iHub to the East, MainOne to the West...

It's easy to see how the massive digital divide separates Africa from the rest of the world. Today, western countries like Finland have taken the step to guarantee 1Mbps of Internet data available to each citizen as a basic human right.

In Africa, by gaping contrast, running water and basic electricity are still luxuries in the majority of the continent.

In Ghana today a 1Mbps Internet circuit costs between $2500 and $5000 per month, and remains in the realm of the wealthy corporations, whereas the average home in North America enjoys 10Mbps for between $10 and $50 per month. Why? How will access improve?

Historically, the cost of getting the Internet backbone to Africa has been prohibitive. Satellite was the only method until about 5 years ago when the SAT3 fibre cable (a project from South Africa that lay fibre from Cape Town up to Sesimbra in Portugal) became accessible from a few of the countries up the west coast of the continent.



Even then, the Government Telecommunications companies have had sole ownership of the capacity and have been selling access at anything from $5000 to $30000 per month per 2Mbps circuit.

Internet penetration has remained dismally behind the rest of the world. Statistics indicate that in various countries across the continent, between 4 and 10% of the population has access to Internet.

But these are exciting times for Africa. Things are about to change drastically. The Seacom cable in Kenya has brought fibre connectivity into Europe recently, meaning an increase in speed and reliability, along with a drastic price decrease and resulting increase in access.


iHub in Kenya has been in the news lately as well – proving that once the It world opens up, the interest and the talent will arrive, and things will start to happen. Developers, programmers, designers and researchers are busy at work in this new forum – proving that Africans are ready to contribute to the technological advancement of the continent.

On the west coast things are hotting up as well. Ghana is on the verge of a major technological breakthrough. Here to rival the monopolies that have controlled the fibre and suppressed access, are a string of new companies who have put their money into the soil and built new fibre cables across the region. MainOne has arrived and threatened to topple the current pricing model. On it’s heels, a Nigerian one-man-show company, Glo is arriving as well. Next year there will be a cable called WACS. The competition will be intense. The man on the ground in Ghana will definitely benefit. Today Vodafone has opened 40Mbps cyber cafes around the country. Only a few months ago, an average café here would struggle with access to 160th of that bandwidth for it’s users to share.

It’s actually amazing.

For me what is most amazing is still the way Africa manages to blend such extremes.

In villages all over Ghana, you can see lines of patrons, under the hot sun, cell phones in hand, waiting to charge them via a car battery, since the village has no electricity. Has never had electricity.

Some low tech engineers have even developed bicycle powered cell phone chargers – photo here courtesy of Afrigadget.



Taxi drivers earning $1 a day are sharing cell phone credit through the cloud, via their handsets…

A barefoot farmer stops at a cyber café on his 10 mile walk to market and perches his 5 chickens, bound with rope, at the door of the establishment while he runs in to check his hotmail.

The modern world is stretching in deeper and deeper to the remotest regions. Twitter is no longer just the sound a bird makes, and myspace is not just a patch of land...

Facebook is becoming a major forum - driving ICT adoption across Africa. There are over 300,000 users in Kenya and Ghana's rate of growth is 3x that of the USA. This is only the beginning I'm sure.

Times for Africa, they are a changin’….

No way to bridge the digital divide: Internet fraud crippling Ghana

One of the annoyances of living in West Africa is the fact that I can’t use my credit card. Now to be fair, this is mostly a cash economy and I really don’t purchase many things that require a credit card, but if and when I need it, I cannot use it.

Fraud is the single reason that comes in many forms. Fraud is so rampant in this area of the world, that in February this year, it was announced that the majority of U.S. and Canadian retailers had blocked any Internet orders originating from Ghana and Nigeria.

Back in my early days in Ghana, 1997 – 2003, I was a lowly volunteer with no credit card to use. My first experience with fraud was during my parents’ epic journey across the waters, to visit me in my new ‘homeland’. My dad was uneasy about just about everything, and just to exacerbate the problem, he got called to the bar at the hotel – where we were all lounging around the pool (me in heaven at the decadence!) – and on the other end of the phone was Visa International. They explained that his card had been used in a global whirlwind of purchases, ever since he used the card at the hotel and a restaurant two days earlier.

All these years later, in the modern age of online bookings, I’ve had to recently contact my offshore bank and go through the highly laborious process of changing the billing address from Ghana to Canada.

JW and I travel a lot for work and as many holidays as possible, and it has become impossible to book car rentals, hotels or air tickets.

We tried to book online with Emirates and South African Airways in the past month and both times their Ghana website states that due to excess fraud, tickets must be paid for in person within 48 hours of booking online. This totally defeats the purpose of booking online! Gone is the convenience of not having to get through insane midday traffic to make a purchase. The only benefit now is that you can choose your seats in advance…. Whoopee!

Ghana has their own word for this rampant fraud now – rivaling the Nigerian 419 scams – the Ghanaian term is Sakawa.

Cyber cafes in the Nima slum run a booming business… rows and rows of 17 – 25 year olds (mostly guys), lit up behind the monitors, with the intense sounds and smells of the gritty streets outside, drowned out by the dream of getting rich quick.

There are as many types of scams as guys running them. The numbers are mind-boggling. In a continent that represents only 3% of global Internet users, and a country where Internet penetration is at less than 1 million people, Ghana has ranked among the world’s top 10 for Internet fraud.

This month Ghana’s government has announced their plan to “set up an emergency Cyber Crime Response Team, to review existing legislature governing the Information Communication and Technology (ICT) activities and strengthen the country's cyber security.”

I hope that this makes a difference, but if we look to ‘big brother Nigeria’, the chances are slim… There is just too much promise for those with the cleverest new scam. Easy money is too tempting to a population of impoverished kids who long to emulate the bling bling, gangster deifying rap stars of the USA, and there are no tangible repercussions… except for those of us who want to use our credit cards in Ghana – legally! Users beware...

Questional.com - Where were these guys when I was 16??!!!

The Internet continues to amaze me and yet at the same time, it keeps evolving in ways that address our perceived needs.

I remember vividly my teenage years, wanting to know so many things, and being so frustrated by the lack of a resource. From simple debates with friends and family as to whether the actor in the movie we’d just watched was the same actor we’d known from a TV show years earlier. There was just no way to solve the debates. No library resource could help. I was perceiving the NEED even then.

But I was no computer boffin – I couldn’t even figure out the Commodore 64 game my Dad has just bought, and the computer class that had just been introduced alongside typing was my most dreaded course. The flashing square on the black screen, with the robotic font and all that basic programming language was the farthest thing from a usable tool. I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined what the Internet would become. I realize these comments risk me dating myself horribly...

Today I look to the Internet for almost everything! I pull out my iphone around the table at a restaurant with friends and log in to the Web to answer the question everyone is hotly debating. It is so gratifying! This is what I wanted at 16!
(This statement is REALLY going to date me>>> The kids today are amazing. Their imaginations are in tune with what the Internet has become and what it can become.

They have been creating it, masters of it’s evolution… and some of them have become millionaires for their vision and their dedication to making those changes. Look at the history of Google, or Skype or even Napster. All of them have one thing in common – kids with a vision and the guts to introduce it to the world, with the result of changing our lives through the Internet.

My son has always been a dreamer, a creative soul. He is also an Internet baby. He can talk your ear off about Web 2.0 (those of you ‘aged’ like me may not know that Web 2.0 is the next phase of the evolution of the Internet). It is what is happening now. Web communities are developing and providing forums for people on every subject, every interest you could imagine, and many you couldn’t.

If you ask him about his friends, he might give you a list of people from around the globe, most of whom he’s never physically met. They are people he’s ‘met’ on the Internet. Yes all the parental red flags go off as we’ve all been brain-washed into believing the Internet is full of pedophiles posing as nice kids… but he’s proven me wrong.

In fact, he has teamed up with some of the kids that are making the changes to the Internet that make the news and enhance our lives in the end. These guys have worked day and night for over 6months on a new website that is a new concept for the Web 2.0 generation. He’s now involved with them on the design of the site and he’s having Skype meetings weekly. My son, ‘working’ at 16!

Questional.com is the site and it’s the brainchild of Robert Newcomb aka ‘Bobbo’, a 21 year old from Philadelphia who has been doing web design since early 2003. He realized that there was something missing in the traditional search engines, in that they are simply designed in an ‘ask a question, get an answer’ format. He decided he wanted to build the frontier website about questions and answers. He created a clean layout (only showing you things you need), easy to use by anyone with an Internet connection, and ensured there was zero spam. He approached his friends with the idea in October 2008. They are now a team of five.

After working 14-hour days, he released the site in February this year to a tremendous reception. The site is called Questional.com. Questional.com has the strength, motive, and the dedication behind it to produce something that will, in time, become the leading source for answers on the web. Despite the site still being early in its expansion, I can see the potential it has.

Questional.com is not a search engine, but provides a community, giving you real contact with real people who are willing to answer your questions and give their views. The Googles of the world can look through something that's already been written, but an entire community, devoted to organizing their thoughts one subject at a time, is truly amazing.

Instead of searching all over the web for your information, you can directly ask your questions on the site and get direct answers by other members. When you’re not asking questions, you can then browse around and answer questions that you have certain expertise in. With enough growth, you have a powerful machine at your disposal. Where were these guys when I was 16?!!!!

The site has a true sense of community, and quite a number of regulars.

The team is working round the clock with new upgrades and they are coming out with a tagging system to increase the organization of the questions, and to allow members to be fully enveloped in subject matters that interest them.

To go the way of Google and the others that mushroomed to success, they need some financial backing and some exposure - and what better place to find exposure than the World Wide Web!

I think it’s amazing and I’m proud to have anything to do with it – even if it is living vicariously through my son’s involvement. Go guys!!!



You can find Questional.com on:
Twitter page
Facebook Fan Page
Facebook Group

And of course, Questional.com