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

Going up?

[Blaine Hilton]

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. We take most of their problems for granted here. I think this is a large problem for Americans, we don't really realize how good we have. The same thing can be said for gasoline, in Europe they are paying double, triple or more then what we are paying, even when we think its so "expensive".

I do believe there is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel though for the Internet economy through out the whole world. We are coming to the point where computers are as common as televisions, and a computer really isn't a computer with out being able to access the Internet. This is going to redefine what we now know as a global economy. Borders are going to become looser, and ideas will be freely exchanged. Another thing is since the .dom crash many people have decided to switch careers, and thus the workflow is going to equalize, and I believe that is going to happen sooner rather then later.

Go calculate something.

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.

Re:Going up?

[@madeus]

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. We take most of their problems for granted here. I think this is a large problem for Americans, we don't really realize how good we have. The same thing can be said for gasoline, in Europe they are paying double, triple or more then what we are paying, even when we think its so "expensive".

While I quite agree with the rest of this paragraph I take strong issue with your opening sentence.

Specifically with:

Here in the states the economics of being a programmer or anything in the IT industry is pretty bad

Workers in the IT industry are still earning above the national average, for a job that's really not that demanding (your actual milage may vary of course, but by and large it's not that taxing if you know what your doing).

I think the IT industry is a great one to be in - certainly as far a salarys & formal prerequisites to employment go, especially for a job that requires almost zero physical labour and has almost endless scope for career development (by which I mean there are so many roles you could do you couldn't possibly hope to do them all in one lifetime).

The only problem this sector ever had was the influx of mid 90's 'get rich quick' lusers turned sysadmins/developers/web designers who wouldn't know a clue-by-four if they were larted on the head with it.

Most of them are still unemployed now, but if your a *real* sysadmin/developer/etc - and your reasonably flexible - then your simply not going to be unemployed for huge length of time (>6 months) unless you live in an area where there is amazingly stiff competion (like say, the bay area).

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:Going up?

[@madeus]

If your unemployed for a long period there is a reason for that. That reason is not 'your skills are dazzlingly bright', nor is it 'you're trying too hard'.

The unemployment rate is currently 5.8% in the US (as of March 2003). It's notably less if you male, or, for that matter white - in which case it's more like 5.1% (relevant as most /.'ers will of course be white males).

Even 5.8% is low, it's one of the lowest in the world. This table for example, maybe a little out of date, being as it is from last year, but it's still useful at putting everything in perspective.

Compared to unemployment rates of 50, 60 or 70% in Africa (and double-digit dates in the last century in the US) the current whinging about unemployment is a-something-about-nothing that's been blown largely out of proportion by media and public opinion.

Certain factions of the public find it easier to believe that they are a victim of a weak economy rather than admit responsibility for their own circumstance. My own father, who I haven't seen in years, has not been in full time employment in a regular job for a decade due entirely to his own inadequacy - and he regularly blames the current government, the previous government (going back 20 years) and the state of the economy (but oddly enough, not himself).

Re:Going up?

[Lionfish]

Man, WE all know how you get AIDS. They dont. There is just no money (and people) to educate them. A majority has not even a clue what "a virus" is. They do not have the choice to not share a needle, when there are not enough one-use needles in their hospitals. If there is a hospital at all. Its die or die.

Re:Going up?

[stinky wizzleteats]

Let's have a history lesson...

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

Poor sanitation, disease, and civil war. United States, late 19th century. What did we do to overcome these problems? Did an international outreach of concerned Europeans build sewers and hospitals for us? Did English peacekeepers prevent the savagery of our civil war?

As evidenced by this statement: "...is rather offensive, in my opinion.", you clearly intend for the reader to assume responsibility for the conditions of those living in -insert impoverished country here- when history clearly demonstrates that such concern is idiotically ill-conceived. If the concern you are offended that we don't have cannot make the changes you would intend, then what possible good can come of those purposes in the first place, except to shock and paralyze soccer moms into believing that they can't walk outside without harming the world in some way?

What got us out of the squalor and suffering of our early days is the same thing that can get them out - the personal struggle to overcome. And if you wake up in the morning, and find reason not to pursue excellence because people in Africa don't have clean drinking water, then you, sir, offend me.

Re:Going up?

[HanzoSan]

The US created their own Civil War, the Africans were given chaos by European invaders in the same way Iraq was given Chaos/.

Re:Going up?

[fulana_lover]

Poor sanitation, disease, and civil war. United States, late 19th century. What did we do to overcome these problems? Did an international outreach of concerned Europeans build sewers and hospitals for us? Did English peacekeepers prevent the savagery of our civil war? Umm, we brought over millions of slaves from Africa to do all the dangerous, hard work for no wages? Oh, so you are suggesting Africans should go invade europe? kidding aside, i mostly agree with you, but it is much, much, much more difficult for countries nowadays to "hoist themselves by their petards" than it was 100 years ago. China and India have managed to putter along pretty well, many people believe because they have accepted little to no IMF funds and are able to set their own economic policies. Don't also forget that 1st world countries currently subsidize their farmers heavily, which means 3d world farmers have a very tough time profiting from farming (long story, Europe is most guilty of this). I do feel Africa squandered their biggest opportunity, the cold war. Now that its over, only the countries with valuable resources (oil, gold, diamonds) are getting vague interest.

Re:Going up?

[stinky wizzleteats]

Umm, we brought over millions of slaves from Africa to do all the dangerous, hard work for no wages?

You overlooked the purpose for having fought that civil war in the first place. The blood of nearly a million Americans was spilt removing the crime of slavery from the American culture, so you'll forgive me if I feel unmoved by the addition of your tears or mine. I consider it the most fundamental respect to the memory of those fallen to live in harmony today, thus, I do not believe in continuing to fight that war. The descendents of Africans are contributing members of the modern American society. They are not and have never been slaves, and I for one am thankful for that.

Their participation in the building of this nation, as previously discussed as the late 19th century, was as free people.

Software Programmers in Ghana...

[timjones]

And you thought we had competition from steaming legions of Indian and Chinese programmers?

Most of the executive set I know (yes, in the USA) wouldn't consider buying an AUTOMOBILE from a third-world country like that, but they will do anything to have IT design (at least as complicated, when done properly) done in such places.

Something to think about...

Re:Software Programmers in Ghana...

[tarball_tinkerbell]

The answer's pretty obvious, if you do actually think about it.
First up, making an automobile takes not just man (woman?) power, but also metal and machinery and what-not. Given a reasonably good PC & UPS (to deal with blackouts), all it takes to write good code is a good brain, or a good codewriting brain to be specific.
Developing countries have terrible infrastructure, badly depreciated machinery, and poor maintenance of said machines. So, to put it simply, an automobile made there would be more likely to be unreliable - note, not guaranteed unreliable - than one made in the US or Europe or Indonesia.
But code?
Given the right training, someone from Ghana or Chad or Burkina Faso can write code that's as good as, if not better than, code written by anyone else in the world.
Simple.

Re:Software Programmers in Ghana...

[The Cydonian]

Precisely. Now you know why all these so-called third-world nations are so excited about IT; most believe it's their ticket to first-world-dom, whether on a personal level (ie jump hop to US/Europe), or on a societal level.

I know Guido

[sbwoodside]

It just happens that I know Guido. I hope he doesn't mind if I talk about him and what I think about his situation. I want to say these things about him.

First, he WANTS to be in Ghana. This is a personal decision on his part, it's his home, it's where he grew up. So it's not like he's stranded there, you know, he went to university in the states and could easily be pulling in 100K if he were there, but he voluntarily returned to africa.

The biggest problem for him in Ghana is that his talent simply isn't recognized. The people who hire in Ghana aren't talented enough themselves to recognize a quality programmer. Most of the western companies that drop in shops in a place like that ship their own talent in as well, and they're not going to be looking for a top-notch coder/ sysadmin / webdesigner / all around talent to be found in-country. So getting a job that's worthy of his talent at all is tough.

Pay? The cost of living in Ghana is dirt-cheap compared to where I am (canada). I think that he would probably be well off at 10K a year (not a month!) and would be above average at half that. Think about that for a minute, if you're looking to hire a web developer he could be doing the work for 1/5 the price.

Unfortunately there are serious, serious problems with being located in Ghana. Just try to get internet access. Sure, there's an 80Gbps (yes, that's GIGA) pipe running JUST OFF SHORE ... the SAT-3/SAFE/WASC line that runs down the western coast of Africa to SA, and then over to india. But can Guido get access to that? Yeah, right! Instead the most reliable internet access is 2Kbps over a VSAT connection at BusyInternet. Anything else is very much intermittent. How can you work in conditions like that?

He'd have to pay $1500 to get his own VSAT (very small aperture terminal) and then $100s a month for a measly 32Kbps or less connection, ironically. Even though the people are poorer there, the bandwidth costs so much more. And could he run VoIP on that and save himself on longdistance? Not without running afoul of Ghana Telecom ... not yet.

It's a chicken and an egg problem. I have a lot of respect for Guido for being there and doing what he's doing. He's just a guy who wants to write code.

simon

PS If anyone reading this can push the right people to give up access to the SAT-3 fat pipe, please do...

Re:I know Guido

[Anonymous Coward]

I come from Ghana and the lack of a good telecom infrastructure has always been my major challenge.

I tried to open an internet cafe and felt so sad at the speed that I closed it down.

The bottom line: Please anyone who can help us in Ghana legally tap from the GIGA offshore, I would be indeed very happy. The truth is a lot of us want to go back to Ghana to help, but the current conditions it makes life very tough for us all these excellent talents but NO INFRASTRUCTURE!!!

Thanks,
kwasi tawia

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

[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: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

[The Cydonian]

Which raises a very curious point about energy. Yes, the world's masses are without power, telephone etc, yes, all that's necessary for *regular* IT development, but the question is, on ecological basis, can we sustain, say, American, energy levels on a global scale?

PS:- From India myself; I know what you're speaking about. My solution:- move to Delhi/Hyderabad! :-D

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 ;-)

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.

What can be done? SAT-3/WASC/SAFE

[sbwoodside]

You probably haven't heard about it, but there's a fat pipe running down the coast of Africa with 20Gbps (yes, that's GIGA) of capacity. I've been following this story, and it's being wasted.

Home Page

Map

The max capacity of the cable is 120Gbps. It cost 0.65 billion to build and was a monumental sign of pan-african development 6 years ago when they bought it. Now it's finally in place.

technical

It's being wasted! It's a fat pipe, it's got something like 20x the bandwidth previously available in Africa (seriously...) but despite the obvious -- to me -- benefits to start using it Right Now, instead nothing seems to be happening.

Analysis: "...the benefits of this new capacity will not be unleashed on the national business environment"

The state telcoms in all these countries that control the access ... they are just going to sit on their hands because they have no vested interest. It's not on their radar screen to do anything with this cable, or to start selling access to regular people, like Guido. Instead, they are all slowly or quickly going out of business and dragging the market down with them. Installing the cable was only half of it. The other half is freeing the bandwidth.

simon

::: Check out rural wireless 802.11 on the wireless-longhaul@openict.net mailing list. subscribe or check out the project page :::

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. :)

Learn more

[sbwoodside]

Obviously I'm really into the whole situation of IT in Africa (they call it ICT .. the C is for communications). Here are some links for you to look at. A lot of them are really oriented towards WiFi too since I think that's the "last best hope" for the internet in Africa

Weblogs:
riptari filter

m u l t i p l i c i t y

R Alden

News

Balancing Act: Africa This looks dense but it's the BEST news source about ICT in africa and getting better all the time. Very reliable too.

Shameless plug
I wrote about using the open source model for (ICT) development here and some other stuff from here.

Stories

Laos

You've already heard about that ... but this much more story and pictures about another project:

Pictures, stories, of setting up the real thing in Bhutan a country you've maybe never even heard of ... but they have a WiFi based VoIP long-distance system that doesn't even need electrical grid to work.

I'll leave you with one that's going on right now ... the Digital Plains of India.

simon

African ????? What...??? Re:Going up?

[yogkarma]

Why all the time people use terms like African this and African that. I mean why not European American and European Australian.???

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.

[minkwe]

The electricity company in Cameroon, Nigeria's eastern neighbour is owned by an American company. Yet things are not any better wrt power failures.

Your assessment of the problem in Africa is insulting, or fallacious at best. Colonialism is the root of the problem. However, the problem is not because Africans can't cope with modernity, or don't understand it, but because of lack of accountable governments, which were put in place by the colonialists when they left. It's been almost half a century and most of the governments are still in place. It is very difficult to replace such governments. Most people fail to realise that African countries are not poor. Power failures are not due to lack of enough electricity. All the problems can be traced to lack of accountability of the government. The electric company does not care about maintaining hardware because there is nobody to hold them acountable for it. All these problems gradually disappear in a true democracy. Show me a true democracy in central/west Africa and I'll show you a functioning society.

I'm an African, and I'm currently in Sweden where I work as a Sysadmin. Where I work nobody knows shit about computers. I don't expect them to understand what routers are, so you should expect to explain technical details to your client in understandable language irrespective of wether they are african or not.

I refuse to believe that all offices in Nigeria are built to the specification the parent poster cited. It's not every house in the US or Europe that would be free from flood or fire or any other disaster. Just because the poster has encountered a bad case does not justify generalising in that manner. Just because the poster claims to be in Nigeria does not make him an authority on nigerian affairs either!

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.

Re:America's got its problems too

[dustmite]

Backwards places like Pakistan don't progress partly because they don't see the need to. They can't imagine a better place.

I was with you up until this silly statement. Of course the people of Pakistan are capable of imagining improving their lives. It might interest you to know that Pakistan is actually in the middle of a mini economic boom at the moment.

There are many reasons why poor countries seem to struggle to crawl out of it, but the idea that it is because they lack the imagination to imagine a better life is definitely not one of them.

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!

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.

Re:Americans and supremacy

[joggle]

Because guess who is on the news? Norway? Canada? Switzerland? Nope, it's the USA, duly prejudiced by your local (and international) media companies and/or government. Frankly, there isn't a perfect government on this planet, but currently the one walking around with the biggest stick and biggest voice is the US, which provokes responses from everyone else.

Everyone always talks about how other countries, such as Canada, are superior (morally and in other ways) to the US. But does anyone ever critically consider the merits of this? Of course they don't because they don't want to put out the time and effort it would take to form an informed opinion (besides, it would be a waste of time since they know that they're right!!). Rather, they will just spout off of what they've heard (which is often heavily biased and utterly false) and have selective memories.

For example, it was rather convenient for all of the Muslims (excepting Iraqi exiles and Kuwaities) to forget about the autrocities commited by Saddam Hussein's regime while the war went on in Iraq, isn't it? Did you hear of the story where journalists working for Al Jazeera were attacked by a mob of Iraqis living in Detroit for this very reason?

In short, everyone is biased and even brain washed. If the Shia clerics in Iraq tell their people to cooperate with the US military, they'll do exactly that. If a week later they tell them to go and rid the country of the 'Infedels' they will gleefully go and attempt to kill every last military person there. My point is that people need to form their own informed opinions rather than acting like brainless fools.