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Ghana's Digital Dilemma
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."
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...
Cruise TT
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.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
Internet in Africa is flaky at best. I work on a project called RANET . It is an effort of serveral partners (ACMAD , NOAA, and USAID to name a few) to make climate and weather related information more accessible to rural populations and communites.
We use the Worldspace 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 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.
My old college roommate went to Ghana, Africa last summer to film a documentary 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.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
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. 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
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.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
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.
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.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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.
indeed..
Nana Frimpong is the chief carver for the King of the Ashanti. His works are sold on NOVICA.com, the company I work for. NPR 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