Building Ghana’s Knowledge Economy Base

Building Ghana’s Knowledge Economy Base
By Franklin Cudjoe

Any astute researcher on African educational history will attest to the fact that Ghana has been a pacesetter in many aspects of education in Africa since colonial times. Colonial records even have it that at the time Ghana could rub shoulders with some developed countries with her quality of education.

Unfortunately as years rolled by, Ghana’s educational standards kept falling with every reform program as with every change in government.

In April 2004, more than a quarter of a million pupils wrote their first external exams in preparation to enter high school. Half of that number, Ghana’s Minister of Education tells me, will end up on the streets, not because they will not obtain qualifying grades, but their prospective institutions lack the capacity to absorb them. Still others might be branded never-do-wells and be forgotten. I leave readers to Imagine the economic and social costs, as this has been ongoing since the last major educational reform in 1973.

This plummeting scenario can be likened to the innumerable ill-fated poverty reduction papers and strategies that are churned out by social and manpower departments in recent times, with oversight responsibilities by our so called development partners.

Ghana’s new direction is embarking on an entrepreneurial-based educational curriculum with Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) as the nerve stimulus. Success stories of the Far East have shown that we can replicate ICT-powered entrepreneurship in Africa. IT brains aver that statistical evidence in information technology weighs heavily against the continent. Accounting for 12 per cent of the world’s population, Africa records an abysmal two percent of global telephone lines and one percent Internet connections. Sadly, out of a population of 20 million I hear there are only 500,000 active computers and 100,000 local email addresses in my country. There is an annual average turnover of 300 Computer Science and Engineers from the country’s traditional Universities, most of whom until recently, received computer tuition on black boards with a limited number of annoyingly slow computers. I had received two years of basic computer programming as part of my Land Economy studies in 2001on something called FORTRAN 77. In that period of my University education, I had access to one of the junks only twice.

Incidentally, Ghana alongside South Africa is coming out from the cold. Ghana is said to be the second African country after South Africa to get Internet connectivity. But as we journey into the world of the chips to ensure sustainable productivity, there are significant cost barriers we have to overcome. Ghana’s first Internet Service Provider, Dr. Nii Narku avers that to close Ghana’s digital divide by a little margin, 1 million personnel have to be trained and an additional 1 million PCs and 1 million telephone lines have to be in place. A total of US$2 billion stares us in the face in a country that turns annual revenue of about $1 billion with ‘back bone costs’.

A contribution

In my quest to promote an open society and help reduce the costs my country will bear transferring knowledge in IT, I did not turn down a request from the Director of the Global Technology Academy to represent the academy in Ghana especially after being associated with their last project in the Gambia.

The Global Technology Academy is a non-profit organization based in Garfield, Seattle and led by Kjell Rye, a lead tutor at Garfield High School. The academy’s mission is to teach youth in developing communities worldwide, how to compete in a global information technology-based economy through, but not limited to, receiving previously owned computers, software, networking technology and training. Our definition of training is refurbishing information technology equipment, teaching processes involved, and learning how to be socially responsible and sensitive to environmental, economic and cultural issues of the community, in a sustainable and self-sufficient manner. The creation of the Ghana Technology Academy is the seventeenth international project.

In fact, I rescheduled my visits to Europe, even though I was to seek newer ideas of creating wealth in a country. I thought this was a practical approach to affecting the lives of my fellow countrymen and women, a result of the ideas we brainstorm in boardrooms and at international conferences. And so I gave it my blessing.

So, Seattle area students, teachers and volunteers refurbished 150 computers and sent them by container to Ghana. Ghana’s Ministry of Education, Garfield High School, Skyline High School, Issaquah School District, The Pacific Institute, Northwest Modular Company, Microsoft Corporation and Venture Crew One were the main collaborators of the first phase of the project. Between April 4-19 2004, the Garfield team of four adults and eight female and male students averaged aged 15 and 40 Ghanaian students and tutors selected from across the country, spent day and night in a typical third world school dormitory eating local food, building the main refurbishing centre and the computer lab, while visiting other institutions to assess their level of need. Five institutions dotted over the country received up to 20 computers and the trained Ghana team will be assisting in setting their labs for them. We were thrice on the Ghana’s major television station, and several local media aired our projects.

Ghana’s Vice President commissioned the main computer laboratory and refurbishing centre. Averring that ICT drives the global wheel of progress, the Vice President said, "In today's world, those who fail to join the process risk extinction." Ghana’s Ministers of Communications and Technology, and Education both said it was a noble sacrifice for children without access to education, to be helped through ICT as that serves as a catalyst for their development. http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=56072

Today the academy in Ghana is being designed and built as a complete computer-refurbishing centre that is localized and will handle thousands of computers per year in addition to training and certifying hundreds of students. Our short-term goal is to install 1000 computers in schools across the country by the end of the year and that is on course as you read this script. Our estimation is that we could refurbish computers in Ghana at unit cost of between $30 and $40 per computer. A million computers comes up to $40 million, plus localized training of a million personnel which could all come up to or a little below half a billion dollars.

Significantly, while projects of other organizations are designed to be perpetually dependent on the beneficiaries, three important values are always held by the Global Technology Academy in executing their projects. These are the sustainability of learning and equipment, capacity building of disenfranchised youth and finally fostering local control and individual freedom.

I want to see Ghanaian graduates to begin thinking about creating jobs instead of holding ‘lifeless’ paper certificates from one office to another, under the sweltering tropical heat only to end up, if lucky, with a slave wage paying white collar job, talking local politics and working paper puzzles to win the weekend lottery.

Even though I was on the ground most often to ensure the success of the first project, I learned how to dismantle a computer and set it up again, not to mention a host of Microsoft Office tools that I have known and continue to learn. Many of the students who had heard about computers but had never touched them had similar tales to tell.

So while American Economists and Political Scientists continue to harangue on the vices and virtues associated with outsourcing, this is one great example of real foreign investment even though it’s non-profit. In the area of IT, this will create jobs for poor people in the long run. There would not have been the need to even debate outsourcing in the area of IT for Africa, if only we had allowed the evolution of an open society that made possible, "the African traditional computing system that now forms the bases for contemporal computers". Thus the potential for capacity building which will make Africans part of technology creators and not just buyers exists and we need to start exploiting it.

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