Life As An African Web Developer

There's an interesting look at the realities of high-tech in Africa running on NewsForge -- specifically, one writer's account of starting a web development company in Ghana, dealing with obstacles including power problems worse than the norm in deepest California.

Comments

Easy Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

At least getting operating capital should be easy, with so many business people and government officials offering to pay well for a little help.

Why, I have six business offers in my email just this morning! It would be so much easier to help those people when you're on the same continent.

Re:GeekCorps: Accra, Ghana

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Hell, I've been coding for years and you couldn't teach me perl in 3 month :)

Re:GeekCorps: Accra, Ghana

[Erik Hollensbe]

Well, that's because programming in perl and understanding perl are two completely different things. :)

Re:Going up?

[DCowern]

Crap... I think I clicked the "read more" link and ended up back in 1996... A few words from the future (April of 2003):

• Most areas of the US still face the "last mile" problem
• Linux STILL isn't on everyone's desktop
• Microsoft is still one big bully of a company
• A bunch of aliens came and tried to enslave half the population but we beat them all back with garden hoses. REMEMBER TO STOCK UP.

All in all things aren't that different in the future :-P

Re:Congratulations

[Lachrymite]

Actually, I travelled halfway across the world for lots of money.

Put Ghana's extra money to work

[bruthasj]

This one guy told me they had millions of dollars in a Swiss account that they wanted to forward to me -- he had some connection with the government I think. Could we somehow utilize this seemingly untapped resource sitting in the hands of locals to fund better resources for the country as a whole?

t-i-c.