Problems affecting the development and use of Information Technology in West Africa have been a major topic of discussion and concern for eons, encompassing  discourse from various IT experts the world over, and even the average individual.

Over the years, in most parts of West Africa, the development of Information Technology has been hampered, largely due to inadequate or insufficient Telecommunication Infrastructure, and even where these infrastructure have existed, the service charges are beyond the reach of the average person.

Pascal Zachary, in his article titled Ghana’s Digital Dilemma- The lesson from West Africa: good computers and fast modems don’t matter if you can’t get a dial tone and the power keeps going out- which was first published in July 2002, writes;

“In the West African country of Ghana, one of the world’s poorest places, the busy signal is a reminder of the unfulfilled promise of the Information Age. Making a telephone call here requires persistence. Roughly half don’t go through because of system failures, but that’s only the start of Ghana’s telephone woes. The country has a mere 240,000 phone lines-for a population of 20 million spread across an area the size of Britain. Moreover, telephone bills are inaccurate, overcharges common, and the installation of a new line can cost a business more than $1,000, the rough equivalent of the annual office rent. Lines are frequently stolen, sometimes with the connivance of employees of Ghana Telecom, the national carrier. Phones go dead, and remain unrepaired, for months. Some businesses hire staff for the chief purpose of dialing numbers until calls go through.

The spread of mobile phones has only worsened telephone gridlock. There are more mobile phones in Ghana than wired ones-about 300,000, as of March-but the network is clogged because of a shortage of cell stations. Customers are bedeviled by what operators term “dropped calls.” Besides, calls are costly. The price of a one-minute wireless conversation, under the most common plan, is ten times higher than it would be in the United States. “The situation has come to a point of crisis,” says Kwesi Nduom, the country’s minister for economic planning. Ghana’s telecom mess limits the utility of the Internet, raises the costs of information services-and suggests that the country is mired in the Stone Age, technologically. But the situation here, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, defies such straightforward conclusions. There is another side to the country’s technological profile, a burgeoning homegrown technology culture that explodes assumptions about the inherent backwardness of Africa and the nature of the so-called digital divide.”

Mr. Zachary, who visited Ghana on several occasions between 2000 – 2002, first as a Foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and later as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism,  goes on to talk about how Information Technology had changed the landscape in different ways, saying;

These problems however, are not peculiar to Ghana, but cut across the entire West African sub region, and a lot of effort has been made to tackle the issues highlighted, and nip the growing IT concerns, resulting in several meetings, workshops, and summits- most notably; the Africa ICT summits and the iPAD 2008. Unsurprisingly, these discussions are most often geared at tackling the same problem- Infrastructure. For instance, the most recent (7th) Africa ICT summit, held in Ghana, was on the theme: “Strategies for low cost broadband access in Africa.“ :

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Is IT Infrastructure Really West Africa’s Problem?

Perhaps not! To reiterate, the period between 2002 and 2008 has seen significant improvement in IT infrastructure in Ghana for instance, but not as much improvement in the attachment and use of these infrastructure.  Could the problem lie elsewhere? Just maybe! A school of thought has it that;

providing all the “tech” infrastructure without properly engaging the populace, would not only be- “a complete waste of resources, but also plain ludicrous”.

In most parts of the sub-region, the concept of being IT savvy appears to be completely misunderstood, as basic (sometimes Theoretical) knowledge of common Office applications such as Microsoft® Word, Excel, PowerPoint,  and (maybe) Publisher or Access would make one an “IT guru”. Extremely worrying also, is the Curricula of the educational system of most West African states as regards IT- where the course structure of Degree awarding, IT programs such  as Computer Science (Bsc.) for instance, is a far cry from what exists in most other parts of the world.

The concept of E-Learning also, which was widely promoted over the last couple of years, now seems to be mere Rhetoric, and at best a figure of speech- this coming at a time where the Full Sail University has just introduced an Online Masters Degree awarding program in “Internet Marketing”.

More so, a previous post “Top Paying IT Jobs For 2009″, quickly woke me to the fact that apart from AJAX developers and maybe Enterprise Architects, most of the other “hot” IT jobs for 2009 probably (I could be wrong) do not even exist in West Africa.

In a part of the world where innovation is not encouraged and (brilliant) ideas are “killed” before they even hatch- as almost everything is played to the gallery- it is difficult to envisage a period where the IT focus would have gone beyond just understanding and appreciating the concepts, to actually competing at a global level, but the belief remains that we would get there some day.

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