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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."
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.
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
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.