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 Educational institutions are still teaching old out-of-date curriculla and more.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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Africa’s Internet Exchange Points score well on lowering latency and local download speed but did not contribute to lowering of end-user costs, says new study.

Those promoting Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in Africa (and Balancing Act was one of them) made several broad arguments. They would enable cost savings as a larger proportion of traffic is exchanged using local rather than international bandwidth; They would improve access speeds for users and cut down delays in downloading through reducing latency. They would create revenue opportunities because they allow easier hosting of local domains and improved access speeds make certain types of applications possible. Thirteen years after the first IXP was launched in Johannesburg a research report has been published assessing their impact.

The purpose of this research entitled “Impact of IXPs – A review of the experiences of Ghana, Kenya and South Africa” commissioned by OSI was to look at the evidence for these three different kinds of impact outlined above. Crucially, whether the cost-savings IXPs may or may not have made helped local ISPs to pass on price changes to the end-user.

The proportion of local traffic going via a local IXP in Africa varies from 10-60%, depending on the scale of the market involved and the level of development in that market. Therefore three African countries were selected that fell at different points of development along this spectrum.

The researchers looked at a combination of the following as measures of impact: the price to end-users and the views of operators on price reductions; changes in access speeds; whether local content, hosting and applications had grown; and other  external which may have had an effect. The core of the report is three case studies covering Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.

The conclusions drawn from the three country case studies were as follows:

• Even where the proportion of local traffic going via the IXP was high, as in the case of South Africa with 60% in 2008, operators claimed that savings made in bandwidth costs were insignificant. However, in this case, the cost savings did benefit Tier 2 ISPs who only had to pay to connect to one point (the IXP) rather than to several other providers. Where the Internet sector has been divided, as in Ghana, it has not been possible to gain the full cost advantages of a unified, single IXP.
• The original cost saving arguments for IXPs were predicated on there being a substantial difference between local, national and international wholesale charges. Since IXPs have been introduced, reductions in SAT3 bandwidth prices mean that in some cases national bandwidth costs may be the same or more than international bandwidth costs on a distance basis: for example, in Nigeria, it is cheaper to send traffic from Lagos to Sessimbra in Portugal than it is to send the equivalent amount of traffic from Lagos to Abuja. With the arrival of even cheaper fibre capacity in 2009 and 2010, this closing of prices will be a challenge for IXPs wanting to attract local traffic. But just as international prices have come down, so local and national prices will have to come into line with them. For IXPs to remain cost-effective, ISPs will need to press for lower national bandwidth charges.
• Since the retail cost of Internet subscription charges (and cyber-café access costs) in Ghana and Kenya has fallen since the introduction of IXPs, it could be argued that whatever cost reductions IXPs made for ISPs, they were passed on to subscribers or users. But since these reductions were also made by ISPs that were not IXP members as well, it is unlikely that they were as a result of savings from IXPs. In South Africa, dial-up charges have changed little over the past ten years and DSL charges have fallen since their introduction in 2003, well after the introduction of JINX. Again this makes it unlikely that any cost savings were connected with the existence of an IXP. Ghanaian and South African providers argue that cost savings were passed on to end users in the form of improved quality of service. But it is clear that cost savings from the IXP process were not passed on to end users except as part of the wider process of competition between operators.
• Whilst IXPs may have resulted in cost savings for the end user, the most significant factors have been: the ending of the international traffic monopoly (in Kenya), increased levels of competition and dramatic reductions in international bandwidth costs. For example in South Africa, international bandwidth as a percentage of total costs fell from 60% in 2003 to 45% in 2008. However, there is a direct link between IXP participants, their ISP associations and the bringing about of the factors listed above. For example in Ghana, GISPA has been instrumental in getting a special, low-cost deal on SAT3 bandwidth and in Kenya, TESPOK was at the forefront of the liberalisation process.
• Access speeds appear to have improved but it is difficult to separate the impact of improved national and international links from the speed advantage delivered by the IXP. Furthermore, as international bandwidth has come down in price, end users have had access to faster download speeds.
• Whilst the volume of traffic going through IXPs in Kenya and South Africa has increased dramatically, even these increased volumes have to a large extent been overshadowed by increases in international bandwidth. Indeed local traffic has fallen as a proportion of overall traffic in South Africa. There is no traffic measurement at the Ghana IXPs so it is not possible to say what has happened either in terms of the proportion of local traffic or the overall growth of traffic at the IXPs.
• Likewise the growth in local content and its use by end users has been eclipsed by a much wider interest in international content. As international fibre has become cheaper, it has been easier for operators to supply Internet users more cheaply. As a result, the number of people using the Internet has gone up. Although local content has grown in all three countries, the majority of use (particularly web mail access) remains international. For example, Facebook and You Tube are amongst the top ten sites accessed in African countries analysed by Alexa.com. However, this growth in Internet use has also benefited a small number of local sites. IXPs have supported the introduction of new local services and applications: for example in Kenya, the implementation of online tax reporting by the Kenya Revenue Authority and the availability of freeware hosted by the University of Nairobi.

The Impact of IXPs – A review of the experiences of Ghana, Kenya and South Africa was written by Charles Amega-Selorm, Muriuki Mureithi, Dobek Pater and Russell Southwood.

Source: Balancing Act news update

MTN short code 2010 is driving me nuts - one txt to MTN to try n win a lovely KIA and all I get back is a minimum of twenty texts per day, at dawn and at nite - bummer! should’ve listened to my MAMA “mikee……no good thing free n no free thing good.

To be honest, I really wanted to win that KIA as well so I also sent the text and then I was involved in this whole game I was not ready to play. I played it four times and realised my credit was almost gone so I decided that I would never play again, only to realise I was in for the biggest trouble of my mobile life. My phone was subject to what i term mobile spam. Let me try and retrieve some of the text messages and share with you. Check the following out;

MTN: Extend your holiday - win our huge cash jackpot and give yourself a non-stop break from! Reply HOLIDAY.

Since I decided not to play again, I would receive hundreds of messages relating to the 2010 World Cup as punishment for trying in the first place. Can someone tell them I am no longer interested? In their desperation to get me to spend more credits on this, they send me the next text message;

MTN: GASPER, We miss you! Return to the game and win 100,000 GHC. One winner chosen this weekend. Change your life. Reply MISS

Can you imagine, MTN misses me. Is it because they want more of my credits huh! And oh, just as I finished typing the last sentence, I received another one. Well, if I did not want to win that KIA, I wont be in such a predicament.

There are similar stories for ZAIN and tiGO too. But seriously, it is about time we take them on for all this spamming. Sometimes I receive very serious text messages I do not pay attention to because the spams are just too much. Sometimes, I simply do not see the real texts because my inbox is filled to the brim I have to spend precious time deleting these spam messages. I am tired about them, I don’t know about you?

Elsewhere, social media such as facebook, twitter, youtube and blogs are used in several ways. For example I got several twitter messages from someone on the role France played in the post election violence in Gabon. In his own small way, he was making his voice heard on developments in his country. You can also do same. Twitter, youtube and facebook played a major role in bringing the attention of the International community to developments in Iran during the elections that brought President Ahmadinejad back into office. In the particular case of Iran, even though twitter and facebook were blocked, it did not deter people from working around that to get their messages across and they did thanks to technology. So this social media phenomena has literally empowered the voiceless to speak out.

Apart from citizen journalism which is one of the many uses of social media, there are several other uses people put them to. It is a great tool for marketing and PR as well, and speaking of PR, the three Ministers of Information were recently on facebook discussing government business via facebook. They said the were trying to reach out to another constituency of Ghanaians and even though I have personal issues with that, I think they got their messages across.

Perhaps one of the most unorthodox uses I have seen people use it for is the Facebook ‘waakye‘ party I attended today. It was totally mind blowing to see several hundreds of Ghanaian youth throng Labone, a surburb of Accra to meet virtual friends, have fun and above all eat ‘Waakye’, a nutritious and delicious Ghanaian delicacy made from rice and beans. It was simply amazing the kind of people I saw there. So facebook became the enabler if I may of organising this new generation of Ghanaians, full of energy and zeal. Now, I kept wondering to myself what next to expect of social media such as these in Ghana. I just think there are countless possibilities and I just hope we can take advantage of them to empower the people more.

I understand there will be a Facebook Awards Night soon and I don’t have any ideas on what that is but I guess I can’t complain so long as people get to use the Internet more and adapt to changing trends. This is already encouraging because for the past three months I have been checking the statistics on unique Facebook accounts at Checkfacebook.com and found out that the number of facebook accounts have increased from 100,000 to 249,060 as of Friday 25th September, 2009. This means people are using the Internet more, and seriously I don’t care whether they are using mobile phones or the PC. I just dream of a day when everyone has access to some form of Internet connection. I feel I have limitless possibilities with the Internet, I hope you do too?

Dr Kwame Nkrumah

At the Berners-Lee event, which took place at the Advanced Information Technology Institute also called the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence, one quote by the man at the centre of the whole discussion caught my attention. This was in response to a question posed by Dorothy Gordon, Director General of the AITI-KACE on why he made WWW a free and open product.

The only way to keep ONE WEB is when you keep it FREE and OPEN.

That was his response and he went to say that if he had priced it, we would be having MMM, KKK, PPP and stuff like that which makes a lot of economic sense. Eventually, many more entrants would have entered the space and saturated the market. The One Web reality we have  now would not have happened. This is how noble the man can actually be.

As it turns out, today is OneWebDay and it is worth noting that this man’s invention is arguably the greatest internet tool and has contributed immensely to bridging the digital divide. Below is a video I saw on the Ghana Connect website inviting more video responses on how the web is helping overcome the digital division.

Well, I was able to take a picture with him even though too many people wanted to say something to the man :-). Remember how government officials and MP’s were trying hard to get a photo glimpse of Obama when he was in Ghana? Peace out!

The wikipedia describes him as follows;

He is a British engineer and computer scientist and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet. In 2007, he was ranked Joint First, alongside Albert Hofmann, in The Telegraph’s list of 100 greatest living geniuses. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web’s continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

The Kofi Annan ICT Center will be filled to capacity at 2:00pm on Monday 21st September, 2009 with many experts from the Internet Community in Ghana. I will be there to see him and possibly take a picture shot with him:-). Let me know if you would be there, so that I can look out for you too.

My most memorable time at the event was however not one of the these, unfortunately..:). On the second day of the three day event, a session caught my attention and it was none other than a localisation workshop. Frankly, I did not know much about localisation before this, so, I was curious. What is this localisation some software developers I know make all the noise about anyway? I was going to find out.

Then my interest was heightened by the sight of one of the finest software developers in Ghana, Henry Addo of Kasahorow and Ushahidi entering the side room of the Kofi Annan ICT Center. Well, i had no other option than to enter as well. I did find out what was localisation was all about and was not disappointed at all and rightly so because all my misconceptions/ignorance about the subject were laid to rest.

My checks show that there are several definitions of localisation but, Wikipedia defines it sometimes called internationalisation in computing as a means of adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences.

I am an ardent fan of using local languages while chatting with friends online. I can write Asante Twi well enough for people to understand and same goes for my native Ewe language but my problem has always been some of the characters in our local languages. I have wondered for so long when we will also have our own keyboard but some brilliant minds were already at work getting a software keyboards out and so they did. I have heard of Kasahorow but never really paid attention to it until their side room session at MFA and have become an ardent fan. I will look out for them on twitter:).

Kasahorow (also meaning many languages) is living to its name by covering several languages already. If you speak some local language, you should look out for it on Kasahorow to download because it may have been covered or in the pipeline. Akan, Ewe, Hausa and Ga have already been developed and there is more to come. This certainly makes our efforts to generate more local content a reality.

Kuddos to Henry and colleagues at Kasahorow and by extention the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) and all you fellas out there, help me say congratulations for these efforts.