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[samegavi]

Neem Trees

I was only seven years old and it was about 6pm in the evening. I was in bed sick with Malaria and itching all over my body. This was in the first of the many houses my parents rented in Accra. We lived in the suburb called Labadi, in a semi-planned area sandwiched between the more planned South Labadi Estates and Labone Estates: two of the first modern settlements designed to accommodate government officials and civil servants during the early years of the postcolonial period. Adjacent to Labadi is Osu which is now famous for it's Oxford Street: the most cosmopolitan street in Accra where you'll find the nicest bars, shops and people from all over the world. Osu, however, is also home to more prominent spaces such as the Independence Square, the first Sports Stadium to be built in the country, and several of the early high rise office buildings ( 3 - 6 floors) designed to house the various functionaries of the Government of Ghana. What both Labadi and Osu share in common is the shores of the Atlantic ocean

Mother had already given me Chloroquine for my malaria but she did not know what to do about the itching. Aside the drugs that I knew came from the pharmacy shop there was also other additional treatments formulated by Mother herself. For malaria I was also to sit near the steam of water boiled with leaves cut from the Neem trees in our neighbors' compound. Later I would find that my friends mothers also made the same double treatments for their malaria: neatly packaged capsules bought with cash from the men in white coats in their well lit shops across the streets and treatments prepared in the home from leaves and herbs acquired from whichever neighbor's compound they happen to be growing, for which our mothers paid nothing.

Of the two treatment camps, as a child, I found the pharmacy more fascinating. I'd often ask Mother why she bothered at all with all the labor involved in setting up fire in the charcoal stove to boil leaves she'd have to roam the entire neighborhood for, albeit within walking distance, when I could just swallow a pill alone and still recover. I felt vindicated when the antidote to my itching came from the pharmacy in the form of Piriton tablets. It didn't matter at all to me then when I heard the words 'side effect' in an explanation the Pharmacist was giving Mother as she handed over cash over the counter. Indeed I never bothered with leaves or herbs as soon as I could take care of myself as an adult, until the Corona pandemic hit. With all the uncertainty about a cure and all the fear and frenzy surrounding Covid I missed Mother's unwavering confidence in African traditional medicine, and so I found myself going out in search of Neem trees a few days before lock-down.

I was to discover that Neem trees were now a scarce thing, even in the second biggest city where I now lived. Most of the home garden spaces I grew up with in Accra had given way to more houses as landlords only maximized their capacity for more rent. Neem trees where thus understandably being driven out of the urban environment as Accra was busy earning its reputation as an important port city of the Black Atlantic and a concrete jungle. Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti kingdom before European conquest, therefore much older than Accra, more inland within the forest belt, was still green enough despite the urban expansion, and you'll still find at least an orange and avocado tree in most homes, with lots of rainfall and hence lots of mosquitoes, and yet only a handful of Neem trees. I was even more surprised when locals told me Neem trees were more to be found along the southern coastal belt and was never part of the natural vegetation of the more inland spaces like Kumasi.

I took a trotro to the area where I was told I could find a Neem tree on the compound of a public school. I saw the tree from a distance before I alighted at the bus stop. When I walked onto the school compound however something else got my attention. The school building painted in two shades of brown, as if to echo the brown of the bare earth of the big school compound, brought back lots of nostalgia for my happy basic school days in Accra. I laughed out loud when I saw that the walls of the building was inscribed with the same warning you'll find even today at the basic school I attended close to Osu: DO NOT SPEAK VERNACULAR. Vernacular, which was whatever Ghanaian language we spoke with our parents at home, was mostly Ga in Accra. In Kumasi that was mostly Twi, which over the years has become widely spoken across the country, and even become the lingua franca of Ghanaian popular culture, but doesn't yet compete with English as the official language of the country. Still staring at the warning on the school wall, I could now recall clearly that one other reason I preferred treatments from the pharmacy was that it was a place to impress Mr Johnson, the pharmacist in his white coat, with my English vocabulary and I never missed an opportunity to follow Mother there.

Somehow relieved off my childhood nostalgia, I plucked a few leaves from the Neem tree and returned home in another trotro. Before I began to make the treatment I decided to put my digital literacy to work on resolving the mystery surrounding the near-absence of the Neem tree in the more vegetative parts of the country. If the World Wide Web is to be believed, it appears that Azadirachta Indica, commonly known as Neem tree, was introduced into Africa during the 19th century by East Indian immigrants fundamentally for its medicinal properties. I threw my iPhone on the couch and went into the kitchen to prepare what I'd hitherto considered a wholly African treatment. After enjoying a bath with hot water and Neem tree leaves I reached out to a few contacts to find out what common herbal treatment Kumasi natives use to treat Malaria. The name of another plant was mentioned and I received directions to a home, within walking distance, whose compound I could find the plant to pluck it's leaves, for which I'd pay nothing. This time the World Wide Web was of no help as no one I knew in Kumasi could say the name of the plant in English.

[samegavi]

Progress

At what stage of my life did I begin to question progress? I don't remember. What I do remember is when and in what form my belief in progress began to germinate. At the age of seven I had an incident that awakened me to the realization that adults don't know everything, however confident they act to hide that fact.

I was sick with Malaria and was itching all over my body; an unusual symptom. No adult around, including my parents, knew what will help stop the itching and after all their suggestions failed to help, a nurse came to the rescue. Because it was a nurse, someone with formal scientific training, I develop a deep faith in science. My perception of progress was shaped in scientific materialism as a result.

The schools I attended in Ghana where very colonial. After several years of independence the curriculum was very white. Even how we were taught and tested on our knowledge of the colonial period was based on how well we could recollect the names and dates of white European colonial administrators rule. This colonial curriculum combined with the fact that I loved science meant that my heroes were all white men. I would often ask myself what my ancestors were doing when Ernest Rutherford was splitting the atom and I'd answer that they were probably busy marrying their third wives and making babies. To which I'd shake my head in ridicule.

It's easy to see then how I developed an inferiority complex. How I came to view anything traditionally African as backward and how progress was as simple as following the path of the white man who has it all figured out. Thus my thoughts on African modernity was very simplistic: we just had to copy whatever has worked for Euro-Americans. All that was holding us back was our inexplicable and yet predictable inability to copy and paste. Our inferiority was the only enemy and if it wasn't for the white man saving us every now and then we'd be completely wiped out by Ebola or some other terrible disease. In our schools where speaking our local languages were forbidden as vernacular, I wasn't alone in developing this mindset. I'll often hear my classmates dreaming of leaving the continent for good. We all bought into the idea that our indigenous religious practices were satanic and we accepted Christianity without question thanks to all the images of white Jesus in the calendars hanging on the walls in our homes. A few of them had Lucifer depicted as black.

During this period I'd never traveled but I read voraciously. I consumed mostly novels from the likes of Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Tom Clancy and more. I believe its this habit of reading that eventually helped start my doubting the superiority of the white man. Especially when I started reading about how barbaric the white man was in colonialism and how all this acts of barbarism was spread with Christianity. It was my reading of postcolonial writers however that brought me full circle to face what we had become. I began to see effects of colonialism all around me: in peoples choice of names, men and womens hairstyles, how people spoke and how outside-in our outlook on modernity was. In effect we were on a march to becoming more white as whiteness was associated with modernity and progress. More disturbing to finally see, was the way colonialism had entrenched a patriarchy in societies were women used to have so much power. How the modern African male was caught in a limbo between the monogamy he is supposed to go for as a modern man and his innate polyamorous nature.

I will later find solace with artists like Fela Kuti who rebelled and resisted the trend of Africans losing their Africanness. I was happy to observe that on the cultural side there's also been positive interventions from the black community in the West that has inspired African artists to stay true to their African selves. Instead of copying and pasting aesthetics from the West these artist rather use foreign forms to reimagine and rejuvinate old and traditional African forms of music, cinema, dance and more. Travel ( to Europe) made me realise that modern does not necessarily have to be opposed to tradition. That as is the case of the West, it can and should be a reimagining and building atop the traditional. The colonial agenda pushed us to throw our traditions away as inferior but I do realise now that there's an urgent task at hand to reverse the effects of colonisation and restore African peoples to a state of self pride and dignity.

[samegavi]

Farewell Fafa

As with Julius, so with me

On that morning, the first Sunday of May, I finally began to cry. I could no longer hold back the tears when I started listening to the Lenny LeBlanc songs a friend had sent my way. Perhaps it was a mistake to have travelled to Accra, I thought, the city that holds almost all the memories Fafa and I created. Those memories, as evidenced in the iPhone photo album of her name, but all recently deleted, still find their way to haunt me from time to time, and more painfully so as I sat in the One Corner Garden in Kokomlemle that morning. It's been two months since Fafa, in a swift mood swing I was in no way prepared for, pulled the plug on us, first with a text message and later a short audio call. The pain cut deep but I had never been able to shed a tear until that morning. I now weep at unpredictable hours everyday since then, so much so that I prefer to work from the safety of my home office so I can spare anyone the uncomfortable sight of a grown man drowning in a flood of tears.

A few weeks before this chronic crying began, I had fallen into the habit of observing the Catholics in my community closely, and I wonder now wether the two are connected in some way. As someone brought up in the Pentecostal and later Charismatic Christian traditions I had always found Catholics weird. I would mock at what I thought to be idol worship, "celibate" priests and sisters, and their antic clothes. This time, however, I found myself paying serious attention. During the period in my life where I experienced a deep crisis of faith, and did not hesitate to adopt the atheist label, I found my Catholic friends to be the most tolerant of all. Granted there where a few occasions where I felt ridiculed and even dehumanized but they still welcomed me into their homes. I'd engage them in debate over the doctrines I found silly and I would surprisingly leave with a deep appreciation of why they do such and such even when I wasn't convinced completely. Later I even surprised myself further when I started attending mass occasionally at the chaplaincy in the university nearby.

At first I only attended night vigil on some Saturday evenings. The plan on such days was to head out to campus to do some research I had reserved for the weekend, head to the tennis court right after, and then as if I had to complete the state of being cerebral and corporeal with a state of being sensuous, I would descend on the road between the commercial area and the art department where I'll fall in with others on their way to revive their spiritual vitality. Mass turned out to be more orderly, always starting and ending on time, and I felt 'talked to', not 'shouted at', during the Priest's sermon. It always felt like I was sitting in a well-organised banquet for the spiritually malnourished.

What I loved most about mass at the chaplaincy, however, was the music from the choir, and It's very clear to me how that is connected to my year long Sunday morning ritual of listening to nothing but classical and choral music from the comfort of my studio apartment. I would be awake as early as 3am on a Sunday and tune in to P2 Klassisk, on Danish public radio DR Lyd. After an hour I'd switch to Spotify where I would spend hours enjoying the beautiful sequencing in Teju Cole's playlists. His a history of jetlag 7, my all time favourite, introduced me to the music of Chanticleer, Tomas Luis de Victoria, The Cambridge Singers and Phillip Glass. I found so much joy in this new music I was listening to that I would, on impulse, take screenshots of whatever music app I was using and share on my whatsapp status, though I was not sure how anybody could relate by just staring at an image of a music player and album art.

On some of these Sunday private musical festivals of mine, I would put Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight on repeat play. Listening to this felt like being taken on a journey up and being brought back down very slowly in both directions. Not starting abruptly and not ending abruptly, as if the composer was being very careful not to traumatize the listener with sudden swift shifts in tempo, either at the beginning or at the end. It must have been this hypnosis I am usually under when listening to this...hymn without words... that made me start questioning the logic of the binary circuits in the switches on the walls in our homes. How do we complain of the trauma of Dumsor, that one can be suddenly plunged into darkness and brought abruptly back into the light without warning, giving our senses no time to prepare for either shock, and yet be so comfortable with the small acts of trauma we inflict upon ourselves when we use switches that don't have the ability to turn off the lights slowly or turn it back on slowly, that know only zero and one and know nothing in between. I made a vow to find a solution to this in my own home. I would rather reduce the volume than pull the plug, and prefer to dial down the luminous flux slowly to zero than to press a button, and switch from close to a thousand lumens to nothing, in the flash of a microsecond.

It was to break the monotony of these Sunday morning home musical concerts that on the second Sunday of May, which turned out to also be the sixth Sunday of Easter, I decided to attend morning mass. I arrived at 8:30am and was ushered in after the usual Covid protocols of hand washing and sanitizing. I had my nose mask on. Nothing unusual happened until what came after the bidding prayer. To my surprise, I voiced out the prayer to Mary without any doubt that she was up in the heavens listening intently. The Hail Mary, together with all the other prayers said to the mother of God, was not a part of mass I keenly anticipated or participated in. This time I felt differently about it. Perhaps it was because that Sunday was also Mothers Day. I had observed through posts on social media how eager people are to celebrate the love of a mother, a love we acknowledge is out of this world, almost divine, and yet somehow the divinity of Mary, the mother of God, was questionable to half of Christendom? I had thought about the memory of my own mother in the early hours of that morning and maybe in my subconscious I had wondered how God would feel about his own mother, the only one through whom he could become flesh. After Hail Mary I said a silent prayer for all the mothers I knew and all aspiring mothers. It was then that thoughts of Fafa came rushing through my mind, like a rush of blood to the head. I began to say a prayer for her and I wept as I prayed.

The tears continued to roll down my cheeks throughout the rest of mass, and this time I felt no inclination to hide it from anyone. I was mourning the living as if it were the dead but I let go of any impulse to hide or trivialize this pain of loss. I mourned freely, and felt this sensation of being loosened, as if a knot in me was being untied. I felt my senses were now whole, as if I had fully recovered my senses from all the untold damage a man suffers growing up in a male dominated society. I felt happy to have overcome my masculine lachrymal challenge.

A few days later, when I was seated inside the Goethe Institute Library in Accra, and about to return a book I had borrowed, I wondered what amount of pain might have caused Fafa to turn cold. What weighed so heavily on her heart, so heavy she chose not to communicate, knowing that my most likely reaction will be to console her or offer an apology if that was warranted. I went over to the Librarian's desk, handed in the copy of Trevor Noah's Born A Crime, and headed for the exit. On my way out my mind was flooded with memories of our good times together. Fafa, she who calls me King Promise, with smiles like kisses, the only Nyabinghi High Priestess I've ever met in person, who taught me how to appreciate House music, a spiritual companion, my own Grace Lee Boggs. A sob ascended my spine.

[samegavi]

Middle

My reflection on this view of New York City and Central Park centres on the dichotomy between the [naturally] given versus the [socially] constructed. Not unlike the difference between sex and gender.

Moving my gaze from left to right, from trees to high-rise urban settlements, I get the sense that one can measure the progress of a civilisation by looking at how much quantitatively it has constructed (physically and culturally) and how less it depends on the naturally given. By asking how far it has succeeded in moving right from left, leaving nature behind, unruffled by its culture and artificial habitat.

We should measure that progress qualitatively!

Reversing my gaze, right to left, from the home of modern man: full of iron, steel and concrete, to the natural world: full of colour and great diversity. Suddenly am not too sure about leaving nature behind. I'll rather it's interwoven: a blend so perfect it's close to impossible spotting the unnatural or the inartificial.

Progress then could be measured by asking how far we've succeeded in creating the middle, blurring the dichotomy between the given and the constructed.

[samegavi]

VOTO is leaving...

...to Accra. We should have known its was a lost battle from the beginning. The city that is the gateway eventually wins.

Don't know what your new coordinates will be. Certainly it will offer all what 6.6541323,-1.5584707 can't

a minutes drive from that international airport.In an Uber of course. More accessible to global people,places and tastes. We're no match!

We are all you loved. Sure about leaving all that behind come January?

the cost-efficient building, that long walk from the junction past the local market, the maze of completed and uncompleted housing, all under a canopy of green, the surprising scorch of sunlight that occasionally makes it through, getting chased by rain every now and then, the amazing talent from that botanical university, the serenity, the quiet, the view....

You'll be missed.

VOTO is a Ghana-based tech startup and social enterprise. They make it easy for businesses, governments, and NGOs to share information and gather feedback through interactive SMS or voice calls in local languages – using mobile to instantly reach across distance, language, and literacy barriers.

The company is shutting down their Kumasi office, concentrating all their Ghana operations in Accra come January 2017. 

[samegavi]

Work

Daybreak. 

Power switches:off to on. Bulbs light up. 

Outside labourers try to get into vehicles umbrella-in-hand. 

Whiles the chauffeured class drive by indifferent, a man rolls off his wife ...then off his bed, throws his nude self into a seat and behind a desk [talent] is instantly at work!

[samegavi]

Thought(s) on our A.I powered future

(i) Auto-Tourism : the coming new wave of travel for leisure where (1) so-called politicians and their families,  businessmen, pastors and all other thieves from the third world flock ,to see with their own eyes, the latest advancement of the advanced world (2) the sophomore coming-year-abroad student, the minimum wage immigrant and the mid 20s-aged millionaires from the last blockbuster IPO all book their flights in earnest: the world that offered slaves then cheap migrant labor then wild-life trophy hunting has a new perk, its the only place on earth where its completely legal for a human to sit behind a wheel and paddle an automobile.

[samegavi]

PROGRESS

It’s Africa day. For most africans it only serves to remind us of the continent’s ills; corruption, abject poverty, self-serving leaders, poor infrastructure and more recently terrorism. In describing our demise we are quick to point fingers at factors such as bad governance, our appetite for aid and our development partners who exploit us with the poison of policies that keep us on our knees.

Our lot will be greatly improved if we lived in a more self-reliant Africa but there is one more factor we hardly talk about though its impact on our well being as a continent of mostly developing nations cannot be overstated.

Technological progress.

You are not likely to hear about the link between the rate of technological progress and our socio-economic problems today. In this post I’ll attempt to point it out.

Am typing this post on a MacBook Pro which has been running on battery power for over 3hrs whiles playing music too. The machine tells me there’s still 65% battery life unused. Impressive. The same however cannot be said for electric power delivery in most economies in Africa. Here in Ghana our state-run monopolies whose duty it is to generate and distribute power centrally struggle to keep our lights on

Our economies cannot grow in the dark.

We usually blame this on the usual suspects; lack of investment, mismanagement etc. The counter to this, however, is also to ask the question ‘Is there no imaginable alternative to a centrally planned, generated and distributed energy?’ The promise of solar technology was that it was going to be this alternative, that my own roof will supply more than enough of my household energy needs. That this dream is yet to arrive in the mass market especially in the developing world (where perhaps like mobile phones its needed the most) is a consequence of the slow if not stagnant rate of progress in solar technology.

Perhaps its the reason our Governments are considering Coal. We cannot leapfrog to solar or any other form of decentralised power. The tech is not there yet!

Contrast this with mobile communications technology. The rate of innovation in mobile has been so fast it’s become a significant contributor to our GDP in less than a decade. Mobile remains the best example of how accelerated technological progress improves our socio-economic lives. It’s not so hard to imagine Africa in a world with a rate of innovation in mobile as slow as in solar:If you live in Ghana you’ll probably be waiting for Ghana Telecom to connect your home to your only means of electronic communication. A landline.

As the rest of the world debates on how to keep the rate of technological innovation accelerating Africa must join in. Our continent stands to gain the most.

[samegavi]

Africa’s ‘Silicon Valley’

Marc Andreessen the eminent Venture Capitalist in an interview with NYTimes columnist Nick Bilton spoke about how the springing up of tech ecosystems around the world is a good thing provided they don’t try to become an exact replica of Silicon Valley. His idea that “there should be 50 different kinds of Silicon Valley” spread around the world struck a chord with me.

The difference lies, according to Marc, in legal barriers that may be absent in certain jurisdictions and hence allow rapid innovations to occur in certain fields that would otherwise not occur in other regions due to regulatory hurdles.So there could be a Biotech Valley, Stem-Cell Valley, 3D-Printing Valley or Drones Valley all in different regions of the world with the least regulatory hurdles for each field.

This had me thinking about Africa.

The tech hubs springing up in Africa to be more precise. There’s a worrying observation in our ecosystem of tech entrepreneurs whose pitches are basically about building copies of successful Consumer Internet products in the West. This Clone-for-Africa attitude is a blind attempt to replicate someone’s success whiles being oblivious to the environmental factors necessary but missing in Africa. Facebook would not have taken off without the fine savvy calibre of US venture capitalists( How long did it take raise money from Peter Thiel?), the ubiquity of computers and internet access in US schools and the culture of the disregard for the impossible that makes people venture into uncharted territory in Silicon Valley where failure is a mark of heroism.

Geography matters!

What then should Africa’s ‘silicon valley’ be about? What can we be best at in the world?

My answer? Development. Solving the third world’s most pressing need: socio-economic development. It’s a problem in plain sight and all around us. Technology has a role to play in this and can do so for profit. There’s a lot of room for innovation here and the market is a huge one(all developing nations in the world)

ICT4D, the use of Information and Communications Technologies for development related goals such as education, health , poverty reduction or human rights is exactly what i have in mind. ICT4D hasn’t been ‘sexy’ enough to attract our young and brilliants minds who are dying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg partly for good reason: ICT4D is usually associated with non-profit operations who are in the business of begging for aid. We need a different campaign.

We need ICT4D$.

ICT for Development and for Profit. We can help get the bottom billion out of socio-economic misery and make money doing it.

Africa can be the valley-of-copycats or the world’s ICT4D$ Valley. It should choose the latter.

[samegavi]

Your Startup's Identity

1. The Social Network and Social Graph for the World 2. Instant Global Public Messaging for free 3. The Global Replacement for SMS 4. Cash for the internet ……………. ……………. ……………. …………….

192,234,001. Pinterest for Africa XXX,XXX,XXX. Nothing for Nowhere

[samegavi]

THE OFFLINE E-MARKETPLACE

MTN, Vodafone, Airtel, Tigo, Orange. These are telecom companies providing communication & data services to subscribers you will say. Afrotechnophile used to think of these companies as ‘minute factories’ manufacturing airtime. Lets think of them differently from these two perspectives for a moment ..or from now on. We propose thinking of them as being Offline MarketPlaces for digital services

These brands have become marketplaces for selling certain digital goods & services that do not need internet connectivity on the consumer’s end for service delivery or order fulfilment.What can you sell in such a market? Airtime, Ring Back Tones(RBT),Magic Voice* to name a few. Services? bill payments,micro-insurance, news, weather info,job alerts,dating, cash transfers and more. The millions of mobile subscribers are the buyers who make this marketplace a vibrant one. Its an offline Amazon.com where you get to consume stuff you are not likely to find in the Amazon catalog.

The market’s technology building blocks has been Voice, SMS and USSD. Mobile Money: the recent addition to the list has made it possible for the addition of bill payments and cash transfers to the list of services customers consume in the marketplace. A very recent service also thanks to mobile money is ‘kwikAdvance’ a credit system that is set to rival the West’s credit card system so missing in our part of the world. It remains to be seen what other offline service opportunities will be unlocked by this offline payments technology.

In Sub-Saharan Africa where internet connectivity is not ubiquitous these telecom brands have built their empire on the huge and profitable offline marketplace. The problem with the offline marketplace however is that its being operated almost as a closed system with no intention of all the players involved to build a developer ecosystem around the technology building blocks {SMS, USSD, Mobile Money}. Try getting an API as a developer from these brands and you will see what we mean.

Enter SMSGH. The Ghanaian tech company is doing an amazing job of making the building blocks of the offline marketplace open and available to developers. By providing APIs to the offline tech (SMS, USSD, Mobile Money ..more) that work on all networks developers now have the opportunity to take their apps

into the offline marketplace and have access to a vast majority of mobile subscribers in Africa for whom offline is the default.

The company is also doing a good job of building an ecosystem around their developer network with past hackathon events and a few developer events coming on soon (We are told).

Well-documented APIs and ecosystem-building events for the offline e- marketplace is now a reality thanks in large part to SMSGH but its only a start. We hope that other tech companies in Africa take note and help push the boundaries for the african developer. 

Special thanks to Antonia Anni (@tonianni) for the beautiful illustration

[samegavi]

The Offline Payments Goldmine

A friend sent me a link to Airtel Money Market, an e-commerce online shop where you can buy music, books and other digital stuff paying with Airtel Money. Coming from Rancard, the software looks well designed but from a product development point of view i feel this effort is misplaced. I have a few reasons but i'll share one which has to do with Airtel Money and how telco's are forgetting their space when it comes to payments.

Mobile Payments is a huge market. The mobile money platforms being rollout by telcos are strongest in the offline segment/space. Online payments work were you have to open an internet browser/Mobile app to pay for a product or service. You need the internet for this. Offline payments on the other hand works without the need for internet on the user's handset. All you need is your handset and a GSM network connection. This is a lower barrier and in a place like Africa this is a huge advantage. In fact for some services/products payment using the offline payment technology is much more convenient. If i had to pay for taxi cab with cash offline mobile money will be the best option….i just pick my phone, not worry about internet connection, tap tap and am done. (M-Pesa is cashing in on this is kenya big time). You can say the same for the payment of bills like TV, Electricity, Data etc

What is worrying in Ghana is that mobile money product managers haven't yet captured the entire offline payments opportunities…I still pay cash when i stop a taxi, pay cash at the drugstore, pay cash at the barber's, pay cash at the toll booth,….all probably 80% of the market left waiting and yet resources are being wasted on taking mobile money online to compete with VISA, MASTERCARD. A battle already lost in my opinion

Perhaps VISA product managers are looking at all this in amusement and are probably cooking up an offline vendor/telco-neutral mobile payment product to take the market away from sleeping telco.

[samegavi]

I was fortunate to be present at the SMSGH-sponsored MPower API Hackathon all day event organised by @DevCongress on Saturday October 5, 2013.

[samegavi]

CONSUMER INTERNET EXPLAINED

I deliberately don't use the word 'e-commerce' in describing what is happening around us like most people do.E-commerce, I think, is a subset of the much broader phenomenon I call Consumer Internet (CI). I'll go ahead and explain what exactly I mean by CI.

Lets focus on the word 'consumer' to start with. Who is a consumer? You! consumers are you and everything living human. Consumers, like you engage in a lot of activities. you sleep, eat, work, spend money on wants and needs, travel, hangout with friends, gossip, tell or listen to stories, share things with others etc.

CI is basically the enhancement to any of consumers activities through internet technologies. The key enhancement can be convenience or speed or (lower)cost or even (better)quality. By internet technologies I don't just mean the internet but also hardware and software that complement the internet in delivering on those enhancements. so yes smartphones are in the CI space but so are the GPRS/GSM-enabled handheld or desktop Point of Sale (POS) devices. You can order food in the comfort of your home and have it delivered, share stuff with a colleague and gossip with your friends today in ways that were not possible before thanks not just to the internet but more importantly to well designed products by players in the CI industry. You probably don't pay with cash at the petrol station anymore...your card is inserted into that handheld POS device and off you go in minutes. Your fuel buying activity and that of many motor vehicle users is enhanced thanks to a CI product. You can pick up your phone today and pay for electricity, tv and other bills whiles sitting on your couch. Yes some of these enhancements can still be refined and made better by other products but what we have now is still way better than what you had to go through before.

There's a lot yet to come in this space in our part of the world. Very soon your road toll fees and traffic offences payment activity will be enhanced by some CI product as is the case in many advanced countries. Wouldn't it be cool if someone enhanced sleep with the power of the internet? Just think of the activities you engage in that is not yet enhanced and you can predict the future.

But if you're not in the prediction business, you believe in inventing the future, you have a great idea for a product in CI, maybe you have some funding but you are short on technical product development talent (software developers + designers) hit me an email.

Consumer Internet is eating Africa and the World!

[samegavi]

Talent & Industry in Africa

Few days to my last day as an employee of a bank in Ghana a colleague pull me aside and asked 'Why are there so many expats in MTN and telecoms general?'

This questions is the inspiration for this blog post. Coming from an industry (Banking) that is bloated with nearly 90% local talent you can understand where my colleague was coming from

But his question offered me an insight into why my experience working in telecoms was a much more exciting one than what i experienced in Banking. Telecom has a sweet blend of local and international talent! I worked with Lebanese, Chinese, Australian, South Africans etc. It is important to emphasize that these not merely foreign employees. The word to use is not foriegn but global or international talent. These are not necessarily just guys who were born elsewhere but guys who have plied their trade in more countries than one, in different geographical regions and different markets. The level of expertise and insight they bring to the table is immense. They complement local talent who due to lack of exposure don't know what they don't know (unknown unknowns). A few locals after years of experience then step unto the international ladder working for global companies outside their home country.

This is in sharp contrast to what i found in the Banking industry in Ghana. You have a bunch of local guys doing what they can with no knowledge of better ways of doing their job and no global talent to shed a glimer of light on those dark areas of their business. The result? A monotonous mediocre culture industry-wide. I hope this situation changes for the better.

The good news is that another industry is emerging in Africa with the same Telecom talent dynamics. Consumer Internet! Companies like Ringier (a Swiss Media Group behind  products like Tisu) and Africa Internet Holding (founded by german RocketInternet & Millicom Group behind products like Jumia) are leading creation of successful online consumer products. They're doing this with a sweet blend of local & international talent.

My advice to anybody stepping out of college today: consider the consumer internet industry!

[samegavi]

An OS years ahead of the competition is about to have another major release? Mac OS X Mavericks....waiting impatiently!

[samegavi]

A Quiet Revolution

MEST is Leading a quiet revolution in Ghana. This has been obvious to me for a while now but the conviction got stronger when i attended the just ended Developer Congress at the MEST campus at East Legon.

The event was exciting but i will not talk about it much in this post. My focus here is how MEST is changing Ghana. In what way? One might ask.

First, its waking up young Ghanaians and taking thier aspirations to the Global stage. Mest is about training young minds in software development and entreprenuership and mentoring them to come up with big ideas for the Global market.And they are succeeding! Look at Saya, Dropifi, RetailTower. Well young people have certainly noticed, to the extent that MEST comes up often when you ask tertiary students the question "Where do you want to go after school"

Secondly, MEST is changing the ghanaian developer community. MEST startup's products are well designed, you could be forgiven for assuming the're from San Francisco when you set your eyes on them. Ghana based developers are raising their game as a result and constantly learning new and better technologies to the benefit of themselves, their employers or their clients. Skills in Git, Node.js, Design Patterns are at the fingertips of MEST EITs(Entrepreneurs in Training) and when you consider that most of these EITs dont have a four year computer science background you can understand why GH developers are sitting up.

Lastly and more importantly to the me is the fact that the local internet/ecommerce market is taking notice and are willingly to pay good money for the talent (not labor) needed to build their online products. Infact a clientele is emerging who are not asking for "website" developers they are asking for "product" developers and designers. This is definitely a change in mindset. Throwing > 10K at a solid product team  for your online project is beginning to look economical.

We are still at the beginning of this revolution, there's definitely more to come.