked at this [ucc.co.tz] internet service provider in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This was from January to June 1998.

    Basically I agree with the author of this article that while the IT infrastructure is sorely lacking, internet usage is more widespread in major African cities than commonly thought. It was very hard to get a new phone line from the local telephone monopoly [psrctz.com] and those that did exist were not reliable. Power cuts were a constant problem.

    However, anyone with a phoneline and PC could get connected for about 30$ a month and we had plenty of customers to keep us busy. In the 4 years since Internet use has fairly exploded. When I was home in December 2000, I had no problems keeping up my school e-mail and slashdot from the local internet cafes.

    The infrastructure is still sorely lacking, but there is gradual steady improvement. Hopefully they will deregulate the telephone services, and the planned fibre optic ring [bbc.co.uk] will be completed.

    Also to those who will inevitably say that "Africa doesn't need IT, it needs food," that is a remarkably short sighted position. The story clearly shows that there is a hunger and a need among the local people to make use of the internet to educate themselves and to create job opportunities. Poverty is more likely to be reduced with the help of the internet than without it, particularly in a global economy that is increasingly about the generation, management and manipulation of information.
    • Also to those who will inevitably say that "Africa doesn't need IT, it needs food," that is a remarkably short sighted position.

      It's also profoundly ignorant, but what can you expect of people who dismiss the entirety of college education because it doesn't necessarily equate to higher paychecks in the IT field.
  • I recently spent four months in Ghana attending the University of Ghana located in Accra. Since I have some experience there, I can personally attest to many of the claims that have put forth both in the article and in the responses.

    First of all, the cost of things. One dollar is about 7000 cedi. Produce was between 500 and 1500 cedis, fresh bread was between 2000 and 5000 cedis, etc. The cost of living was much lower than what we know in the US. Furthermore, many families eat together so dividing income by each person is a bit misleading.

    However, there is a distinct class divide. Upper Class Ghanaians (and foreigners -- mainly from Europe) dress, shop, and dine at different places. They can easily afford the Internet Cafes. At University, there were several internet hubs (at least six that I can recall), whose prices ranged from pre-paid ($1 for an hour), to Balme library which was much less (but you couldn't check your email.)

    To catergorize the internet cafes as being out of reach of most Ghanaians is pretty extreme. My friends at school whether rich or poor could use it, if they chose to. Many had little interest in it.

    I should take this time to point out that a significant amount of web-surfing is looking at pornography. At least at the University level. Furthermore, Ghanaians tended to get into large groups and surf together. I agree that it was usually the hostel Ghanaians (rich, prilivedged kids) who were surf daily, but a lot of Ghanaians would stop in at the cafes -- which were all located near the cafe/bars on campus.

    Power Outages are awful, but not as frequent as in the past. Ideas for web-designing companies in Ghana are somewhat silly, because the market is so small. The post-college employment field is virtually barren, with only large European banks doing much of anything. This is a reason that many students attend school until they are 25-26-27 (but with new reform, A-level education is finishing sooner.)

    Now, the comment about there only being 50 coders that were compotent was completely ludicrious. First of all, Kumasi is where the engineering school is so many of the more talented computer engineers would be there. I do not doubt that Accra is not a technologically enhanced city, but you have to realize the resources that do exist are largely being poured into private hotels and elaborate supermarkets (Max-Mart) which do not address the average Ghanaian.

    Also, compared to Burkina Faso or dozens of surrounding Sub-Saharranian countries, the standard of living, low corruption rate (now that JJ is gone), and educational opportunities greatly surpass them. Ghanaians are probably wary of falling into the fate of Nigeria -- chaos.

    I was interested in the part about Kufour in the article. I remember him visiting the Cadberry people when they came. Ghana and them have been working together for 100 years -- cocao crops, and whatnot. I like Kufour -- he brings a lot of hope in the Northern region with him.

  • Internet in Africa (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fruey ( 563914 )
    There are a number of issues in Africa, not least that telecoms companies want traditional telephone revenues (the great cash cow in the sky) and want to limit IP telephony. Telephony revenue is indirect taxation. Taxes cannot be levied in third world countries, but telephone bills can, 'cause you get cut off it you don't pay.

    The infrastructures won't be improved if telephony works OK, because the telco doesn't care. You're still talking low percentage penetration of the market for Internet. I'm in Morocco, a relatively advanced nation in North Africa, and yet things move very slowly indeed. Add a bit of corruption (recently it was discovered the CNSS, which is the social security equivalent, had been pilfered by its management for thirty years and billions of dollars).

    Wireless is often also controlled by the state. Each country has it's own advantages and disadvantages. I've seen good things in Tunisia, Haiti, Malawi, Rwanda and Eritrea, but as many bad things like crappy copper links to know that there is a long long way to go. Don't forget how political Internet is, censorship and government fear of radicals means they can't embrace Internet with open arms. Information is what is most important, you can't have people criticising the incumbent powers that be on a medium funded by US, Japanese and European budgets!

    So all those of you in the US who've never left Uncle Sam, come by here and see what it's like before you cry into your Starbucks when your internet is ONLY at 100kbps today.

  • while the story is positive on the entrepreneurship of the people there, I really do think that there are some seriously negative things in there too...

    A large part of the story is about the data entry companies that are located in the capital. Isn't the way they work there called exploitation?

    While the people are paid a bit more that the average salary in the country, you must take into account that the average salary there is a sum of all salarys, divided by the people that are in the 'working' age group. I think it shouldn't be said that the unemployment rate in Ghana is astronomic. They aren't paid that much after all.

    And do you really think that the American companies that are employing those people wouldn't be get another company in a country where they would have to pay less? The only reasons why they're in Ghana is that the official language is English (unlike cheaper countries like the Phillipines or China) so that the people there can read the papers easily, and that it actually is a relatively stable third world country.

    The whole method of working sounds just like the way companies like Nike and IBM work in the Phillipines:
    Pay your workers just a little more than the average salary ( so that they come in herds, and can be easily exploited, with a lot of potential replacement workers), pay them per piece of work done, make them work in shifts (6 or maybe even 7 days a week), and get some local supervisors who are just a bit ambitious (= no mercy) to supervise them.

    I think that most of you will agree that this isn't the correct way to help the poor people of the world.

    If we would get those people (not just Ghana, the whole 3rd world) enough food, water and (very important!!) good education, they will close the digital divide themselves after some time.

    And maybe everyone will stop hating the West someday too?
  • I'm an American that grew up in Ghana. This article is entirely correct. I lived in Tamale, a small city in the northern part of Ghana. The phone system in Ghana is really bad. To get online I would set my computer to dial 10 times with a 10 second delay between retries. During the busiest times (8-10am and 4-6pm), it was nearly impossible to call anywhere. You could hit redial on your phone for 30 minutes and then finally get through.

    But even with the problems, it is a big advancement from the way things were 10 years ago. It used to be that in order to call the US from Tamale, you needed a HAM radio, extraordinary atmospheric conditions, and a HAM in the US to call on his phone and patch you through. Even then you had to talk in turn and say "Over" to let the other person talk. Now you can just pick up your phone and dial anywhere in the world directly. Calling out of Ghana is a lot easier than calling into Ghana. Anyway it all comes down to money. You have to have the money to buy the phone line and repair it when it breaks. You have to pamper the telephone repair people by bringing them cold water and cookies. =) And you must have the money to pay your bill when it does come (every 1 - 6 months).

    Poverty is the biggest problem in Ghana. The economy is very weak. Because it is so hard to make money in Ghana, most of the educated people leave. If you go to the US Embassy in Accra, you will see the hundreds of Ghanaians sitting on benches outside, each holding their papers and number, waiting for their immigration interview.

    When the most educated people leave a nation, the education of the children suffers. Ghana will eventually rise out of poverty. It will rise up and become the shining example of West African prosperity. But this will only happen when the children are educated. Education will bring jobs, and jobs will bring prosperity. But you need money for good education. This is the catch 22 that takes time to overcome.

    I think that organizations like the Geek Corps, Peace Corps, Opportunity International, and the many other organizations provide an invaluable helping hand to less industrialized societies. Also the companies that provide those $3/day jobs are neccessary too.

    -Mike_L
    (All winter I longed for the warmth of West African Sun. Now that it's summer I long for the daily cool rains.)
  • Well, if they want to be Africa's answer to Silicon Valley, at least they have the rolling blackouts....
  • The problem with most developing countries is not directly tied to technology or infrastructure, it is law and legal/political culture. See The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else [amazon.com].

    Many developing countries have a lack of well defined property rights. The book notes that the poor in under-developed countries have assets, but that their real property is often owned informally, and thus cannot be used to generate capital. As a result, the crucial role of real property is simply absent in under-developed countries.
  • I am going to stop bitching about my HS having had an 8088 lab while PIIIs where out.

    And I thought public schools had it bad. . . . at least the power functioned and the Internet was up most of the time!

    Hey, you know if somebody opened up some small white color secretarial positions down there but paid just 1/2 US rates (say $5 an hour or so) then the economy there would skyrocket and the company would still save a lot of money. . . . as opposed to the pricks that are paying ~$3 a day, grrrr.
  • Nana Frimpong [novica.com] is the chief carver for the King of the Ashanti. His works are sold on NOVICA.com [novica.com], the company I work for. NPR [npr.com] ran a piece on Ghana and Nana Frimpong which discusses many of the issues in this article. NOVICA has a local office in Accra. Our connection to the internet there is through a relatively expensive radio uplink.

    Steven Klotz
    Web Developer
    NOVICA.com

  • Ghana is NOT Poor or Backwards... (Score:3, Informative)

    by pamzella ( 563247 ) on Friday June 21, 2002 @01:47PM (#3745075)
    ...like this article makes it sound. I spent 4 months in Ghana in the spring of 1998. I sent email to my friends and family from the university libraries, and get email from the friends that I made there all the time.

    Ghana's electricity problems stem from the U.S. bastard baby, the World Bank. The World Bank thought it would be brilliant to build dams in Ghana for hydropower, creating Akosombo Dam and Lake Volta, which is a fantastic breeding pool for mosquitos carrying malaria and yellow fever. Ghana's northern half is in the Sahara Desert!! The only thing for sure in Ghana is sunshine, so if it was you or me there, we would have been in there installing solar power everywhere. The libraries had older DOS computers for the most part, but those old workhorses are better adept at handling the unexpected power outages (and planned ones, when the dam runs out of water) than my new G4 would be. The Geekcorps has been in Ghana for a while, so clearly they see potential.

    Go there and find out for yourself what an amazing place Ghana is, delicious food, unbelievably friendly people. I was there during the biggest drought/electricity crisis in several years, and they just had rotating blackouts no different than my native CA did a year ago. Water had to be trucked in to be spread around, but you wouldn't believe how I could make a bucket of water last when I learned from my friends there. Ghanaians aren't all living in horrendous poverty. They do know how to make do with less than Americans, and really, it's not a reflection of them but of our excess. And they've got more culture than in all our bio-tech labs combined.

  • zachary spoke to some wrong people. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is really funny. I am reading slashdot (have been reading it for years and boom! an article about Ghana.

    I am an IT Professional living and working in Ghana and I know almost everyone mentioned in the article - your man, G Zachary is way off. He got the wrong sources. Tried to make a good story but got the wrong sources.

    The Somuah guy is not reviewing the national IT policy. He is sitting on it. This document was created almost a year ago!!! How do I know ? I helped draft it.

    The guy who said that there were only 50 coders in Ghana who could work without supervision couldn't recognize a coder even if it bit him on the arse and said "C?"

    But seriously, there are a lot of opportunites in IT here and there are a hell of a lot of good people from all walks of life who are making a difference, ignoring negative perceptions and bad press.

    We have world class C++ and Java coders, basically all the ISPs are using Linux somewhere behind the scenes. Some of the Open Source projects that you see mentioned on slashdot and others that you don't see mentioned get contributions from programmers in Ghana.

    We also have some Indian companies coming in to train people and they just teach half-baked Microsoft stuff. I have to reject about five of them each month when they come looking for a job.

    Why ? The damn training outfit thinks we are so far behind that they produce low quality graduates who *keep* us from going forward.

    This is the technology we import. Another problem is with donor agencies. Big contracts are all awarded to external firms yet there are local people who can do a better job. You have geekcorps coming in, feeling good - like they are helping the poor Africans. I never yet met the geekcorp guy or gal who could kick *my* ass on technology. And I've worked with some of their best people ...

    Someone here posted that their friends were helping Ghana's parliament because they designed a web site. Hell no!! There are Ghanaians who could do way better than what was done there. If geekcorps is coming in, then they better bring some high level expertise else we are wasting each other's time.

    There is a really interesting comment from sun2day who wrote about Tropical Tolerance and called the article an attempt to make Africa look like a black hole. That was the most realistic post I saw on this topic.
  • I am really interested in this article since Ghana specially is the main focus of the Geekscorps [geekscorps.org]. Regarthless of if its true or not, I am usually very skeptick when I read this types of articles that describe a country so deep into poverty. I have visit many countries where reality is far from the perception of the media specially in US. I have found that they just narrow their reports to the poor areas and local problems and blow them up as if the whole country was run that way.

    Assuming that the article is realistic enough, then I would had to say that Ghana is just a boom market. With low infraestructure it gives new structures to been builded from scratch, making technology re-freshen.

    The domestic IT market for Ghana is rather booming since the least you need to worry about is IT saturation. This makes schools and institutions boom if the pricing is right and also develop profitable infraestructure. If the article was accurate that business neeeded to pay $1000 for telephone then it would be easier to afford wireless technology or satelite telephony through communal services and micro-financing programs.

    In the case of the programmer mentioned in the article, some things just dont fit. If he had Dell laptop, then he should be wealthy enough to buy a white-box for 1/3 of the price. Which means that he is wealthy enough to download e-books for 10 bucks a piece. And since he is on the internet, he can get on programing user group forums and learn new languages like C/C++, PHP, ASP, Flash, Python. Then again if he cant be on line that long, over a 56K modem then he can download a book in less than 2 minutes.

    If he has an oversaturation of work, then is market enough to other one like him. And is as easy to get a willing employee to work as his assistant and take one under his wing.

    Then is the Open source, completely free, and easy to look into and implement. He can get a linux server and host a wide array of websites- applications- networks etc..

    I think this article is a cry for international entrepreneurs to start a business in Ghana. Or at least another reason to join the Geekscorps [geekscorps.org].

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