Ghana and the Information Age
Ghana and the Information Age
The unbearable lightness of waiting. Time is different here. So close to the 0 meridien, Ghana is on GMT. But it is a different GMT. Ghana Maybe Time. The difference is, in a sense, trivial. Everything just takes more time. I'm writing this in front of Ecobanks HQ here in Accra. The driver picked me up at 7:30 this morning. Instead of going straight to Dansoman, however, we were stopping at the bank to cash a check. It was around 8 when we got there. Opening Time - 8:30. Waiting in the car, time passes. 8:30 - driver heads for the bank. A full 40 minutes later he returns, check in hand. The message that took 40 minutes to deliver? Come back this afternoon or tomorrow.
I guess in most industries, it isn't a huge problem. If you pay a dollar or two a day for an employee, who is to say you can't spend that day having a check cashed. For high-skill industries such as IT, the situation is different it seems. The no. 1 barrier to better and cheaper Internet services, and the potential of building a much needed foreign currency generating tech industry, is the lack of skilled labour. The education system just isn't good enough. An educational tradition that seems to thrive on rote memorization. Computer Science programs that operate with practically no hands-on computer time. And an inflation rate that makes it prohibitively expensive to train abroad, are some of the barriers in building a highly skilled workforce.
GMT is one of the barriers to utilizing it effectively. The efficiency of the workforce is low. The cost of low efficiency is exponentially higher in a knowledge industry. Combine this with a general lack of understanding of the differences between a knowledge industry and a service or production industry and the outlook becomes less optimistic. The old adage that knowledge is power seems to be the mantra here. The focus on equipment investment is high, that on skills investment is low. The willingness to invest in the skills of ones workforce seems severely hampered by the fear that they will take that knowledge to the competitor as soon as a chance arises. The understanding that sharing knowledge may well increase the size of the pie, giving everyone a bigger slice, is but an evil rumour. The concept that the key to success is in the hands of your workers, and not management, is acknowledged in words but rarely in action.
Such are, in my opinion, the biggest barriers to entering the Information Age.
I'm sorry Ghana, you have a great country, but in certain matters there is a long, winding road ahead.
