Is facebook driving ICT adoption in Africa?

February 11th, 2010 by admin 6 comments »

facebookI read ICTworks, a very informative blog all the time. Earlier this week I saw a blog post titled “facebook is driving ICT adoption in Africa” which inspired this blog post. My intentions are to interrogate that statement and ask whether it is not the increasing use of smart phones that has increase facebook adoption or the other way round or it is a rather more complex web.

I have been following with keen interest how people in Ghana are adopting facebook, twitter and other social networking tools and ICT in general. Last year checkfacebook published a month by month statistics on how people are adopting facebook and it showed an increasing rate. In November, Ghana had 277,600 facebook users, 68.7% of which are males and the rest female. Of this number, about 48% are between the ages of 18-24 and 34% for ages 25-34. In October, it had below 200,000 facebookers from Ghana.

These statistics gave me an idea the rate of increase of ICT adoption. But upon interrogating the issue further, I realised that I may be wrong. People are making decisions to buy smartphones because they would like to get on the facebook train, update their statuses and tweet or use one social networking platform or the other. Or shall I say people are making decisions to get onto facebook because they have some smart phone or the other?

So, facebook may actually be driving the use of smartphones and not necessarily ICT. ICT’s are far broader than that and even though i conceed that it will have a long term effect on ICT adoption, government and organisations need to do more to drive ICT adoption.

By the end of last year, the total Internet penetration of Ghana is still about 4.0% and broadband penetration is less than 0.1%. There are less than 100,000 PCs in Ghana and the ICT skills level is nothing to write home about. Government ICT systems are infantile and companies/organisations are still struggling to deploy IT systems. Educational institutions are still teaching old out-of-date curriculla and more.

And oh, I forgot that Internet is very expensive and highly unrealiable in Ghana and most parts of Africa. If the rate at which these indicators were increasing was was commensurate with facebook adoption, I would conclude that Africa is adopting ICT. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This is not to belittle however, the immense contributions the mobile industry or should I say facebook is making towards ICT adoptions.

In order not to delve into the more complicated area of ICT adoption which involves amongst other things, use of ICT equipments, intensity of use of connectivity solutions and intensity of computer use and  skills levels, I would simply add that we are at the risk of reducing the digital divide debate to a mobile adoption instead of ICT adoption. Can we realistically say that mobile adoption equals ICT adoption? I say no but it will be great to read your thoughts and criticisms.

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Posted in Internet, Mobile Technology

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Glo readies to launch in March

February 10th, 2010 by admin 2 comments »

Competition in the telecommunications industry is set to further increase as Glo prepares to launch in March this year. The media and marketing campaigns have already started with several mini billboards carrying photos of Ghanaian celebrities endorsing the Glo brand with the “like never before” slogan.

Glo will be exceeding my expectations if they can introduce value added services and revolutionalize prices downwards. As things stand now, the various internet packages available are simple too expensive, unreliable or irregular. The mobile industry will also be given a major boost if Glo can introduce more innovative products and reduced prices that can see users trooping to their network.

glomobile

I am also hoping that Glo will put more of their resources into corporate social responsibility, for eg. building technology centres for schools and communities instead of spending on beauty pageants. All they need to do is to get the media at the launch of these initiatives and the media will do the publicity.

There are interesting times are ahead and I am so looking forward to them.

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Posted in ICT4D, Internet, Mobile Technology

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My twitter account is suspended!

October 19th, 2009 by admin No comments »

This weekend was a bad one for me because I had my twitter account suspended and for what reason, I will tell you. As far as I am concerned I did not think I had breached or violated any of the twitter rules, so this really came to me as a surprise. But I did, well, not knowing. I have however submitted a request to the twitter team and still awaiting a response from them and I hope they do.

To think that I have to wait for up to a whole month is really something and why would I not be edgy when the twitter team is telling me they have only a staff number of seven (7) and may take a long time to respond to me.

I really wanted to do a little tweeting on Saturday night, so I did the first tweet and decided to retweet a google work from home employment opportunity for people leaving in Canada and the US which I found interesting. Thinking and researching more on this several hours after the account suspension, I found out this was just a scam I fell for. Now, I look like a real fool for getting my twitter account suspended. At first, I thought it was some kind of a joke but reality struck me when after sleeping over it, nothing happened.  Too bad but it seems I can do nothing until the small twitter team can restore my account back to me. I hope they do because it will be such a shame.

Some simple advice to you folks out there, watch out whom you retweet! :-(

UPDATE: About 26 days without twitter, my account has been released to me. Well, they said it was a mistake! I wonder which mistake…

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Posted in Internet

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Why must our own ccTLD (.gh) cost as much as $42.66?

October 19th, 2009 by admin 2 comments »

As part of my research with the Diplo Foundation, I am required to present a case study of the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) and Ghana’s (.gh domain space) comes handy. I found that registering for a .gh domain is cumbersome and the price is ridiculously high. Seriously, I wont know the reason why it is so in the case of Ghana and moreover, it does not make any marketing sense.

First of all, whilst a generic top-level domain (gTLD) - for example, .com, .net, .edu - costs just around $9 per year, a .gh is almost 5 times expensive ($42.66). Even though many Ghanaians are generally willing to have a .gh domain names, they would rather go for the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) because the ccTLDs are simply too expensive. Only last year, it cost $35 and one would have thought that if there are proposed changes in price, it would be downward but this is obviously not the case. Why wouldn’t I chose to register a .net domain instead. Moreover, the .gh is not being marketed as it should. Many organisations would like to register these domains but they cannot even tell where to register them or in case they do have to go through a cumbersome process of registering them.

I saw a comment which sought to relate a ccTLD to a “made in Ghana good” on the public participation site of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and I absolutely agree with that. This certainly gives Ghanaians some form of identity on the web and I think it is absolutely necessary that the authorities in charge have a re-look at marketing the ccTLDs and reducing the prices.

Where to get a .gh domain name

The Ghana Network Information Center (ghNIC) was set up in 1997 and incorporated in 2003 as a not-for-profit company under the laws of Ghana to carry on the work of providing Network services for the development of network infrastructure and managing the .gh domain space but has been relatively ineffective in doing so. The current structure is for ghNIC to manage the .gh domain space administratively and Network Computer Services (NCS) which is the company Dr. Nii Narku Quaynor an Internet poineer and a Jon Postel Award winner, to manage the .gh domain space technically.

GhNIC adopted the hierarchical structure of namimg such as a .com.gh even though there are instances of the flat structure of naming domains such as .gh.

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Posted in Critical Internet Resources

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