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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.
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.
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...
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.
... 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?
... not yet.
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
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
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...
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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
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.)
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.
... 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.
:::
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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
simon
::: Check out rural wireless 802.11 on the wireless-longhaul@openict.net mailing list. subscribe or check out the project page
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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.
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
... but this much more story and pictures about another project:
... but they have a WiFi based VoIP long-distance system that doesn't even need electrical grid to work.
... the Digital Plains of India.
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
Pictures, stories, of setting up the real thing in Bhutan a country you've maybe never even heard of
I'll leave you with one that's going on right now
simon
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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...
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.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
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.