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

GeekCorps: Accra, Ghana

[jvarsoke]

I was a volunteer in 2000 for GeekCorps. And I can affirm most of what this guy was talking about is true. My job was to teach one guy how to code in Perl or PHP in 3 months. No problem, right? Heh.

For one thing the educational system in Ghana is completely based on rhote memorization. In programming you never see the exact same thing twice. Oh, you might see something similar, but never the exact same thing. Well, my Ghanian counterpart would sit there in front of a problem and just blindly try to apply the last thing I taught him. It took a lot of drawn out silences and lots of me sitting on my hands to get him to be a beginner programmer. But this was a success story, a year later he got into an American university for CS. And this year competed in an ACM contest. Wow.

Other things that the article doesn't really go into are aspects of doing business w/o contract law, not getting paid for 4 months, and often work only comes if you're aligned with the political party in vogue at the moment.

And getting a straight business plan or a requirements document out of Ghanians is impossible. These people want to do video conferencing via 14.4k modem, real-time purchases w/o credit cards, and door-to-door shipping when no place has a street address.

but don't get me wrong, best 4 months I ever spent. I'd go back in a second.

If you want to know more about it, check out: Geekhalla.org.

-j

Re:GeekCorps: Accra, Ghana

[Lachrymite]

I'm having very similar experiences right now.

All the techs here learn by rote, not by principles.

They're good at networking stuff like routers and whatnot. I'm teaching them to be passable at Linux administration, considering I got everything set up and running fine, and they just need to make sure nothing breaks.

But they have no concept on how to code, and I don't think it's something I'll be able to teach them.

I cannot emphasize how true it is that they just try to apply the exact same solution to every problem.

And the weirdest part is, they can learn some pretty arcane syntax fine for command line stuff in Linux fine, but they don't totally understand the concept of directories and file system structure. They know by memory how to type these complex commands, but they don't really grasp the idea of directories and the ability to tinker with stuff.

When I came here, I was a moderately talented if somewhat inexperienced Linux admin. I learn extremely quickly though, and I'm picking up stuff at a great pace. This is why I was brought here... We just get it on some level that these guys don't, due to having grown up around a more tech focused culture I guess.

I know what its like

[arvindn]

... for power to fail all the time.

we had to endure the infamous "load-shedding" -- a practice of cutting off electricity to whole sections of the city in order to conserve power.

They do that here in India too. Especially in the summer. The next few months are going to be pretty bad. It sucks, especially because I'm running a server on my lil' machine at home. (As if enduring 44 degrees C and near 100% humidity for a whole day weren't bad enough.)

Re:I know what its like

[metlin]

Better in Georgia Tech [slashdot.org] eh? ;-) Congratulations!

I'll find that out I guess, but hey thanks ;-)

The difference in quality is evident, but unfortunately, the people affected don't bother to say a thing, or even if they do its not heard. And the people who should do something have no economic viability. Its unfortunate, but thats one of the evils of Capitalism I suppose :-) Atleast its better than the other alternatives!

I do agree with your point on the digital divide, but there isn't much that we can do now, can we?

PS:- Why HCI? Your earlier sig and your webpage seems to be filled more with AI than HCI.

Actually its got both Graphics and AI, figured that HCI involves both :-)

Three reasons why HCI -

1] More realworld application scope than arcane theoretical CS stuff in AI (yeah, I've done all that too, but wouldn't want that as a career option)
2] Its multi-disciplinary - involves AI, Graphics, Design, Psychology and Engineering - so more fun ;-)
3] Better prospects in the industry, and equally good prospects for a Ph.D too.

More than that, these places have some neato projects and cool research with funky gizmos, so I just thought it would be more fun to work with ;-)

Re:Going up?

[Scarblac]

Here in the states the economics of being a programmer or anything in the IT industry is pretty bad, but from the article it seems Africa is much worse.

Well, DUH. Talk about obvious.

There are a few major problems in Africa, and the price of gasoline or the lack of $60k jobs isn't one of them.

One is drinking water. Another is AIDS. Civil war is also quite common.

In some countries, school teachers are dying of AIDS faster than they can be trained. In some countries, people pay more than half their daily income for fresh water. Saying that "it seems" the problems in US IT industry are not the worst in the world is rather offensive, in my opinion.

exhibit of power of human

[jsse]

a practice of cutting off electricity to whole sections of the city in order to conserve power.

It's not the worse thing you could find in Africa. I've seen how they work with a donated SUN workstation in a school where electricity is inaccessible.

To use the workstation you must have another one power it up with bicycle-dynamo. The user gotta type real fast before your partner exhausted - that means playing game is out of question. :)

That's how many of those donated workstations are being used. I'm very impressed by their eagerness of learning. In them I see what real geeks look like. :)

I'm currently in Nigeria.

[Lachrymite]

I'm currently in Nigeria, working for a company that's an ISP with plans to expand into fixed wireless phone stuff as well. I'm pretty much their head (and debateably only) technical person, and the only other non-Nigerian here besides the head of the company. The Nigerian techs are okay at what they do (mainly making sure the routers and satellite connection are fine), but fall apart on anything related to configuring the Linux servers. They're enthusiastic learners though, even if they lack the technical background to pick things up very quickly. I was specifically imported for this purpose, setting up their servers, making sure everything runs smoothly, and helping the Nigerian techs learn how to keep the machines running. My role has expanded to include web development of internal apps as well, since I have a very strong background with web dev stuff.

That said, working in Nigeria is absurd, both frustrating and amusing at the same time.

The biggest problem here is the power. The power goes out between three and twenty times a day. We have an extensive UPS and generator system that keeps all our machines online.

We have a side division of our company that does major installs of networks for local companies and government agencies. I was brought to a site to survey putting a 300 machine network into a building with no roof. All of the individual offices did have roofs, but the main part of the building with the hallways connecting everything together was completely open to the elements. Furthermore, the doors of the offices were of very poor construction, so dust and rain could easily come from underneath and mess up everything inside. We're trying to convince them to put a roof on the building, just even a glass one or something, but it looks like they're just going to be having a lot of inhospitable operating conditions for their hardware instead.

The strangest part is that this isn't at all unusual... In another instance, a company wanted a 20 machine network installed, and freaked out when they saw cabling and routers on the bill. They said they didn't ask for that. They didn't understand you needed these things to actually connect the computers together on the network.

It's a good thing I'm incredibly laid back and just find everything kind of funny, or I probably would have jumped off a roof by now.

Assuming I could find a building with a roof...

Re:I'm currently in Nigeria.

[Lachrymite]

Wow, somebody is rather easily insulted. Sorry for attempting to inject a little humor at the end of the comment there, my mistake.

Like I said, the individual offices DO have roofs. However, the hallway is completely open to the elements.

Have you ever been to any government buildings in Nigeria?

There's basically three layers; an outermost square of offices, a middle ring of a walkway, and an inner square that's just open air. There is NOTHING keeping the elements out between the inner square of open air and the walkway except four a three and a half foot tall railing, leaving some six feet of open air. Some of the buildings have a glass cover over the open air on the top floor, but this one doesn't, and there's no plans to put one. If it ever rains heavily with a wind, they're all completely fucked, because the wind blows the rain sideways into the hallway area, and the drainage isn't sufficient to get all the water out in time, so it floods and comes seeping under all the office doors.

Re:I'm currently in Nigeria.

[Lachrymite]

Africans aren't stupid, but they've had 'modernty' thrust onto them which they neither fully understand nor can cope with.

I think this definitely sums up the whole thing perfectly. It's completely true... the people here aren't dumb, and they're very interested in learning, but they've just been dumped into this digital age they really don't have the background for.

It reminds me of what the S. African government was trying to do to 'bridge the digital devide' - sending trucks laden with tens of thousands of dollars of computers into the poorest slums so they could browse all half dozen webpages in their language to help them out of extreme poverty.

This is also extremely true. They just seem to have weird priorities in general (not that Western nations don't a lot of the time). They're building this huge impressive monument nearby, and down the road there are people living in huts constructed from tarps and sheet metal.

Re:I'm currently in Nigeria.

[easter1916]

As a citizen of a former British colony (Ireland) I think I can fairly say that colonialism is not the problem. Ireland had it hard under the British, blah-blah-blah, but 50 years after independence the place was still an economic backwater with low incomes, by western European standards. What changed in the last 25 years? People stopped blaming the Brits, the government, anybody but themselves for their problems and started working hard, starting small business, availing of the excellent free education system and so on.

I don't deny that colonialism can cause problems, and I certainly disagree with the tone and content of the parent post, but there's a good deal of truth in. You ARE on your own now. African nations are responsible for their own destinies. Have a revolution if your governments are corrupt, un-democratic and inefficient.

America's got its problems too

[bfinuc]

Americans... don't really realize how good [they] have.

True. Or how bad. I tried wholesaling UPSs in Germany, but there is no market for them. Why? No power outages. Meanwhile, my sister in law in Lexington, KY reports that after a recent ice storm, they went three days without power and there was widespread looting. She lost her TV and stereo. No wonder those rednecks running (or not running) Iraq take such a relaxed attitude. It's just like home. The solution is to run the power lines underground, but that would require investment in infrastructure.

Europeans cope with ridiculous gasoline prices (1 a quart!) by buying fuel efficient cars. Americans cope with their awful electricity infrastructure buying USPs and guns. Poles and Russians can repair just about anything. It is impossible to try to explain to your average Korean what a dump Seoul is, because he can't imagine a city that is actually pleasant.

Poor countries have spurts of growth unimagineable in rich counties. Look what's going on in China. It's partly because they see rich countries in other places and know things could be better. Backwards places like Pakistan don't progress partly because they don't see the need to. They can't imagine a better place. There was a huge debate in India among Hindu fundamentalists about whether the flyover pictures of Southern California in a popular TV series showing all the swimming pools were real or just CIA backed propaganda.

Once the entire world is equalized, and every talks to everyone, the will be a burst of growth and then all progress will stop, because no one will aspire to anything better.

Not easy teaching CS in Ghana

[Otisserie]

I taught computer science in a Ghanaian university in the early 80s, and had a number of smart, competent students. But the educational environment didn't give them much of a chance:

1. We used an IBM 370 with punch cards. The card reader was frequently broken so the students had to write out the programs and I graded them by hand. They were never run.
2. University students have to apply to a specific department to be admitted, not the university itself. The CS department was considered easier to get in than some others, so some students with no interest in CS applied to that department just to get in the university.
3. Text books were difficult and expensive to get. And mostly out of date.
4. Brain drain: the best graduates moved to the U.S. or U.K., leaving the rest back in Ghana.
5. Indifferent or incompetent professors. I was just out of school myself and, while I worked hard, I just didn't have the experience to be a good teacher. Other lecturers were more interested in their next "educational" trip to London to bother teaching students.

With that kind of education it's amazing anyone there can program at all.

A thought...

[Isldeur]

[I posted this over there at newsforge. Hopefully it will reach the author.]

Greetings to Ghana! It was only 2 years ago that I spent a super month working in a hospital in Kenya. Great people, and I salute you!

The author here mentions an interesting point about paying to train/teach students. This gave me a thought. The first being that every job is, naturally, always training its employees in it's methods and ways from when they start work.

Now that wasn't wat the author meant, I know. But how about this: I'm just about (hopefully!) to finish medical school. I'll then enter a period called a residency where I'm being paid, but the learning experience is far from over. Most people believe that residents are still students, and I'd have to agree. It's the first time we actually get to treat people largely ourselves, with the watchful eye of our superiors, naturally.

Medicine dictates that. It needs to start paying these "students" because few if any could hold out any more without a paycheque. Perhaps that's the mentality the author needs in Ghana?

Find some people who really *want* to learn and have that drive. Maybe they never had the opportunities at this college. They will be the ones who stand to you.

Best wishes & greetings!