67843 Ghana Country Study: A roadmap for the strategic application of information and communication technology Final report November 2011 Prepared for the World Bank By Table of Contents Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................ 5 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 7 Methodology ...................................................................................................................................... 8 1. Creating a critical mass of users – the central argument ..................................... 10 2. The transition from a focus on infrastructure to services and applications 13 2.1 Affordable international fibre and broadband prices ................................... 13 2.2 The shift from basic to feature-rich and smart-phones................................ 16 2.3 The growth of local services and content .......................................................... 17 2.4 The shift from bandwidth selling to complex services ................................. 19 2.5 ICT Take-up in the different sectors .................................................................... 21 2.5.1 Public sector ......................................................................................................... 21 2.5.2 Private sector ....................................................................................................... 22 2.6 Comparisons – Ghana alongside other countries ........................................... 23 2.7 Ghana’s SWOT analysis: Perceptions of the issues from the ICT sector 25 3. The Current State of ICT-Enabled Services and Applications in Ghana ......... 28 3.1 Different genres of ICT services and applications implemented .............. 28 3.1.1 Information-based.............................................................................................. 29 3.1.2 Transparency ....................................................................................................... 30 3.1.3 Improving efficiencies ...................................................................................... 30 3.1.4 Transaction-based services .................................................................................. 31 3.1.5 Entertainment ...................................................................................................... 32 3.2 Constraints affecting the scaling-up of ICT-enabled services and applications ................................................................................................................................ 32 3.2.1 The attitude of mobile operators to content ............................................ 33 3.2.2 The limitations of the e-payments landscape .......................................... 33 3.2.3 The shortcomings of the available business models for services and applications ........................................................................................................................... 34 3.2.4 The lack of export capacity in the ICT sector ........................................... 36 3.2.5 The need to mainstream pilot projects ...................................................... 36 3.2.6 Need to change top-down approaches to implementation ................ 37 3.2.7 Lack of strategic leadership ............................................................................ 38 4. Getting from here to there: actions needed to scale up ICT service and apps...39 4.1 Blockages to growth ................................................................................................... 39 4.1.1 User broadband prices still too high: .......................................................... 39 4.1.2 Fragmented m-money market delays critical mass: ............................. 39 4.1.3 Attitude of mobile operators to content: ................................................... 40 2 4.1.4 Mainstreaming pilot projects into Government – new models needed: .................................................................................................................................................... 40 4.1.5 Reaching the un-reached – creating new models: ....................................... 41 4.1.6 Lack of enabling, strategic leadership – who takes responsibility?: .... 42 4.2 Enabling recommendations to break out of the “chicken-or-the- egg�cycle ...................................................................................................................................... 42 4.2.1 Seeding local content: ....................................................................................... 43 4.2.2 Government engaging with social media to create interactions with citizens ..................................................................................................................................... 43 4.2.3 Discussion networks to encourage developer community to grow and scale –up:........................................................................................................................ 44 4.2.4 Give support to enable entrepreneurs to become export-capable companies: ............................................................................................................................. 44 4.2.5 Skills and experience deficit: .......................................................................... 44 Appendix 1....................................................................................................................................... 46 Appendix 2...................................................................................................................................... 47 Appendix 3....................................................................................................................................... 62 Appendix 4....................................................................................................................................... 64 3 Charts and Tables Chart 1: Creating a circle of growth Table 1: Domestic broadband monthly – Ghana vs Kenya Table 2: Mobile broadband monthly – Ghana vs Kenya Table 3: Internet subscribers – Ghana vs Kenya Chart 2: Sub-Saharan Africa – Changes in Internet Access by mobile Table 4: Top 10 most used websites – Ghana vs Kenya Table 5: Comparisons between Ghana and other countries Table 6: Ghana – SWOT Analysis Table 7: Different genres of ICT services and apps implemented Table 8: Overview of Top 10 Sub-Saharan countries by GDP (PPP) and population Table 9: ICT Services and Apps in Ghana and support services 4 Executive Summary The central argument of this study is that Ghana needs to achieve a critical mass of users of e-enabled services, whether by PC, mobile or tablet. Now cheaper international bandwidth is available, prices need to be reduced to end-users to open up the market for these services to a wider range of users. To be successful, the market for these services needs local content, services and applications. Experience from elsewhere suggests that once bandwidth becomes a commodity, there is a transition to providing value-added services of this kind. 1.1 This critical mass encompasses three key factors: the use of devices that can deliver a wide range of services (for example, feature-rich and smart- phones) at prices that allow the maximum number of people to own them; the availability and widespread use of m-payment systems that offer micro-transactions to facilitate easy payment for services; and enough users (either individual or corporate) able to pay for the services. 1.2 There has been a dramatic increase in the use of computers in both the public and private sectors but they still tend to be used largely for administrative purposes rather than productivity or e-enabled services. With certain exceptions, the smaller the organisation, the less likely it is to have widespread access to computers and the Internet amongst its employees. 1.3 In terms of scaling up its services and applications, Ghana has a number of significant strengths (safe, politically stable, small but innovative developer sector, potential content assets and a user base nearing critical mass) and considerable opportunities (potential to become sub-regional platform for ICT; call centres; and opportunities for PPPs to implement Government services). However, the strengths and opportunities are finely balanced with significant weaknesses and threats. 1.4 Ghana has implemented a range of services and applications and these are described in detail in Appendix 2. These services and applications fall into five different (but sometimes overlapping) genres: 3.1.1 Information- based; 3.1.2 Transparency; 3.1.3 Improving Efficiencies; 3.1.4 Transaction-based services; and 3.1.5 Entertainment. 1.5 The key constraints on the scaling-up of these services are described in section 3.2. These constraints include: the attitude of mobile operators to content; the limitations of the e-payment landscape; the shortcomings of the available business models; inadequate export capacity in the ICT sector; the need to mainstream pilot projects in the public sector; top- down approaches to implementation; and a lack of strategic leadership. 5 Concrete recommendations for achieving these objectives are provided under two headings in section four (see page 39): 4.1 Blockages to growth; and 4.2 Enabling recommendations to break out of the “chicken-or-the-egg� cycle. 6 Introduction At the end of February 2011, the World Bank commissioned Balancing Act to assess the innovative ICT applications already being used in the country, the impact of these applications, and provide recommendations on how these applications could be scaled up in the future. The study is part of a wider World Bank initiative to scale up the strategic application of information and communication technology in Africa. The Terms of Reference for the Study acknowledged that Ghana had used “technology to uplift living standards and propel the country forward�. Indeed, its last major policy document in 2003 was called ICT for Accelerated Development Policy’ (ICT4AD). At its heart was a key objective:�(to) engineer an ICT-led socio-economic development process with the potential to transform Ghana into a middle income, information rich, knowledge-based and technology driven economy and society.� The Terms of Reference for the Study proposed six activities: (a) Take stock of emerging uses of ICT across sectors and of good practices in Ghana; (b) Assess how ICTs are changing business models in strategic sectors including Agriculture, Climate Change Adaption, Education, Health, Energy/CleanTech, and the delivery of Public Services. A cross-cutting theme will look at how the ICT services sector itself is being harnessed to promote innovation, job creation and export potential. (c) Identify applications that have had significant impact in Ghana that have the potential of being scaled up, and propose strategies for scaling them up in Africa. (d) Identify binding constraints that impact ICT adoption and scaling-up of effective models, and measures to address these constraints; (e) Identify the role of different actors and stakeholders (private, public, development community, civil society, etc); (f) Contribute to the formulation of an “Transformation-Ready Roadmap� on the strategic application of ICTs in each of the focus sectors. The terms of reference specify the following sectors as important for the study: Agriculture, Education, Health, Improving Delivery of Public Services, development of ICT services and the development of mobile payment systems. The study takes as its main assumption that ICT can provide a number of different ways that can help the social and economic growth of a country. However, it also looks at the interplay between things that ICT can make happen and the broader factors affecting Ghana. 7 The structure of the report is as follows: Section 1: Creating critical mass – the central argument. This section outlines the overall argument of the report. Section 2: The transition from infrastructure to Services and Applications. This section looks at: affordable international fibre and broadband prices; the shift from basic to feature-rich and smart-phones; the growth of local services and content; the shift from bandwidth selling to complex services; ICT Take-Up in Different Sectors; Comparisons – Ghana alongside other countries; and a Ghana SWOT analysis – perceptions of the ICT sector. Section 3: The Current State of ICT-Enabled Services and Applications in Ghana. This section describes what has currently been developed and implemented (3.1) and the constraints affecting the scaling-up of ICT services and applications. Section 4: Getting from here to there: actions needed to scale-up ICT services and apps. This section outlines strategic objectives and interventions and concludes with recommendations to achieve effective scaling-up. The Appendices provide an overview of i) Top 10 Sub-Saharan countries by GDP ii) a more detailed description of ICT Services and Applications in Ghana; iii) list of people interviewed; and iv) a list of background documents. A considerable number of people have given both time and ideas that have enriched this report and we would like to formally thank them, particularly Mavis Ampah and her colleagues from the ICT Unit of the World Bank, whose comments have enriched the redrafted report. However, we take full responsibility for the final form in which those ideas have been given shape in this report. Methodology The methodology for this study has three parts to it: an examination of the African ICT roadmap; comparisons with Kenya and other countries; and the gathering of expert opinion both from the public and private sectors. Tracking Africa’s ICT roadmap: In the development of ICT in Africa, there has been a clear roadmap in terms of how the sector has grown and strengthened. This roadmap has significant similarities to the pattern of developments in other developing continents as well following elements of the developed world path. The idea is not that every country follows an identical route to the same levels of development but that certain developments happen in a given sequence. For example, before the influx of international fibre, the high price of satellite bandwidth made it difficult for widespread use of the Internet to develop in African countries. The presence of a single monopoly provider in most countries 8 meant that there was limited investment and no competition on price and service. Each of these things represented blockages to the further development of ICT. Once removed, it allowed the market to develop to the next level. These blockages can be traced along the line of the value chain. So for example, the presence of more than one international cable landing station will mean lower wholesale, international bandwidth prices. However, as this study on Ghana demonstrates, low international bandwidth prices do not always translate into lower prices to the end-user at the retail level. There are often issues affecting national and local bandwidth access. And operators themselves may not pass on these savings on international bandwidth to their customers and this will be a blockage to market development. Lower retail prices for customers opens up the possibility of a far wider number of people using the Internet. Once this starts to happen, a “critical mass� of users is reached and networking effects begin to be felt: each person connected has more possibilities of connecting to others. The size of the potential critical mass of users is affected by the availability of content and services. If there are structural issues about the way content users are paid, this will be a blockage to market development. Likewise, if there are not trusted online methods of payment that can be widely accessed, this will be another blockage to development. This African ICT roadmap is based on looking at the development of the market and seeking to identify blockages to the next stage of development. The assumption is that Government might act to remove blockages but it is unlikely to have the means to deliver ICT services by itself. Put simply, all of the public interest, developmental activities that ICT can deliver ride on the back of there being a critical mass of users: everything else is one hand clapping in an empty room. Comparisons with Kenya: There are almost no direct country-to-country comparisons that are exact in allowing like-for-like comparisons or wholly fair. Therefore the purpose of making comparisons between Ghana and Kenya is to see how each country compares to the other when looking at the issues raised and whether there are lessons in terms of things that might be learned that could be helpful to Ghana’s future development. Gathering expert opinion: This part of the methodology might best be described as “Delphi Lite�. We carried out a wide range of one-to-one interviews and group meetings across the public, private and civil society sectors. The one- to-one interviewees were asked: how things had changed over the last 5 years in terms of ICT?; what blockages were hampering further positive change?; and what the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats were for Ghana’s development in ICT terms?. At several points during the study, these perceptions were put in front of groups of individuals and their reactions to the findings were noted. 9 1. Creating a critical mass of users – the central argument The development of ICT has had a broad underlying pattern that has been visible in a number of different African countries. The path of transition from almost no ICT use to much more widespread use has had many twists and turns but a lot of the same key developments are apparent, even where market blockages have occurred. The key turning point over the last three years has been the introduction of much cheaper international wholesale bandwidth to the continent: cheaper bandwidth is like the petrol of the new global economy. Prices over five years have fallen from US$5,000 per mbps to nearer US$300 per mbps on both sides of the continent. Cheaper international prices are beginning to put pressure on national network prices: if it costs US$300 per mbps to get traffic from London to Accra, it no longer makes sense for it to cost US$1,000-1,200 per mbps from Accra to Kumasi. Cheaper international and national bandwidth prices have led in time to cheaper retail prices to end-users. Past experience in other African countries shows there are delays, but in the end prices come down where competition exists. With bandwidth becoming something sold at commodity prices, a transition begins to occur. Companies no longer sell scarce bandwidth at high prices but move to selling services that use the cheaper bandwidth. Internet services have become something that are not solely the privilege of a small number of people and have moved to being something much more widely used. The shift has begun to occur in many African countries with the young adopting international applications like Facebook and Twitter. Experience from elsewhere shows that whilst widespread consumer use starts with international applications, local services and applications follow once a sufficient scale of market exists. Out of this process of creating local applications and services comes both wealth (through jobs and investment) and more effective ways of meeting citizens’ needs by the private sector and Government. Technology is clearly a driver of social and economic growth even if the relationship between different elements of this pattern of growth are less well understood. The questions for Government and financing institutions/agencies are two-fold: how is it possible to accelerate the process of transition in terms of ICT up-take and the scaling-up of services? And secondly, what roles can the private sector, Government, civil society and development partners play in this process? The dilemma in the early stages of this transition to a market for online services and applications is the “chicken-or-the-egg� nature of something that is busy being born. Without sufficient access to relatively cheap Internet, there will not be enough of a “critical mass� of users to create a market size where success is possible for developers of services and applications. But without the services 10 that will attract users, then it is hard to get the “critical mass� of users that will justify lower access prices. The primary driver of the creation of a critical mass of users for ICT services and applications is the private sector: its attitude to the “chicken-or-the-egg� choices available at this stage are crucial. Therefore continued investment by the private sector in both improving all parts of network delivery and extending it to more people remains paramount, alongside building up content and services. Investment from mobile operators in infrastructure will continue, but the shift to content and services (and customers for them) will mean that new investors will need to be attracted into Ghana. These new investors will be: independent players wanting to deliver cheaper broadband (including Triple Play) in ways that compete effectively with existing players; local content and services providers1; and pan-continental and international media companies. The role of Government and funders in this process is three-fold: firstly, breaking the “chicken-or-egg� cycle by intervening in ways that open up ICT use to citizens; secondly, for Government to remove any remaining market blockages; and thirdly, by piggy-backing more effective service delivery on the emerging ICT networks. The biggest driver of change for ICT-enabled services is the achievement of critical mass at all levels. This critical mass encompasses three key factors: the use of devices that can deliver a wide range of services (for example, feature-rich and smart-phones) at prices that allow the maximum number of people to own them; the availability and widespread use of m-payment systems that offer micro-transactions to facilitate easy payment for services; and enough users (either individual or corporate) able to pay for the services. From the point of view of the developer of the ICT services and applications, a single country market may have insufficient critical mass to sustain the development of a new start-up. Even with the most optimistic assumptions, Ghana’s national market may be insufficient to sustain a large number of ICT entrepreneurs and companies. Therefore it is important to look at how Ghana is able to export its expertise to other markets in order for it to be successful in the medium-term. Chart 1 below summarises all of the elements that need to be in place to create ICT-enabled services. The purpose of the chart is to identify specific areas where intervention may need to be made to assist the creation of critical mass. In order for entrepreneurs to create services, they need to have the skills or means to acquire the necessary skills. Once they have these skills, they need to have ideas that are innovative in the context they are operating. In order for their ideas to turn into reality, they need capital (often modest amounts at start- up) to launch and crucially, the skill and resources to market their service. 1For example, South Africa’s Naspers: http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/en/issue-no-526/top-story/naspers- backs-kenyan/en 11 For cost-effective and demand driven ICT-enabled service, there needs to be the infrastructure to deliver it affordably and effectively, and the distribution channels (the Internet, mobile companies) to put it in the hands of users who want it. The entrepreneur has to produce a service or product that is wanted or needed by broadly one of two audiences: firstly, middle class Ghanaians who have the resources to afford it and those at the bottom of the pyramid who may need it but will have greater difficulty paying2. It is worth noting that However, the more successful of the continent’s m-money servicers have hit both of these markets and have stood a greater chance of success. Aiming just at users from the bottom-of-the pyramid makes attracting a critical mass of users significantly more difficult. The reverse is also true. Chart 1: Creating a circle of growth ICT-enabled services can be paid for in one of three ways: i) through advertising and sponsorship from companies wanting to reach the buyers of the service; ii) through micro-payments on transactions; or iii) through the people or businesses using the service paying for it. This money goes back to the entrepreneurs and enables them to scale-up their idea and to create further new ideas. The better the ideas and the bigger the number of users, the more potential advertising revenue will be available. The greater the number of users, the more the chance that there will be enough willing to pay for it. However, without a successfully functioning ICT-enabled services market, Government is unable to “piggy-back� public interest services on the distribution channels the private sector has created and reach its users. Government by itself cannot create this successful market. Nonetheless, the private sector and Government both want and need a critical mass of users to be in place to achieve their objectives. 2In practice, the more nuanced categories of LSM (living Standards Measures) are more useful but the argument is being made in broad terms. LSMs are socio-demographic categories used by market researchers. 12 However, the requirement for critical mass holds true for all of the elements identified in the circle for growth in the chart above. Ghana’s wider use of ICT is being held back by a lack of critical mass in the right ICT skills3 and the range and variety of those skills. Being a relatively small country, some of those skills either need to be acquired outside the country (hence the importance of the diaspora) or “imported� into the country. The Silicon Valley-type locations where ICT entrepreneurs thrive best have a critical mass of the following: i) people who have succeeded as entrepreneurs; ii) people who want to invest; and iii) people with ideas. With a critical mass of ideas, there is a Darwinian process that takes place that, for better or for worse, weans out the ideas that are less likely to be successful. Currently Ghana comes up short under all three of the headings above. There needs to be enough sources of start-up and early-life capital and also social impact investment networks for public interest projects. Social Impact investment companies can contribute much needed business insights for early life businesses. The need to create critical mass at all levels to deliver the scaling up of ICT services and applications is the central thread of the argument of this report. Without achieving this critical mass, the circle of growth shown in chart 1 above will never be sufficiently large to allow scaling-up to occur. 2. The transition from a focus on infrastructure to services and applications 2.1 Affordable international fibre and broadband prices Connectivity is the petrol of the new global economy, and before other things begin to happen it has to be both plentiful and relatively cheap. Ghana was one of a handful of African countries that was connected to the SAT3 international fibre cable in 2002. However, the monopoly incumbent kept prices high for many years. The country now has access to three international cables and by 2012 will be in the unusually advantageous position of having access to five of these cables.4 Ghana is connected by fibre to more of its neighbours than Nigeria. There is fibre cable out via Togo to Lagos and one to the north connecting to Burkina Faso. In addition, there is only a small gap to be closed between Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. The country’s cheap landing station prices – which could fall to the sub-$100 level in 12-18 months time- should attract regional traffic. 3 At all levels in terms of technical and software development skills and both overall management and project management. 4 Already operating: SAT3 (consortium of incumbents), Main One (independent of carriers) and Glo One (Nigeria’s Globacom). To be launched: WACS (carrier-owned) and ACE (carrier-owned). The WACS cable has landed in Ghana but is not yet operational. 13 The price for wholesale bandwidth has fallen over the last five years from US$2,500 per mbps per month to US$297 per mbps per month. More competitive cables will push prices even lower: the arrival of the third cable has already done that. However, although users are now being offered more bandwidth, prices at a retail level have not fallen as much as they have in Kenya. The fall in wholesale bandwidth prices in Kenya has been steeper as the country has moved from satellite to fibre. Retail price comparisons are always difficult but the ones below (Tables 1-3) tell a fairly clear story: the lowering of domestic broadband prices in Ghana lags behind reductions in Kenya, and Ghana’s prices are still structured to ration download capacity, and hence use. The latter makes less and less sense as the amount of international bandwidth increases. Retail prices need to fall to between US$15-30 for reliable download capacities of 2 mbps or more. In the case of Kenya, prices have fallen and download capacities increased but in the case of Ghana, download capacities have increased but prices have not really gone down much. For example, the current 1 mbps product priced in November 2011 is only approximately US$2 cheaper than an equivalent product in May 2011. Table 1: Domestic broadband monthly – Ghana vs Kenya (November 2011) Operator Download Capacity WiMAX/ADSL Wananchi Turbo 1: 1 Unlimited US$10.82 mbps Turbo 4: 4 Unlimited US$21.64 mbps Turbo 8: 8 Unlimited US$37.88 mbps Vodafone Browser Lite: 1 Unlimited US$33.48 Ghana mbps Streamer Lite: Unlimited US$63.93 4 mbps Streamer Max: Unlimited US$88.28 8 mbps Currency conversions in tables 1 and 2 calculations dated 21/11/2011 It is also clear that Ghana’s mobile broadband prices are currently significantly more expensive than those found in the Kenyan market. Prices for pre-paid bundles have come down but are still not comparable to those found in Kenya. 14 Table 2: Mobile broadband monthly – Ghana vs Kenya (November 2011) Operator Pre Pay Bundle Price Safaricom 1.5 GB US$10.82 3 GB US$21.64 8 GB US$43.30 Vodafone Ghana 1.5 GB US$18.26 2.5 GB US$27.40 5 GB US$51.57 MTN 1 GB US$12.17 2.5 GB US$24.35 4 GB US$36.53 There are now two fairly extensive national fibre networks (MTN, Vodafone) and these will be joined by the NITA-managed Government fibre network5. Wholesale pricing on the Vodafone network is based on capacity taken, not geographic distance. Most of the major urban areas have metronet fibre and the number of metronets6 is increasing. However, local access to the bandwidth delivered by fibre remains spotty and there are significant gaps in wireless coverage, both in urban and rural areas. There are currently no public plans to deliver Fibre-To- The-Cabinet, Fibre-To-The-Home or cable. Kenya already has Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) cable and another operator is going to roll-out Fibre-To-The- Home. These faster speed connections enable a wider range of services and applications, including video streaming and downloads. Kenya’s cheaper mobile broadband prices have seen an explosion in mobile Internet subscribers but the low number of subscribers by other means (37,356) in January 2011 reflected its higher prices until shortly after that point. By June 2011, this figure had gone up by 83%. Ghana’s figure for Internet subscribers other than by mobile is up from around 10,000 in 2002 to between 45,000- 50,000 in 2010. Ghana’s regulator NCA does not provide Internet figures so the data below is estimated based on data gathered in the Spring of 2011. Table 3: Internet subscribers – Ghana vs Kenya (June 2011) Type Kenya Ghana Mobile subscribers 4,189,720 1,000,000+ All other forms (fixed, 68,567 50,000+ fixed wireless, satellite and cable According to market research company Synovate’s survey in 20107 covering only urban areas in 10 regions, 17% of those sampled used the Internet yesterday. An Audienscapes survey8 in 2009 covering both urban and rural areas found that 5 Financed by the Republic of China. 6 Metronets: A fibre network connecting locations in an urban area. 7 1745 respondents. 8 2051 respondents. 15 4% had access to the Internet; 7% in urban areas and 1% in rural areas. 4% nationally is just under a million people. 2.2 The shift from basic to feature-rich and smart-phones Voice access has grown exponentially over the last ten years. In 2000, Ghana had 85,971 mobile subscribers but by August 2011 this had grown to 18.89 million, a penetration rate of 80.5%.9 Voice and SMS have become both business and consumer tools. However, there is a still a need to deliver voice and data to the 20% of the population who remain unconnected. Access to the Internet via mobile phone in Ghana is getting much easier as both device prices and access charges are falling. Feature rich phones that have Internet access can be bought for GHC50-80 (US$33-53). In terms of the device pyramid shown below (Chart 2), Ghana is ahead of the pattern shown: one major operator estimates that 32% of the phones in the market are either smartphones or feature rich phones10: Chart 2: Sub-Saharan Africa - Changes in Internet access by mobile In terms of mobile data coverage, there is now 3G coverage outside of buildings in all urban areas but not inside of all buildings. In addition, there are an estimated 1,000+ Wi-Fi hot-spots across Ghana, but mainly focused in urban areas. MTN, Airtel, Vodafone and Tigo all have 3G coverage. 9 The actual figure is lower because of multiple SIM use but nonetheless the figure is in the upper range in continental terms. 10 A new local mobile handset assembly company rLG has set up and this may assist this transition. 16 2.3 The growth of local services and content Ten years ago there were no easy methods for conducting financial transactions electronically in Ghana. Now almost all of the mobile operators have an m-money product that their subscribers can use, and an increasing number of companies and utilities have signed agreements to accept payment from a mobile phone. There are also three platform-agnostic payment platforms described in detail in the report.. Nevertheless, actual regular users11 of m-money systems would seem to be under half million. The main reason given by operators for this relatively low number is that Ghana is a cash-based economy. It is worth noting, however, that Uganda and Tanzania which have similar characteristics are now breaking the million mark in terms of users. But the adoption of social media in Ghana has been a great deal quicker as most users are probably in the less conservative, early adopter 18-35 age group. Between August 2010 and October 2011, Facebook subscribers in Ghana increased by 56.6% from 621,000 to 1,096,100: it is the most used site in Ghana. By comparison, Kenya has 1,217,000 subscribers but with a larger population. On this basis, Ghana has a Facebook user for every 22.2 people whereas Kenya has only one per every 32.8 people. A large part of Ghana’s Internet traffic is from users of You Tube which is Ghana’s sixth most used site12. Twitter numbers are still relatively small but it does not yet have a local “short code� for mobile use. Ghana’s Ministry of Information has a Facebook page but it has only slightly over 1,000 friends but the President’s Facebook page has 16,264 people who indicated they liked it13. But there is no equivalent in Ghana of a private CEO like Bob Colleymore of Safaricom in Kenya who talks directly to his customers from his Twitter account14. Also in response to a budget announcement, the Kenyan Treasury received 3,000 responses by Twitter, Facebook, e-mails and blogs, a process initiated by the Minister from his Facebook page. There are also two ways in which access to local content has been optimised: firstly Ghana’s two Internet Exchange Points (which allow local exchange of Ghana traffic) are interconnected; and secondly, there is a local Google cache server which makes download and response times much faster. In this case as well, Ghana compares very favourably with Kenya which also has both of these things in place. 11 Registered user levels are much higher. 12 The number of views for Ghanaian You Tube material: Adam’s Apples snippet (8,836), Princess Tyra (22,100), GMA 2009 – Christiana Love and Kwaku Gyasu (26,536), and Highlife from Ghana (Tumi Ebow Ansa): 64,092. 13 President Jonathan Goodluck has 350,000 friends on Facebook. 14 Colleymore had 6,865 followers on Twitter in May 2011. 17 Table 4: Top 10 most used websites – Ghana vs Kenya Ghana Kenya 1. Facebook 1. Facebook 2. Google.com.gh 2. Google.co.ke 3. Google 3. Google 4. Yahoo! 4. Yahoo! 5. myjoyonline.com 5. You Tube 6. You Tube 6. Blogger.com 7. Peace FM 7. Wikipedia 8. BBC Online 8. Twitter 9. Wikipedia 9. Daily Nation 10. Ghana Web 10. Wordpress.com Source: Alexa.com Yellow overlay = local sites. Table 4 above shows that Ghana has three significant local sites (highlighted in yellow) in the Top 10 most used websites by country. By contrast, Kenya has only one local website in its top 10 but it has far more user-generated content shown by the presence of blog software sites, Blogger.com, Twitter and Wordpress.com. Elsewhere in developing countries, the pattern is that local content and variants of international sites like Facebook begin to develop once there is a significant user base. To encourage localisation, Google has added Ga and Ewe to the languages it supports. However, not all services are via the Internet. There are a number of interesting SMS-based services. Tigo in Ghana has a funeral insurance service where credits are awarded on the basis of voice use, and a mobile health information service (a user can check symptoms by sending details to short code number). MTN has launched a mobile-based life insurance scheme targeted at the low-income market: clients pay their premiums through the company’s mobile money service, which launched in Ghana in 2009. All of Ghana’s mobile operators have had both online and SMS content offers but none have been as successful as the social media and local sites identified above. Indeed, mobile operators have been relatively slow to get to grips with local online content needs. MTN has announced it will open an Apps Store this year (2011) but will start by doing so in the much larger Nigerian market15. The mobile phone in Ghana is becoming a media in its own right as well as just a media delivery platform. In the Audiencescapes survey, 16% of those surveyed said they got news and information from their mobile phones compared to only 18% for newspapers. Often the number of those accessing news on the Internet– whether on PC or mobile or both – is considerably larger than the readership of physical newspapers. As Internet use grows in African countries, the amount of money spent on advertising and social media will grow. Discussions with local advertising agencies and key advertising spenders seems to indicate that online advertising might in 2-3 years time become 3-5% of overall advertising spend, up from a 15 This had not happened by the end of November 2011. 18 figure below 1%. This growth is both driven externally by international clients who have global social media strategies, and internally by agencies and companies who can see the increasing size of the online market. Although all of the above is promising, there is still a deficit in local content and online services. Local sites are relatively undeveloped as only seven feature in Ghana’s Top 50 most used sites. This deficit is not because Ghana does not produce local content: for example, it has film, broadcast and music industries (what might be called creative industries) that generate home-grown production. The reason for this content deficit is that local content producers of this kind have been slow to adopt online as a means of marketing and delivery.16 2.4 The shift from bandwidth selling to complex services These changes over the last ten years have produced a more diverse ICT business ecology that includes call centres, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) work, website design, IT network and software set up and maintenance and data centres. Companies like mobile services delivery platform provider Rancard Solutions and Busy Internet, for example, have shifted from their initial emphasis and found different business niches. In the case of Rancard it has become a mobile content delivery company and in the case of Busy Internet, it has become a corporate ISP as well as a cyber café. The growing complexity reflects a shift from companies largely selling voice and bandwidth to offering value-added services to those who use bandwidth. Improved connectivity at a low cost both allows the development of new services (particularly on feature-rich and smart-phones) and drives the need for more server capacity in data centres. These “cloud computing� based services could enable users to buy time on a PC, whilst their work and software is stored elsewhere and thus lower the cost entry barrier to PC use. One part of this growing complexity in the ICT sector has been the slow but steady growth of the entrepreneur and developer community. Ten years ago Ghana had some of the first pioneers in Africa in this field but the circumstances were not sufficiently promising to sustain all of them. However, some have survived and others have come into the market. Not all of the newcomers have been local Ghanaians: a number of diaspora Ghanaians have returned with international skills and some Nigerian companies that fit this category have also expanded into Ghana. In the absence of better metrics, attendance at Google’s developer events, G-days provides a useful comparator in terms of the size of the potential developer community: the March 2011 G-Day in Ghana attracted between 300-400 people; a similar event in Kenya around 1,000 people (which reduced to a hardcore of 16Compared with say Nigeria where Spinlet has launched as an online music platform and Nollywood Love is a successful You Tube platform delivering Nollywood movies. 19 500-600 on day 2); and a G-Day in Nigeria in May 2011 attracted 1,400 people. Another piece of proxy data for the size of a nascent developer community in Kenya is the 4,000 strong membership of Nairobi’s iHub. Ghana probably needs a larger critical mass to generate competition, ideas and innovation. Government is still the largest customer for software skills and applications but its financial position as the largest customer is largely driven by donor money. ICT skills are desperately needed throughout economy. All local companies report skills shortages and difficulty finding people with a sufficient breadth of skills. The skills lacking include: software development skills (across different languages, technologies, databases, platforms and protocols); marketing for SMEs; project development; and export-related marketing; team management. Ghana needs to find a way of attracting a breadth of skills and ideas that can be passed on and added to its own. Ghana is very near17 to having sufficient users to be able to start generating a local ecosystem of developers and users for online services. However, the number of these services is still relatively small and the number of apps for smartphones (using iOS, Android or the RIM OS) is tiny. There are not many content rich local sites like Mocality and Dealfish in Kenya: for example, the latter has 40,000 small advertisements. The only equivalent is JobsInGhana.com,18 which shows the potential for disruptive, advertising- supported online sites that take over some of the functions of local newspapers. In terms of the mobile apps, there appears to be only a handful, including the Leti Games iWarrior/Kijiji and Street Soccer19 Apps, Nkyea Learning Systems Teach Yourself Asante Twi, and Adinkra E-Card (with over 100 Adinkra symbols and Kente strips). Most apps are SMS-based and this is in line with current ownership patterns (see Chart 2: Handset Pyramid). There is a low local awareness of mobile apps, and developers worry that they will not have enough knowledge to create international apps to have a chance of a larger revenue slice. ICT incubator MEST has nurtured a couple of start-ups that give some idea of the potential for this type of approach: Nandi Mobile and Retail Tower. Nandi Mobile has developed a customer service application to connect customers to operators via SMS. This is targeted at customers who often want to complain but do not want the expense of a voice call or have access to the Internet so they turn up in person at the operator’s premises. Nandimobile won an award at the prestigious US West Coast event Launch and is currently in the testing phase. Retail Tower is a piece of software for online retailers to push their products on retail price comparison engines and is targeted at US markets. 17Based on a variety of indirect pieces of evidence: the number of fixed and mobile broadband users, the Alexa.com rankings of local sites and the number of Facebook users. 18In November 2011, it was displaying 131 jobs. 19Currently available on Facebook & Street Soccer’s website, it is a multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed on the concept of street soccer, which is mostly played in Africa. 20 Currently developers and entrepreneurs tend to develop their ideas “in their own corner�: there are fears (sometimes justified) that others will steal their ideas. A level of trust has to be created in the developer community that allows people to present and discuss their ideas and gets people to understand that sometimes they may not have all the ideas and skills to make a success of their idea. Some form of soft-networking organisation like iHub in Nairobi would help to break down these barriers. Elements of such soft-networking is emerging through the Mobile Monday discussions organized by the Kofi Annan Center for ICT, but more needs to be done. Ghana has a long track record of doing call centre work and its work is promoted by the Ghana Association of Software and IT Services Companies (GASSCOM) and ITESGH Secretariat of the Ministry of Communications. GASSCOM currently has about 40 members. 2.5 ICT Take-up in the different sectors The take-up of computers and the uses to which they have been put has been dramatic in the public and private sectors in Ghana. For example, three years ago, the Ministry of Health had hardly any computers, but now it uses them widely, and they are also found in some clinics. All members of Parliament have recently been provided laptops through the World Bank’s eGhana project. But computer uptake in many ministries has been much slower, and there are ministries where they are not widely used. Senior managers are all likely to have either smart-phones or feature rich phones. 2.5.1 Public sector The Judicial Services has recently put out an RFP for computerisation, and is working on automating the judicial process. This objective that has been under discussion for a number of years. The Ghana Education Services has begun computerising a number of its functions but it is in the early stages. The Ministry of Information, which has spearheaded the use of ICT to spread online information, has until recently had a 128 kbps connection: it is planning to go up to a 1 mbps connection. All Ministries are now connected by the Chinese- financed fibre network (project managed by NITA) that was completed in 2011. The network consists of: a 10 Gb fibre ring in Accra with 4 Sub-Rings; 30 Wi-MAX towers across the country; and several two STM1 Internet feeds to districts, with bandwidth from SAT3 and Main One. The primary aim is to automate Government revenue agencies (Ghana Revenue Authority) and the Registrar Generals. Similar automation programs : e-immigration, e-parliament, e-justice, e-procurement, and e-payment system are all being launched with support from the World Bank. In most Ministries, computers are used solely for administrative tasks and for the Internet by the relatively few who have been given Internet access. There are not many widely used productivity applications, either in Ministries in Accra and even fewer nationwide. There are almost no public service SMS or mobile 21 Internet applications that deliver services nationwide. Among the exceptions are privately provided e-payment systems that offer utility bill payment from a mobile. The country’s main university, the University of Ghana has a 45 mbps connection and is in the process of creating a Wi-Fi environment across its campuses. Google’s University Access Programme has given free bandwidth on the basis that the savings made go into providing wireless infrastructure. Google, in collaboration with the Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Communication and the World Bank, is extending this University Access Programme to 10 Tertiary institutions across Ghana. These universities and colleges are now expected be connected by the Government fibre network as part of latter’s contribution. 2.5.2 Private sector In the private sector, computer uptake varies depending on the scale of the enterprise. Large companies all have computers, and many have wider access to the Internet than in the public sector. Nearly all large company employees will have smartphones or feature rich phones20. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are much less likely to have computers, particularly in the informal sector and where they have, it may only be one PC owned by the Chief Executive. However, PC prices have fallen over the last five years, and so many more SMEs are beginning to use them. The same pattern is mirrored by NGOs where the larger international organisations all have computers, but the smaller local organisations may only have limited access. In the Agriculture sector for example, one notes that most of the regional growers and farmers associations have extremely old computers if they have them at all. But the food multinationals that deal with them all have computers and an increasingly effective data connection back to Europe or the USA. However, they have almost no integration of SMS services into their delivery chain processes and are in the main, not able to communicate directly with “the field� (where crops are grown) or the shops (where some of the product is sold) for stock control. However some sectors have less well developed ICT systems than others. In the field of forestry, there is a pilot National Wood Tracking System funded by external donors. An assessment of it concluded:�…complex systems such as the National Wood Tracking System need upfront capacity building and “institutional change management� before the system can be expected to be fully effective.�21 20 Evidence for the findings above comes from talking to a wide range of private sector data operators who deal with these companies as part of their customer base. 21 See PROFOR document reference in Appendix 2. 22 At an individual level, an Audiencescapes national survey in 2009 found that 10% of respondents overall said they had access to computers; 18% of respondents in urban areas and 4% in rural areas. This compares with similar Audiencescapes survey in 2009 for Kenya where the overall access level was 5%, with 12% in urban areas and 1% in rural areas. 2.6 Comparisons – Ghana alongside other countries Comparisons are always difficult to achieve as few countries share the same numbers in terms of both GDP and population. The countries in Table 5 below are chosen to reflect a grouping that allow comparisons both within the continent and with one country (Sri Lanka) of similar population outside the continent. Comparisons may not always be fair but the purpose is not to draw absolute conclusions but to use the process to highlight areas of comparative advantage and disadvantage. Ghana compares well in terms of mobile penetration but is less well connected in terms of Internet penetration, although it has clearly made far better progress than Madagascar. Table 5: Comparisons between Ghana and other countries (2010) Ghana Kenya Uganda Madagascar Sri Lanka GDP (US$m) 18,058 32,417 17,121 8.3 48.28 Population (m) 24.23 38.6 31.8 20.7 20.66 Mobile penetration 74.2 63.2 33.5 37.2 84 Internet 5.3 10.2 11 1.5 8.3 penetration Internet access US$29- US$18- US$50-90 US$25- US$14.60- cost (US$)* 35.61** 52*** 55***** 27.38 **** * Fixed connection ** Unlimited *** Capped **** source: www.confusedlanka.com ***** Blueline, a Telma subsidiary. Uganda has the highest prices amongst the selected countries for a variety of reasons: it is an inland country; there are only two connections to international fibre cables; and there is not yet a fixed broadband challenger in the market. Despite significant political turmoil, the impact of competition and the arrival of new international fibre cables in Madagascar has been such that the incumbent Telma has reduced its prices and launched a Triple Play offer. With eight ISPs in its market and five mobile operators, Sri Lanka has amongst the lowest prices but by GDP it is a significantly wealthier country than the African countries selected. In terms of Internet penetration, both Kenya and Uganda have higher levels than Ghana although both have larger populations. It is worth noting that Sri Lanka has 33 licensed external gateway operators. According to the ICT Price Basket at the end of 2010, the value change downwards in the overall basket of services was fastest in: Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Nigeria, Kenya, Djibouti, Benin and Zambia. Ghana is notable by its 23 absence, although to be fair, some of the countries listed had extremely high prices to start with. The attractions for ICT investors of countries like Ghana and Kenya is that they provide mid-scale markets in Sub-Saharan African terms that are relatively easy to enter. However, there are significant differences between the two countries. Some of these differences are all, for all intents and purposes insuperable: for example, Ghana has a smaller population. Others can be changed but are harder to overcome: Ghana is a comparatively less wealthy country and different colonial histories mean that it has a less well developed physical infrastructure connecting different parts of the country. Kenya has two other comparatively large neighbouring countries (Tanzania and Uganda) that share common languages (English and Swahili) and offer markets for expansion whereas Ghana’s immediate neighbours are relatively small and speak a different language (French)- although this could be an advantage if more Ghanaians were bi-lingual. Kenya’s role as a business platform for East Africa means that it has a far larger international population than Ghana. Kenya has been effective at telling its “ICT story� and has attracted considerable interest from international companies and funders through this process. Ghanaians are the first to admit that they are much less comfortable with the process of promoting their own successes and may have lost out somewhat in the process. Also, Kenya’s position as a platform for East African business has given it considerable advantages but perhaps this merely reinforces the need for Ghana to focus more effectively on playing a similar role in West Africa. Whilst both countries have been continental leaders in terms of introducing competition, the outcomes so far have been very different. Kenya has a new incumbent (Safaricom) that controls 70% of the market and a much less commercially powerful former incumbent (Orange/Telkom Kenya). Despite Safaricom’s dominant position, it has continued to take risks to develop the market: mobile broadband and M-Pesa were not easy and obvious successes initially. The timing of these kinds of innovations in Ghana has tended to lag behind those made in Kenya although there is no reason to suppose it will not catch up. However, in terms of broadband providers, Kenya has four relatively evenly matched companies: Jamii Telecom, Wananchi, Telkom Kenya and Access Kenya. All are investing in fibre infrastructure for delivery to the home. Furthermore, as has happened in both Tanzania and Uganda, Kenyan ISPs have been allowed to offer VoIP-based services, and CDMA operators have added a further element of competition in the voice market. It also has a high level of competition on key national fibre routes, including a Government-initiated national fibre network. The Government has also proposed that there be a single LTE open access network. 24 In Uganda, there are 36 voice and data licences and 8 capacity resale licences. The latter is significant in that one of its power utilities sells “dark fibre� to operators that is used to connect to neighbouring Kenya. The number of licences and the ability of operators to offer both voice and data has ensured that a significant number of investors have continued to enter the country. There are five mobile operators with the largest, MTN, having around 50% market share. The impact of competition on Ghana’s communications markets has been considerable but perhaps slightly less transformative than in East Africa. With the launch of Glo22, there will be six mobile operators: outside of MTN Ghana (49.23% market share23), the other mobile players24 are all much more evenly matched. But in terms of fixed broadband providers, the market is still dominated by Vodafone Ghana which took over the former incumbent. No-one is yet investing in fibre networks to deliver broadband to the household customer. The challenge for Ghana is how it can continue to use competition to attract investors for this new phase of ICT development and in so doing turn its policy aspirations for becoming a business platform in West Africa into reality. 2.7 Ghana’s SWOT analysis: Perceptions of the issues from the ICT sector Any effort to scale-up ICT services and applications has to start from a clear understanding of Ghana’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Table 6 below is a quick way of summarising the many perceptions given to us during the extensive field interviews conducted during the course of this study. The research team conducted 75 formal interviews and we met a further 50 people in a range of group meetings on different topics, making a total of 150 people in the ICT sector. The SWOT analysis is based upon the perceptions of these people and our perceptions based on the information they gave us. Although there were occasional differences of emphasis, the issues raised across all interviews (and in group meetings) were remarkably consistent. The items marked yellow in the table below are things that are specific to Ghana rather than Africa-wide. For example, Ghana is a safe environment. Of course, there are other African countries that are safe environments but this is not true of all African countries so this quality is specific to Ghana. In contrast, some issues are Africa-wide and these are marked in green on the table. For example, the cost of electricity is a vital consideration for things like data centres in the next wave of ICT growth. In this, Ghana is not alone in having unreliable electricity supply and sharp rises in prices. 22 Further delays announced in November 2011. 23 NCA, latest data end 2010 24 MTN, Airtel, Tigo, Kasapa, Vodafone. 25 Table 6: Ghana – SWOT analysis Strengths Opportunities Safe environment (compared to Become sub-regional platform for ICT Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) companies in West Africa Politically stable, legal framework in Expand call centre outsourcing locally place and relatively transparent and internationally Small but innovative entrepreneur Attracting diaspora and international and developer sector- ICT ideas that expertise can scale elsewhere Track record of call centre operations Creating education opportunities that will help create ICT change Potential content assets (film and Public-Private body to: promote broadcast) Ghana’s ICT potential; attract investment and assist ICT exports User base nearing critical mass Private sector and PPPs to implement ICT services in Government Weaknesses Threats Poor at communicating strengths and With certain exceptions, Ghana’s successes culture doesn’t encourage entrepreneurship and innovation – A degree of complacency after early Education system not turning out start – other African countries now critical minds and people who can take starting to catch up. Not much responsibility (project management progress on BPO. and implementation) Lack of ICT leadership (both Rising electricity costs and collectively and individually) and unreliability of supply ability to work together to achieve things Skills shortages and high staff High level of taxes on communications turnover (lack of critical mass) services and devices Lack of capital (bottom-end funding Other African countries will move gap) faster and get the prizes (Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda) Implementation (esp. in Govt) and Not enough focus on driving last mile timescales involved and un-serviced area access Ghana has a number of significant strengths and considerable opportunities but these are finely balanced with significant weaknesses and threats. The country has been an early pioneer, both in terms of developing software and attracting call centre work. But both of these sectors have struggled against the historic realities of high price bandwidth, the size of the market and available skills. Until recently, the call centre sector work was not aggressively promoted, but things have begun to change with the global marketing drive in 2010, although this has yet to bear visible footprints. In terms of software development, a seed has been sown, and there is now a small but innovative entrepreneur and developer sector as can be seen from the examples given in appendix 2. Compared to its much larger neighbour Nigeria, 26 Ghana remains ahead in this field, but it needs to focus on export markets as it does not have the large domestic market found in Nigeria. It has considerable potential content assets as one of the continent’s more significant film and broadcast programme makers, which will be important as the ICT sector shifts from bandwidth sales to content and services. But despite being in existence well before Nollywood, it is one of the continent’s best kept secrets and this touches on a broader problem: with few exceptions, Ghanaians (as they will themselves admit) have not always been good at communicating their strengths and successes in the ICT field. They need to focus on creating a clear overall picture of ICT development in Ghana and within this narrative be able to convey success stories at several different levels. Many of the weaknesses and threats are factors that affect all African countries. For example, there are considerable ICT skills shortages at all levels and as a result, there is a high turnover of staff in some sectors. Inevitably, the public sector finds it hard to keep up with the wage demands that exist and does not always get the skilled people it needs. Some of these skills shortages come from a lack of wider experience that can only really be gained outside the country: training, academic courses and online learning are no substitute for direct work experience. The shortages are also a function of an education system that, in the perception of ICT employers, does not produce critical minds and people who can take responsibility, particularly for project management and implementation in the ICT field. According to many of the employers spoken to, there is too much learning by rote and accepting what you are told in the education system. Also as in most other African countries (and indeed internationally), there is a lack of capital funding to support both start-ups and early ventures. Below the US$0.5 million investment level, there are very few ways of either providing long-term equity or loan funding to promising start-ups or early-life companies. Some of the weaknesses and threats will clearly undermine Ghana’s potential for ICT success unless they are addressed. But here, it is important to differentiate between long-term issues that cannot be addressed quickly and “easy win� actions that can be taken. For example, Kenya has both lively powerful and articulate personalities25 that shape the perceptions of its ICT sector and bodies like the National ICT Board that provide a combination of leadership and incentives for change. Ghana lacks ICT leadership (both individually and collectively), and any body that brings together public and private focus on key barriers to ICT growth. Ghana needs to move quickly to fill this leadership gap otherwise it will lose out to others who are quicker at demonstrating this kind of leadership. Culture is the hardest thing to change, but phrases like “that’s not how to do things here� and “it’s not our culture� which were given during the study as the 25For example, former Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph, existing CEO Bob Colleymore and PS Bitange Ndemo, Ministry of Information and Communications. 27 reason for “hastening slowly� need to be re-examined. For Ghana to turn its current strengths into a winning hand requires it to challenge itself about what it can achieve. Considerable change has happened in the country: the Ghana of the 1970s and 1980s is not the Ghana of 2011. The challenge is that in a fast-moving global economy the pace of change has to be swifter rather than slower. 3. The Current State of ICT-Enabled Services and Applications in Ghana Many of the services and applications described in this section have the ability to change completely how business will be done, whether in the public and the private sector. In developing countries, the adoption of e-enabled processes has produced new businesses and made existing businesses more efficient. 3.1 Different genres of ICT services and applications implemented The services and apps found in Ghana can be broadly categorised in the ways indicated in Table 7 below. Obviously some of the services and apps fall into more than one category: Table 7: Different genres of ICT services and apps implemented Genre Service Supplier 3.1.1 Information-based Election monitoring Mobile Content and PenPlusBytes Education Services Mobile Content Constitution awareness Global Bid Agricultural pricing, polling & Esoko community creation Pineapple growers Persol CocoaLink DreamOval Drug verification mPedigree Info for pregnant mothers and Grameen Foundation ante-natal nurses (MoTeCH) Job advertising JobsinGhana 3.1.2 Transparency Public tendering software DVLA, Hutspace 3.1.3 Improving efficiencies Customs, revenue collection GCNet Management Info Service Ghana Education Service E-books in schools World Reader BPO eServices 3.1.4 Transaction-based Funeral Insurance Tigo Ghana Life Insurance MTN Ghana Selling goods and services ShopAfrica53.com SoftTribe/BSL e-commerce for the diaspora Techbrookers and Star Concepts 3.1.5 Entertainment Street Soccer Leti Games On the basis of the table above, it is clear that information-based services and applications have been the most popular genre. Many of the information-based services lay claim to improving efficiencies but none yet have sufficient critical 28 mass to decisively demonstrate this effect. The most recent genre is transaction- based as this has been enabled by the take-up of m-money services. Entertainment (with its close cousin, edutainment) is relatively under- represented given that this is one area where individual users are prepared to spend money on things that they find entertaining. Some basic SMS services might also be included in this category. More information on each of the services and apps identified above is supplied in appendix 2. 3.1.1 Information-based This genre of services and applications has the longest history in terms of their development. For over 10 years, donors have been funding developers, Governments and agricultural organisations to come up with software systems that will deliver agricultural prices to small-scale growers. Indeed, 3 out of the 8 services in this genre shown in the table above fall into this category. The idea is that the small-scale grower will be able to find the best price for his or her crops and in so doing improve their income. In addition, the growers can receive and ask about information to improve the cultivation of their crops. Esoko is a more developed version of this basic idea as it also targets large growers and buyers in the value chain. In addition it provides the facility to allow its users to collect information from growers as well as being able to convey information. It sees itself as being in the business of creating a community of all those involved in the agricultural value chain. It is also “platform-agnostic�, being able to deliver across a range of phones of different levels of sophistication and on the Internet. The challenge for these agricultural information supply services has been achieving critical mass in terms of use and in having a sufficiently rich pool of information to offer users. Collecting and verifying pricing data is a very detailed and challenging task. However, Esoko sees itself as “seeding� the process by providing it and that others may eventually come into the community it creates and provide it as a separate business. The use of the same genre of approach for health-based work is a great deal easier as often the information needed is the same across a group of patients. Grameen Foundation’s MoTeCH project uses information supplied on mobile phones to give pregnant mothers information, monitor their progress and remind them to come to appointments. It has already demonstrated time-savings and improved monitoring processes. The nurses involved get a US$40 Java- enabled phone with an app based on the open source Medical Records System. It is clear from the pilot that this is a service that could easily scale-up nationally. The impact doing this goes further than just the particular service as it accustoms both patients and nurses to use mobile phones as a central organising mechanism for care processes. 29 The drug verification app produced by mPedigree is designed to be used by both consumers and pharmaceutical suppliers, and some of its early roll-outs suggest that it will have the same impact on the supply processes of the medical drugs supply industry. Once a system of one kind is in place, other elements (like collecting and supplying information) can be put in place. For as has already been noted in section 2.5 above, even the private sector is not yet geared up to the potential of this kind of service but a great deal will change as they become involved in implementing these kinds of e-enabled services. 3.1.2 Transparency Online systems have potential to limit or drive out unfair or corrupt practices from things like application and tendering processes. They cannot by themselves bring this about but with sufficient backing from those implementing them, they can become a force for change. The idea is that, for example, all applications for vehicle licences are applied for online and that no cash changes hands as the funds must either be paid electronically or by money order made out to the relevant department. Although there is considerable potential for these kinds of services, particularly in Government, it is noteworthy that there are only a limited number of services that fall into this category in the table above, most notably Vehicle and Licensing Registration GCNet’s contract with the Government of Ghana to automate the Revenue Agencies and Registrar General’s department is expected to bring significant transparency and efficiency in Government processes and services when launched in December 2011. Also, all of the agricultural pricing systems have as one of their claimed benefits the ability to offer transparent pricing information to growers. 3.1.3 Improving efficiencies Digital services and applications allow the speedier and cheaper delivery of virtual goods and services. For example, mobile operators find it significantly cheaper to deliver Pre-Paid phone units electronically rather than using paper based systems and scratch cards. Government is no different in this respect: the slow and often repetitive paper-based systems are costly to maintain and mean that resources are not released to provide better services. For example, since 2008, UNICEF has been running a programme named Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) in Ghana. The programme provides financial help (so called “social cash transfer�) to extremely poor household to fund health and education expenditures. The programme currently supports 40,000 household across 80 districts in Ghana. In the next 12-18 months, the project will be scaled up to reach between 60,000 and 80,000 household. The plan is to automate the current MIS process which is paper- based and labour intensive process. 30 Delivering the cash to households electronically also opens up the ability to collect information from householders receiving the cash. However, according to UNICEF, currently there is a lack of infrastructure equipment, and computer literacy is very low among social workers. But this kind of “sharp end� is one way that improving efficiencies can benefit even the poorest members of the community. Government is planning to automate all key agencies. Planned activities including e-immigration, e-parliament, e-justice, e-procurement, and e-payment system are all either launched or in the process of being launched. In different circumstances, World Reader is providing a service that will allow school children to access a far wider range of books than might have been possible if they had to be purchased in paper form. It will take time to see whether the system of using Kindle readers in pilot schools works but it has potential to make a significant change, both by interesting students in reading and offering a far wider diet of books to them, including locally sourced books. Another significant category would be the call centre-based, customer service element of Business Process Outsourcing. The growing trend of contracts between local BPO companies and Electricity companies, Health Agencies, financial institutions and Telecom companies, signals a clear opportunity for domestic outsourcing in Ghana. Whilst much effort to date has been put into securing the BPO sector international work, significantly less has been applied to it getting local contracts. In particular, Government has greater potential for using these kinds of services than is currently the case. The Government’s ongoing efforts to automate its key institutions should hold strong promise for the BPO industry who have opportunity for range of activities including digitization of government records, provision of call centre and managed services to these institutions. BPO companies that have significant long-term local contracts will be considerably more marketable at the international level. 3.1.4 Transaction-based services Enabled by the spread of m-Money services, this genre has considerable potential as it both allows a good or service to be delivered and for payment to be made. In terms of the shortcomings of the available business models (see 3.2.3), it offers developers and service providers real revenues direct from users. Both Tigo and MTN are pioneering different forms of insurance cover, life and funeral insurance respectively. The services allow the user to make several cumulative payments on their mobile by the equivalent of subscription so that they can spread the overall load of affording the cover. The same must also be possible with key Government services like payment for vehicle licences. 31 3.1.5 Entertainment There is a huge potential for these kinds of entertainment-based26 services and applications of which there were few examples in Ghana. With the right combination of ideas, these apps and services can be sold across Africa as there are very few locally created entertainment services available for mobile phones or PCs. In addition, as Leti Games has found with its Street Soccer app there are also international opportunities for selling their work. Although this is a high-risk area where few are successful, it makes sense to create a greater level of awareness of these kinds of opportunities. Other services give some idea of this scope in this area and they include: Nkyea Learning Systems Teach Yourself Asante Twi, Adinkra E-Card (with over 100 symbols and Kente strips) and Jojoo Imbeah’ sites that offer a dictionary for local languages, African food recipes and music lyrics. Edutainment – where entertainment and education have been combined - can be a particularly strong form for content. The best examples on the continent come from television (for example, Makutano Junction27 and several Soul City productions) but the same approach has also been used with games: see the video link footnoted below.28 3.2 Constraints affecting the scaling-up of ICT-enabled services and applications In June 2003 the Government published The Ghana ICT for Accelerated Development (ICT4D) Policy. It expressed with admirable clarity a vision for using ICT to turn Ghana into a medium-income country. The strategy outlined rested upon 14 pillars of development covering a wide range of topics including: human resource development; facilitating Government administration and service delivery; developing export-oriented ICT products and services; the modernisation of agriculture (using ICT); creating a globally competitive Value- Added Service (VAS) sector; the promotion of national health; and facilitating national security and law and order. Of this ambitious list of broad objectives, four have been put in place: the facilitating of the development of the private sector; enabling physical infrastructure development (for ICT infrastructure at least); the legal, regulatory and institutional framework provisions; and promoting funding and local direct investment in ICTs. A further five remain very much “work in progress�: human resource development; facilitating Government Administration and Service Delivery; the development of export-oriented ICT products and services; a 26 The definition of entertainment used here would cover what elsewhere is referred to as the cultural or creative industries. 27 This regularly appears in the Top 5 most watched programmes in Kenya. 28 http://www.youtube.com/user/BalancingActAfrica#p/u/42/vCNYukGoaBw 32 globally competitive VAS sector – regional business service and ICT hub; and the development of ICTs in the community. The availability of much cheaper bandwidth and the higher levels of access to both mobile and fixed broadband have removed some of the key barriers to achieving these objectives. Therefore it is worth looking at what constraints remain that hamper the scaling up of ICT services and applications. 3.2.1 The attitude of mobile operators to content Up until recently, mobile operators have got most of their revenue from voice and therefore have not put a great deal of attention into developing content services, whether delivered on SMS or the Internet. They have until recently tended to leave the management of content at a country level to the SMS aggregators, who are sub-contractors. Content product managers have been largely reactive, implementing international services and responding to locally offered services brought to them. With falling voice revenues, mobile operators have begun to realise the value of data services as a way of stemming the decline in revenues. The rise of social media and the growing use of smart-phones and feature rich phones have demonstrated the potential for providing Internet-based services over mobile. There is a great deal of scope for partnership between the public and private sector but no clear routes for bringing it about: each side is involved in parallel conversations that only occasionally seem to converge. 3.2.2 The limitations of the e-payments landscape GhIPPS (the operator of eZwich) forecasts that 1 million users would represent a critical mass for its service. The greater volume of transactions would produce more revenue and lower the cost of the Point-Of-Sale equipment. In terms of mobile payments, all the m-money customers taken together probably do not exceed 0.5 million, so Ghana currently does not have a critical mass in this key area of electronic transactions29. Ghana will soon be in a position where almost all the mobile operators are promoting some form of m-money service and an increasing number of companies and utilities have signed agreements to accept payment from a mobile phone. The main reason given by operators for this relatively low number is that Ghana is a cash-based economy. The same could also have been said of other countries which are slowly achieving a critical mass of users. There are a number of reasons why adoption might be slower in Ghana: lower levels of literacy, culture 29 Registered user levels are much higher. 33 (more conservative?) or business factors like the number of agents or the need for experiential marketing30. Whatever the causes, the fragmentation of the m-money user base means that it will take longer to achieve critical mass unless users are easily able to make payments across different systems: in other words, for example an MTN Money customer needs to be able to make a payment to a Tigo Money customer and vice-versa. In the early days of mobile phones, there were no interconnection agreements between operators. Most of the larger ones felt that they had a more powerful case for expansion based on the size of their subscriber numbers. Once interconnection between operators became an established reality, it became clear that the networking effects of being able to ring larger numbers of people enabled even larger expansion of subscriber numbers. The same arguments apply to m-money payment systems: users do not have a need to pay only people on MTN, Vodafone, Tigo or Airtel. If all payment systems are interconnected, networking effects ensure that the overall number of users is greater and this will help the market grow. Within the mobile m-money systems, developers need to be able to create payment processes that can be used by those wanting to make Internet transactions, whether by phone or PC. Also for certain types of transaction-based services to be successful, m-money systems need to be able to process micro- payment transactions. 3.2.3 The shortcomings of the available business models for services and applications There are essentially three different ways of delivering content and services and getting paid for doing so: SMS, Internet and Apps based on the Internet. In broad terms, there are three different potential sources of income: splitting the revenue from the SMS with the mobile operator; paid online content; online advertising; and paid Apps. Splitting the income applies to B2C services like SMS and Apps as well as the range of broader-based transactional services. One of the key barriers to growth is the current “terms of trade� between content providers, SMS aggregators and the mobile operators for SMS services. Currently, this income split varies between 50:50 and 70:3031 in favour of the mobile operators. The remaining income is then split between all the other parties involved: usually the content provider and the SMS aggregator. Mobile operators argue with some justice that at present they do most of the marketing and the customers belong to them. 30 The latter two are cited as obstacles to effective roll-out by several of the more successful M-money service operators. 31 There are two large mobile operators currently taking an 80% share of all revenues. 34 Under these circumstances, even with relatively successful services, the income to the content provider is not large. It makes sense as an additional revenue stream for existing content providers (like media houses) but cannot really finance the generation of original local content. For local mobile content to grow, mobile operators need to think hard about seeding the process: they need to give a little to get a little as they will be one of the main beneficiaries in the medium- term through increased data use. The choice of who pays is a strategic one. The potential clients of B2B online service Esoko are all smallholders and therefore do not yet have the ability to pay for services. However, a survey it carried out in the North and on Cape Coast indicated that around 70% would be willing to pay GHC-2-3 per month for services. Nevertheless, a strategic choice has been made to keep the service free at the point of delivery in order to attract a critical mass of users. This dilemma is bound to be one that repeats itself as those promoting services and applications have to choose between short and long-term revenues. With the Internet, the business model is inevitably advertising (as few people will pay for content) and to make that work in the Ghanaian context, site operators (whether accessed by mobile, PC or tablet) will need millions of users. However, if they can achieve 1 million users, they will compare favourably with using newspapers as an advertising media. For example, the current circulation of the Government-owned Daily Graphic is 72,000: even assuming 10 readers per copy, this is still significantly under 1 million readers. Therefore increasingly online content will have compelling arguments to attract advertising revenues. Reliable existing surveys show that mobile Internet-based media would reach a great deal more people than current print-based media. For services to succeed they need to be relevant both to groups that can pay and those who have less ability to do so. Esoko’s services, for example, will be sold to multinational food companies but provided free to the farmers who supply them. JobsinGhana charges companies to advertise jobs whilst the service is free for users. A critical mass of users comes from having ICT-enabled services that people want. Whether they are SMS-based or an App for a smartphone, users need to be in the millions in order for the entrepreneur to get enough money to create a successful business. That is unless they are specialist services (like GCNet’s customs service) that involve a group of businesses and/or Government agencies. 35 3.2.4 The lack of export capacity in the ICT sector Out of 25 organisations (see Appendix 2) that have products and services that might scale up across the continent or elsewhere internationally, only 5 have sold services outside Ghana. The same would be true of most African countries, including Kenya but the relatively few companies that have taken this jump illustrates the scale of the challenge. Ghana by itself is too small a market as a country to sustain a large number of businesses that operate only in Ghana. Nevertheless, the business of selling virtual ICT goods and services is ideal as with the right skills, relatively small content and services companies stand a chance of becoming successful in both international and domestic markets. The entry costs seem relatively low and it is possible to operate virtually. However, capital is needed both to acquire skills and to market virtual goods successfully. These kinds of obstacles can be overcome but they may require support programmes to help developers skill up in these areas. 3.2.5 The need to mainstream pilot projects Because a social need exists, it does not mean that it will turn easily into an SMS or Internet service. Users are more readily motivated by things they want (fun, a social life, music) than by what they need. Nobody needs to run capacity-building workshops on how to use Facebook for 18-35 year olds because they are well motivated to use the product. Where these kinds of public services have been more successful is where there is essential information users must have: for example, exam and election results. In both cases, the Government has supplied information and information providers have delivered it to those who want it. The challenge is to create Government services that are more than one-off, occasional events that have this degree of uptake. For public ICT-enabled services, sustainability has been the rather woolly word that is used to disguise a number of challenges that need to be overcome. In the main, donors pay for pilot projects and this has happened in Ghana (as elsewhere in Africa) for over a decade. However, there are very few examples where pilot projects have been rolled out as mainstream services and paid for out of Ministry budgets. Some pilot projects in Ghana have been notably successful: one of those described in the section below has 3,000 users and is about to be expanded to a second region. But there is no clear route for scaling things up to a national level within Government. Without this “mainstreaming�, pilot projects either go on being pilots by finding new sources of funding or simply die. Ghana’s Government is not alone in 36 making almost no fundamental changes to its pattern of service in the light of the evidence offered by pilot projects. Taking the praise for pilots whose impact on overall levels of service delivery is largely marginal is a lot easier for Government than making hard decisions about changes in how it spends its own money. In this way, Government simply avoids addressing the question of efficiencies and how it prioritises the way it spends its resources: spending other people’s money involves few choices and many of the wrong kinds of rewards32. Worse still, NGO-driven projects are nearly always conceived of as pilots and a number do not survive the end of the initial funding period. But unless this pattern is broken, the large-scale efficiencies that could be made by scaling up pilot projects simply will not be achieved. Both donors and Government have a responsibility to ensure that this is not the case. 3.2.6 Need to change top-down approaches to implementation The top-down approach where Government acts as both gatekeeper and implementer, rather than simply being a facilitator, is not a recipe for getting things done. It means that all decision-making and power keeps travelling up the management ladder rather than being devolved downwards. It also makes it hard to get champions throughout Government who will push for change because change always relies on the permission of somebody “higher up� and thus disempowers those who might take the initiative for change. This approach is often justified on the basis that it’s needed to get things done but in the main, Government has had a great deal of difficulty delivering projects effectively and in a timely fashion. As the overview of ICT projects in Appendix 2 shows, Ghana has made some effort to put in place “the basics� of an e- Government service offer. All too often Government insists that it must manage public interest projects without working to create the circumstances for success: the “issue an order and it will happen� approach will not ensure that ICT-enabled processes are accepted by key groups of individuals in Government or in the wider community. Because Government is the primary implementer, the volume of projects (both big and small) being undertaken means that they lack any strategic focus and are not well communicated even within Government itself. There is: no easily accessible overview of projects, no audit of where things currently are, or a clear, simple strategy expressing priorities that translate into projects33. 32 Per diems, vehicles, phones rather than incentives to buy and use computers. 33 The last Government ICT strategy referred to earlier in this report was written in 2003. 37 Government needs to work with both the private sector and NGOs to find ways that services can be contracted to organisations or partnerships that can work directly with groups receiving services to improve their delivery. 3.2.7 Lack of strategic leadership Strategic success for a country using ICT as a force for change is bought about by having key people involved in the discussion and debate about both the strategy and tactics for achieving success. Naming the categories of who should be involved is relatively easy: Government; the private sector; civil society; the media and creative industries; finance; and educators. The more difficult task is creating meeting points and processes that allow these diverse groups of people to take something from a discussion to the practical point of delivery. Ghana has had several attempts to bring people together to address strategic issues and the blockages described above but there is no single grouping currently in existence to address these tasks. Government has tended to get on with its own business, engaging with the private sector through legal and regulatory processes and occasional, ad-hoc meetings. For example, no-one in Government is consistently addressing the lowering of the cost of Internet access to the end-user. By contrast, in Kenya, for example, there is a National ICT Board that plays this role and which has as in its governance group, players drawn from a wide range of sectors. The Board has a staff that is active and well known for working with the private sector and there are individuals who are capable of overcoming obstacles to progress. The Board has taken on the roll-out Pasha Centres to under-serviced areas and a grant programme to seed local content. Outside of this body, there are key individuals in the public and private sector who provide leadership to this discussion, both in the media and elsewhere. Nothing is ever perfect but the Board has a pragmatic ability to combine talking strategically and doing things in practice. For innovative ICT-enabled services to succeed, all those involved need to extend the reach of which groups they talk to in order to get things moving: the creative industries like film and music must play a key role in local content; teachers and educators need to be brought into the debate about the nature of education required; and bankers and capital funds need to sit round a table to devise ways of solving the capital deficit for start-ups and early-stage companies. Organisations that support ICT entrepreneurship (whether run by Government or others) need to be cherished and supported. 38 4. Getting from here to there: actions needed to scale up ICT service and apps What follows is not a grand strategy but a series of practical actions designed to speed up the moment that Ghana will get to a critical mass of online users. These actions are broken down into two categories: those that tackle existing blockages to market growth and those that will address “the chicken-or-the egg� problem alluded to in section one. In other words, the need to create a sufficient volume of users to enable operators to lower their data prices, which will in turn create more users. 4.1 Blockages to growth 4.1.1 User broadband prices still too high: Mobile and fixed Internet prices are still too high and have not reduced sufficiently rapidly over the last 6 months as the updated figures in section 2.1 demonstrate. There is not enough competition to Vodafone Ghana in the fixed broadband market to create a dynamic market. Unlike in East Africa, VoIP is not a legal option for potential triple play operators and existing ISPs. Action: The Government needs to ask operators to lower broadband prices significantly. If there is no movement on prices, it needs to ask the regulator NCA to look at what market blockages are causing higher prices and at the likely impact of lower prices on user numbers. The regulator NCA needs to give VoIP services as an option to existing ISPs and to provide regulatory incentives to both existing and potential operators to offer Triple Play and Fibre-To-The-Cabinet and Fibre-To-The-Home. Furthermore, it needs to have a strategic plan for the roll-out of LTE that will maximize broadband access in such a way that opens the market to wider competition. Opening up the sale of dark fibre for smaller operators would also contribute to a more lively market competition and help lower retail prices. The Open Access LTE network being developed in Kenya may not suit the Ghanaian context but is worth considering. 4.1.2 Fragmented m-money market delays critical mass: There are currently around 500,000 m-money users but these are split between several providers. According to GhIPP (operator of eZwich) 1 million would represent a critical mass for its service and probably represents a wider critical mass benchmark. 39 The shift to using m-money services has not yet taken off. The absence of a critical mass of users means that a number of SMS and online services that might use m- or e-transactions cannot yet be launched successfully. Action: The regulator NCA can help overcome this slow-take off pattern by insisting that all services are interconnected and that there is a clearing house that is platform-agnostic: the technology to achieve this is readily available in the market. Government needs to start making certain payments using m-money services and encourage its suppliers to do the same. 4.1.3 Attitude of mobile operators to content: Revenues from content are relatively modest for mobile operators against total voice revenues. Therefore mobile operators have tended not to assign it higher- level management attention and investment resources. Indeed, the management of SMS content (still the largest part of mobile content) has largely been sub- contracted to SMS aggregators. The Value-Added Service (VAS) management in operators has been largely reactive, bringing in international services and only occasionally finding local services. With the shift in handset ownership shown in chart 2, section 2.2 from basic phones to a far wider pattern of smart and feature phone ownership, the potential for wider uses of content are considerable: the transition from 160 characters to both different typefaces and visuals will be transformative. But it will also be complicated for content producers as they will have to produce for several platforms, including SMS, mobile Internet and mobile apps. The challenge is also one for mobile operators to realise that mobile has become a media and treat it accordingly. Aside from these broader attitudes to content and mobile as a media, there are significant detailed challenges around the way content providers are paid: these “terms of trade� (which come out of SMS content) act as a disincentive for a wider involvement of local content producers. Lack of local content means the number of jobs generated by its production remains relatively low. Action: The suggested Online Content Board (see 4.2.1) needs to engage with mobile operators to look at ways of expanding local content. It can also use its funding to open up new “terms of trade� for local content producers, on a “proof of concept� basis: in other words, if it puts some money into a project, the local content producer could be offered a higher percentage of the available revenues. 4.1.4 Mainstreaming pilot projects into Government – new models needed: Section 3 of this study contains several examples of externally funded pilot services that are targeted at citizens. Unless something happens, these projects are destined to remain as interesting examples that never grow to scale. The issues are not particular to Ghana as the same issue can be found in many countries, both in Africa and elsewhere. 40 If these services could reach the sort of scale nationally that they are currently achieving at a pilot level, there would be significant increases in the quality of life of a large number of citizens, many of whom are only lightly touched by current Government services. Therefore the challenge is to create structures that will allow the rapid roll-out of pilots once they have proven themselves. Action: This is an opportunity for the Ghana Government to be a pioneer for different approaches to public service delivery and to build on and extend the work it has already done with external contractors such as GCNet. There are a number of options that can be explored included: sub-contracting certain services in different regions to NGOs; creating local service providers, both for regional and national services; and PPPs of the type represented by GCNet. These pioneering different approaches would have several different purposes: to speed up the efficient delivery of life-changing Government services; to create models that might later be applied within the civil service; and to offer opportunities to collect data on those the services are used by to inform future Government policy. This work needs to be linked to partnerships with Ghana’s call centre sector as services will need to be hybrid voice-online-SMS to reach maximum number of people. This approach to service roll-out will help avoid the issue identified in section 3.2.6 of the difficulties created by top-down approaches to implementation. 4.1.5 Reaching the un-reached – creating new models: There are several significant blockages that might be addressed: these include geographic coverage and economic barriers to access. Geographic access to voice is now reaching a large part of the population. On the basis of August 2011 figures, 19.5% of Ghana’s population does not have access to a mobile phone.34 Mobile data availability is significantly less widespread. Universal service access initiatives have not yet produced lasting solutions to reaching this last group of un-serviced citizens and this is a wider problem on the continent. Mobile operators are feeling pressure on margins and the cost of fuelling and communicating with remote base stations has not yet come down significantly. However, PC prices have fallen in Ghana over the last five years but the cost of the equipment to access data services still remains beyond the reach of some users. For those for whom a PC is beyond their reach, what they do on the Internet is limited by the type of software available at cyber-cafes. Action: New low-cost base station technologies (which handle both voice and data) are emerging and the regulator NCA should encourage the setting up of “test-bed� operations using these newer technologies. Two approaches for 34 Given multiple handset ownership, this figure is likely to be slightly higher. 41 currently un-serviced areas might be adopted: firstly, micro-operators could be given licences or secondly, existing operators might offer franchises to smaller operators to deliver services on their behalf. In order to lower the barriers posed by the cost of PC ownership, operators should be encouraged to offer two things: data bundles which include an access device (low cost laptop or tablet) and cloud-based services that can be accessed from any PC or laptop, cyber-café and some mobiles. 4.1.6 Lack of enabling, strategic leadership – who takes responsibility?: Each of the recommendations for action in this section and the one below need several sets of people to agree to do something. This can only really be achieved if there is someone taking responsibility for getting things done and is acknowledged to be playing that role. Ghana has several associations that deal with different parts of the ICT sector but no single body that can drive initiatives across the public and private sectors. Government has taken responsibility for its initiatives and has a pretty full agenda. Therefore the question is: who takes responsibility for getting Ghana’s online users to critical mass? Each private sector company has its own initiatives and these will succeed or fail in their own terms within the structures each runs. But a great deal of what is described in the section below sits at the edge of what can be justified in market terms: it is about developing a market of online users that is not yet fully in place. Nevertheless, the private sector should take leadership of this market development process as it will understand the importance of it for the future of their businesses. Action: A simple, time-limited, ad hoc body needs to be created that will focus on the development of a critical mass of online users in Ghana. The body needs to involve the public and private sector but be chaired and led by a significant private sector figure. The members of this body and its Chair will take responsibility for articulating a narrative about the country’s ICT story, particularly Ghana as a place to make investment and as a safe base for regional operations in West Africa (compared to other more challenging environments in the region). 4.2 Enabling recommendations to break out of the “chicken-or-the-egg� cycle The “chicken-or-the-egg� cycle describes a moment when one thing cannot happen before another thing does but it’s not clear which needs to happen first. 42 4.2.1 Seeding local content: There is currently a deficit in local online content and services. Ten years ago Ghana was one of the pioneers of these things but inauspicious factors like bandwidth pricing saw many companies fall by the wayside. There is no shortage of local content but not enough of it is available online, particularly audio-visual content (like film and music), of which Ghana is a steady producer. Whilst the number of online users has been increasing, the level of online advertising that might support local content is not yet matching this early increase in user numbers. Action: A local content fund should be set up to support online content initiatives that will help increase the number of online users. These incentives should be available to both new companies and to existing content producers like media owners with particular incentives for entertainment and edutainment content from film-makers and TV programme producers. It would seek to emulate the success of sites like Nollywood Love35 in Nigeria with equivalent local sites based around local films, TV programmes and movies. It would get local media owners thinking about the possibilities of a mobile newspaper. The Content Fund would engage with local advertising agencies about the need to support early stage online content providers. Government could be encouraged to set an example by putting part of its advertising budget (particularly relating to jobs) to online media. The content fund could host a sponsored annual competition and awards for best Ghanaian online content and services. 4.2.2 Government engaging with social media to create interactions with citizens Traditional offline Government in many developed countries is a one-way process in which citizens “queue� for attention. Online services offer more opportunities for citizen feedback that can affect how those services are delivered. An increasingly important component of Government’s interaction with its younger citizens is social media. The use of Facebook, Twitter and You Tube offer new opportunities to get messages across and to receive messages reacting to what has been conveyed. The video of President Goodluck of Nigeria on the You Tube link on the footnote below36 gives some idea of the scale of what can be achieved. Action: The Government of Ghana needs to scale up its social media strategy. This involves both enlarging the effort put into the high-level messaging of Government activities but also expanding the use of social media for reaching different specialist groups (like teachers, doctors and nurses). 35 http://www.youtube.com/user/BalancingActAfrica#p/u/41/IlFganlMGSo 36 http://www.youtube.com/user/BalancingActAfrica#p/u/21/1In70Z2CiJE 43 4.2.3 Discussion networks to encourage developer community to grow and scale – up: Ghana already has a couple of physical spaces that encourage entrepreneurship by offering office and support facilities.37But it currently lacks a soft networking function that would enable developers to meet and work together. Also, there is no virtual incubator or physical meeting space for those who are working on putting their ideas into shape. The nearest example would be some of the services that iHub in Nairobi has successfully offered. These include: a physical meeting and hot desk space; a website allowing members to offer their services; and a talks programme. The physical space allows people to meet up, formally and informally. The talks programme offers developers a steady diet of interesting talks with both people who might become potential clients and international visitors. It is also seeking to develop a broking service for entrepreneurs wanting to meet angel investors. Action: The financing institutions/agencies need to support an organisation that will supply these soft network services that will allow the developer community to find work, connect with international visitors and find initial capital. 4.2.4 Give support to enable entrepreneurs to become export-capable companies: Ghana has a couple of associations that support export-related work but no incentives for export-related software. Making the leap from a relatively small national market like Ghana to going into a large neighbouring market like Nigeria requires: initial financing and advice, new expertise and the sourcing of local partners in chosen export markets. There are no schemes that support attendance at international conference and exhibition events where deals where export deals might be secured. Action: The financing institutions/agencies need to support a bank loan guarantee scheme for companies that have products that might be scaled up across Africa. Under this scheme, the bank would vet the applicant as if a normal applicant, but grant a loan on the basis that some proportion of it (70-80%) is guaranteed by loan scheme. 4.2.5 Skills and experience deficit: There are a range of skills that are neither widely available locally nor are necessarily always of the highest quality. These include but are not limited to: software development skills (across different languages, technologies, databases, platforms and protocols); marketing for SMEs; project development; and export- related marketing; team management. 37 GMIC and MEST. Busy Internet has moved away from this activity. 44 The difficulty for Ghana is that the development of a sufficient number of people with these skills seems to be lagging behind the requirement for them. As a result, the private sector is paying a premium to get these skills, making it significantly more difficult for the public sector to retain people with them. However, it is not solely a skills deficit but also the level of experience people have in the workplace and this is significantly harder to address. Action: There are already a significant number of organisations focused on this issue so there is little point in simply repeating things that they already do. Starting with school and university level students, Coding Clubs should be set up where peer-to-peer learning helps those involved learn skills they might not otherwise acquire. Alongside these Clubs, a national software competition could be run, looking for applications that might be rolled out commercially, particularly for mobiles and tablets. Alongside these national events, there might be an annual professional coders event (which would attract a West African audience) with international invitees. Again the purpose would be to turn out applications in a limited period of time and learn through experience. More experienced local and international invitees would also teach the skills that go alongside creating interesting applications. To address the shortfall in experience, a scheme needs to be funded whereby university students and unemployed graduates get placements within companies. These placements would again be focused on a practical outcome agreed between the organisation running the scheme and the company taking the placement trainee. 45 Appendix 1 Ranking of Ghana’s economy within Sub-Sahara Africa Table 8: Overview of Top 10 Sub-Saharan countries by GDP (PPP) 38 and population Country ranking GDP (PPP) in Population (est All Africa ranking in SSA US$bn 2011), million by GDP (PPP) 1. South Africa 404,900 49 2 2. Nigeria 294,800 155 3 3. Angola 93,100 13.3 6 4. Sudan 80,500 45 8 5. Ethiopia 61,600 90.8 10 6. Kenya 57,600 41 11 7. Tanzania 48,900 42.7 12 8. Cameroon 39,400 19.7 13 9. Cote d’Ivoire 32,200 21 14 10. Ghana 31,300 24.2 15 38 Purchasing Power Parity 46 Appendix 2 ICT Services and Applications Providers in Ghana Table 9: ICT Services and Applications in Ghana and Support Services Sector Organisations and projects Where implemented Improving public Mobile Content (election Ghana service monitoring, education services) Hutspace (public tender Ghana software) GCNet (customs, revenue Ghana collection) Global Bid (constitution Ghana awareness) PenPlusBytes (African 10 African countries election monitoring) Key sector: Agriculture Esoko (pricing information, 16 African countries polling and community creation) Persol (Pineapple growers Ghana project) DreamOval (CocoaLink – not Ghana yet implemented) Key sector: Education Ghana Education Service Ghana (management information service) World Reader (use of Kindles in schools) Key sector: Health mPedigree Pilots in Ghana and Nigeria. By the end of 2011, Uganda, South Africa and Tanzania Grameen Ghana Foundation/DreamOval (MoTeCH) Tigo (funeral insurance Ghana information services) Development of local eServices (BPO) Ghana ICT sector 47 Mobile Content Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Côte d’Ivoire JobsinGhana (recruitment Ghana site) Busy Internet/Explainer DC Ghana (data centre) SoftTribe/BSL Ghana so far (ShopAfrica53.com) Techbrookers and Star Ghana Concepts (e-commerce for diaspora) Leti Games (street soccer) International Ghana Cyber City (office park Ghana and support services) Development of mobile Mobile operators (MTN Various African payment systems Money, Airtel Money, Tigo countries Cash) AfriExpress (txtNpay) Ghana but plans to expand (Nigeria) eTranzact Ghana and six other African countries eZwich Ghana Profile of Selected Companies Improving Public Services GCNet: One of the most significant large-scale Government projects is Ghana Community Network Services (GCNet) which is a public-private partnership company, whose shareholders include GCB, Ecobank, the Ghana Revenue Authority and the Ghana Shippers Authority. It has two long-term contracts, one from the Ministry of Trade (for Ghana Customs) and another from the Ministry of Communications for the revenue agencies and the Registrar General. The challenge is a set of processes where there are multiple users – both in the public and private sectors – and change moves as fast as the slowest organisation or part of an organisation. The breakdown of a scanner in one part of the process slows up everything else. Also automating one process raises other needs: for example, the ability to physically locate containers at the ports. Nevertheless, the halving of clearance times does show what can be done. Ghana Information Network for Knowledge Sharing (GINKS): Founded in 2003, GINKS is an NGO whose main aim is to share information on ICT. The organisation has currently 480 members and is active in the following areas: health, agriculture, education, gender and youth. GINKS, main funding partner is 48 Dutch NGO IICD. Knowledge sharing on ICT is mainly done via discussion groups (online) and workshops targeted at specific groups (e.g women under the gender section). Its initiatives include: information dissemination (Ministry of Agriculture and Food) by radio broadcast on the use of pesticide, repackaging of information and translating it into 4 local languages; a livelihoods workshop for women in the Central region, initiating the use of computers and the Internet; and setting up a library with Internet access in the western part of Ghana. The main constraints on its work (which is largely outside of Accra) are: the price and limited availability of Internet access outside Accra, the lack of content in local languages, the low participation of women in ICT uptake; and the lack of financial support from key stakeholders, like telecoms companies. IICD funds similar organisations in Zambia, Uganda and Burkina Faso and has created knowledge networks to share best practice. GINKS feels that the completion of the Government’s national network will offer many opportunities for new initiatives, particularly in secondary schools. UNICEF: Since 2008, UNICEF has been running a programme named Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) in Ghana. The programme provides financial help (so called “social cash transfer�) to extremely poor household to fund health and education expenditures. The programme currently supports 40,000 household across 80 districts in Ghana. In the next 12-18 months, the project will be scaled up to reach between 60,000 and 80,000 household. In the longer term, LEAP is expected to support a couple of hundred thousand households across Ghana. All the data collected during the identification of eligible households (through questionnaire), the registration of households in the programme and the recurrent payments to households are kept in a centralised management information system (MIS). The plan is to automate the current MIS process which is paper-based and labour intensive process. Although selected household are issued with an ID card with their details and a bar code: the latter means of identification is not yet used because of the lack of bar code readers. In this area Government has limited capacity in terms of ICT. There is a lack of infrastructure equipment and computer literacy is very low among social workers. Nevertheless this whole process of social payments could be automated through a combination of mobile phones and ATMs, generating significant efficiency savings that could put back into the programme. The programme also has the potential to offer significant amounts of aggregated data for management planning in the key areas of health, education, employment and welfare and agriculture and food security. UNICEF has signed an MOU with the Ministry of Health to integrate its programme in the building of national social protection system. 49 PenPlusBytes: Over ten years old, this capacity building organaisation seeks to empower the media through the use of ICTs to advance the work of journalism. It consists of a network of media organisations and journalists interested in using ICTs effectively to advance the course of journalism. There are around 600 journalists across the world which are part of Penplusbytes. It has implemented its services in 11 African countries, including Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Liberia, Mauritania, Malawi, Botswana, Mozambique Namibia, Togo and Guinea. One of its key initiatives is the African Elections Project. This organises the following: training journalists on how to use ICT and strengthening professional values like impartiality (including online training kits); media monitoring; and media guides for journalists. Its follow-up after elections is to monitor how well Governments deliver on their promises based on 20 indicators (including health and education. These are also available via Twitter. The main constraints on its activities are the cost of Internet access (which is why they make more use of SMS), limited access to newer technologies (like video cameras for streaming) and funding. Improving delivery in key parts of the economy (agriculture, education, health) In terms of public sector delivery, certain sectors are key to improving the conditions and opportunities for Ghanaians, particularly those at the bottom of the pyramid. These key sectors are agriculture, education and health. Ghana Education Service: The Ghana Education Service (GES) administers pre- university education and works as a separate unit/agency under the control of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports (MOESS). GES’s future is currently uncertain as it might be fully integrated into the Ministry of Education. It is working on a number of ICT-enabled services: re-developing a education management information system (to provide the underlying data for the launch of the GES website); working with USAID and World Reader (see below); and the implementation of an ICT syllabus in education aimed at pupils from the junior schools to the senior schools. Constraints on implementation include: attracting ICT staff to work on public sector salaries; the need for more computers in schools (reducing from 3 pupils per computer to 2); having the budget to pay for Internet access; and retraining issues for teachers. Esoko: It sees itself as a mobile media company operating across the value chain in agriculture. It started with pricing information but has added things like weather, stock levels and who’s buying and selling. Whereas other organisations focused on this sector have tended to look just at pricing information for farmers, it has sought to bring together everyone in the supply chain from farmers to large food companies and hotel buyers. 50 It has sought to seed the process of creating an agricultural supply chain community by collecting market information data (particularly in Ghana, where it collects from 4 markets in every region) but it also wants to be a platform that allows different categories of users to collect and distribute their own data through an SMS polling tool. It has put together a deal with MTN to put the Esoko application on the SIM in new mobile phones and hopes to extend this to other operators. Its other defining characteristic is that it is a platform-agnostic, cloud-based service that is capable of delivering to: basic phones, feature phones, smart phones and PCs. Based on small sample survey, 56% of farmers in Cape Coast said that market information had an impact on their business. Esoko is currently working on different projects in 16 African countries. Grameen Foundation: It has launched a mobile-based information and data collection aimed at pregnant women and the nurses who care for them39, working with Ghana’s health service. It is targeted at meeting Millennium Goals 4 and 5. It is a 2-year pilot that has been operating for 18 months in the Upper East region of Ghana which borders neighbouring Burkina Faso. There are three elements to the service. The first two are stand-alone and the third works when the other two are in place. The first element is called Mobile Midwife and it sends SMS information to pregnant women, relevant to the age of the development of the child. The second element is to get improved data and better data collection. Each nurse is given a Java-enabled, US$40 phone with an app based on the open source Medical Records System. The nurses then enter all their patients and their details on the phone and these are uploaded to a central server and the nurses and health service management get a monthly report. This means two things: it improves data for management decision-making and saves the nurses time. Previously it might have taken up to 4 days to complete the process of collecting data and some part of this saving can be applied to patient care. The third element of the system deals with women who do not turn up for their pre and ante-natal health checks (who are described as defaulters). Previously getting information to chase these people was difficult and follow-up tended not to happen. Now the women get SMS reminders and the nurse gets a list so that she can make personal follow-ups. World Reader: It is in the process of putting e-readers into six schools, two from each different education level: primary, junior high and secondary. A research project will be conducted with another set of schools that have no e-readers for the purpose of comparison. So there will be 500 teachers and students with access to the device and 500 without. 39 See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvY51gftgVQ&feature=relmfu 51 The Kindle e-readers will have three roughly equal categories of material: classics like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Nathanial Hawthorne for advanced years study (where the material is out of copyright); local books in English and vernacular languages that it has helped Ghanaian publishers digitise; and text books. Among the local books is one called The Shark about a student wrongly accused of having an affair with her teacher. It is currently working with nine local publishers to get relevant local content. Content will be rolled out in three phases. Phase 1 will be pre-loaded books that come with the Kindle loaded on by Worldreader.org. Phase 2 will be materials that the teachers have added. And in phase 3 students will be given US$15-20 to buy any books they want:�If we give children a budget to rent or buy books, it will become demand-driven.� DreamOval: It is an Internet and mobile solutions software company. It was responsible for creating the Grameen Foundation health application described above and will be the developer of CocaoLink (announced in April 2011) that will provide pricing and crop information to cocoa growers. It has also developed mobile banking systems for the Agricultural Development Bank among others that are accessible by SMS and Java-based phones. It is currently developing an m-money product called iWallet that will enable Internet payment that is targeted at retail outlets and their shoppers. mPedigree: It offers both those selling and buying pharmaceutical products the opportunity to ensure that verified rather than counterfeit products are being sold and bought. It has been estimated that 25% of drugs being sold are fake. Counterfeit drugs rarely provide the healing impact of genuine drugs; for example, a recent study showed that 50% of malarials do not meet established standards and 20% are fake. The service works on the basis of a scratch code on the sealed packet of drugs. This provides a number that can be SMS’d to a short code number that will then return a message saying whether the drugs are genuinely what they claim to be. It is working in Kenya with four telcos and the Kenya Association of Pharmaceuticals and has also done pilots in Ghana and Nigeria. By the end of 2011, it will roll out the service in Uganda, South Africa and Tanzania. It has recently announced a partnership with Orange to develop its services. The main constraints on its expansion are: lack of equity funding; the inevitable regulatory issues; getting toll-free short-code numbers; lack of support from the Ministry of Health in Ghana; and working with a complex mixture of stakeholders. ICT-enabling services in the private sector eServices Africa Limited: It is an IT-consulting and technology, BPO firm, which has the capacity to set up call centre solutions. eServices broke new ground in the customer care arena with the launch of it’s new business process outsourcing division. It formed a strategic partnership with U.S.-based Osprey Associates to deliver a suite of customer contact and analytical services. The company already serves a few clients within the following industries: Financial (banking/non- 52 banking services including insurance), Telecoms, Government and IT Support. It has 150 staff, and may double its staff size by end 2011 due to a large contract for the Ministry of Public Health. It will manage health transactions, hospital ICT and information issues through its call centre. Mobile Content: It started in 2004 by offering mobile value added services (VAS). Although mobile users were used to voice services they had not much understanding of premium SMS services at the beginning. The challenge was to make mobile users acknowledge that VAS services are not so different from voice services. To get a better view on what mobile users might like, Mobile Content also looked at the demand side in terms of what people were doing (e.g. listening to radio, watching TV, going to church, etc…) in order to launch locally relevant SMS services (for example religious messages). Its services include: standard SMS services (entertainment, sports); a school placement service (when pupils move from Junior High school to Senior High school) and an information service on universities and their courses. On its USSD platform it has developed: a health information service for pregnant women; an electronic school book management platform pilot in partnership with a Dutch NGO: school books can be delivered on the pupils laptops; a very basic TV streaming service for feature phones. The company will also soon launch a music service with local artists (with an exclusivity deal for1 month to ensure the uptake), a mobile handset insurance scheme aimed at the top and middle users segments (Q3-2011) and a local social networking platform (with chats, dating and discussion groups). The constraints on its expansion are: the revenue share between mobile operators, content providers and developers; the cost of electricity and Internet; the limited amount of capital funding and the high burden of tax does not act as an incentive to expand. Nevertheless, it sells its services in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Côte d’Ivoire. It sees considerable potential for expansion when the number of 3G subscribers increases. JobsinGhana: Started in 2005 by a diaspora Ghanaian, the idea was to build a website where employers could post their job vacancies and job seekers could post their resume and apply for a job. The idea was born out a banker friend complaining that he could not find a good secretary. Today JobsinGhana has over 60,000 job seekers’ resumes uploaded and the website has an average 1 million pages viewed per month and over a million impressions per month. Jobsinghana generates revenue from advertising (Google ads but also direct advertisement from companies like Vodafone and MTN) and fees from the publication of the job vacancies. The service is free for job seekers. Six years after its launch, JobsinGhana covers all corners of Ghana and has become the reference platform for online recruitment/employment. 53 Constraints on its growth include: the difficulty of finding skilled IT people; the lack of development capital; and low awareness and education of job-seekers. Because it believes the average Ghanaian is not career-ready it has had to to create a sort of career toolkit on their website with tips and advice. Nevertheless this kind of website encourages professional, transparent recruitment and increases the skills of job-seekers. It will soon launch a low-graphic mobile version to reach a wider audience and is talking to a company in East Africa about setting up a similar service. Persol: It is a software and IT development company founded in 1995. The company currently employs 30 people working on 16 different applications (with 7 active applications). In partnership with USAID, Persol was involved in a project named “Last mile initiative� which aimed at improving the traceability of pineapples meant for export (from the farmers to the pack house). Persol developed a mobile application (on Windows mobile) connected to an SQL server to record information regarding how farmers cultivate pineapple (e.g chemicals used, planting information, diseases information). The data was sent via SMS and on completion of the process, the farmers received a certification document which allowed them to bring their pineapples to the packing house. Besides providing a complete planting history of the pineapple, the certification process also helped to cut off illegal purchases of pineapple. Persol also offers customised business software (HR software, fund management system). All applications are developed in house except for its implementations of SAP software. As part of Ghana’s e-government program it developed: developed a monitoring application of KPIs for the public sector and a revenue collection and management system for facilities (e.g. car park; utility services) run by local government. The aim of the project was to improve revenue collection (more money for local authorities) and transparency in how local government runs facilities under their responsibility. The constraints on the growth of these types of projects were: the lack of long- term financial sustainability of NGO-driven projects; the slow implementation of public sector projects; and resistance to introducing modern ICT-enabled control processes. Both the traceability and revenue collection projects have many potential areas for application, both in Ghana and elsewhere on the continent. Hutspace: It is web and mobile applications development start-up company founded 18 months ago. Its main product is a web based application for procurement evaluation for public tenders named “Ependa� (the word “choose� in Swahili). The software program is aimed at donors’ organisations and public administration as it helps to follow and speed up the procurement process and evaluation stage via an online scoring system. It is also in the beta version for Mealspot ( www.mealspot-test.appspot.com) a restaurant location web and mobile application with menu samples from the listed restaurants with the potential to offer a food ordering service and is developing an IT assets tracking and management software for the Social Security and National Insurance Trust. 54 Constraints on growth are: the high cost of electricity (with need to buy a back- up generator); the difficulties of finding skilled IT people; access to capital; and the absence of support structures for companies moving beyond the early stage period. Both of its public sector projects have wider applications and it can easily increase its output of local apps like Mealspot. Outside of companies, there are independent individual publishers of local content and developers. Jojoo Imbeah has created: a music lyrics (http://www.fienipa.com/); dictionary for local languages (for example, Swahili) (http://words.fienipa.com/?utm_source=fienipa&utm_medium=fntheme&utm_c ampaign=featured&auth=); and African food recipes (http://food.fienipa.com/?utm_source=fienipa&utm_medium=fntheme&utm_ca mpaign=featured&auth=). He is responsible for animating the Ghana Google Technology User Group (GhanaGTUG). (http://ghana.gtugs.org/ ) a online tech community supported by Google. There are 140 members, 60 of them based outside of Ghana. The group has been active for one year and organises regular events to learn together and provide training on mobile apps development (Google products orientated). He makes money from advertising on his websites, programming and consultancy work. His constraints on growth are: rights issues for musical content; the revenue share with telcos; slow uptake locally (although his music site gets 0.5 million visitors a month, most are from outside Ghana); and access to market. Other companies like veteran pioneers SoftTribe are developing and bringing together new applications and services: one of its latest products is a site (ShopAfrica53.com) which it describes as wanting to see it become the “e-Bay of Africa.� Organisations that support entrepreneurs producing ICT-enabled services and applications There are a significant number of organisations that support entrepreneurs producing ICT-enabled services and applications and these are worth describing because they have the potential to underpin a development strategy in Ghana. Ghana Cyber City: This is a large-scale property development, using 12.5 acres of University of Ghana land. It will offer 500,000 sq ft of rental space and a number of “soft� services including incubation, match-making talent with VC capital and creating and managing ICT companies who have investors. It will also provide a data centre. The plan is to start work in September 2011 and to have the first phase ready by early 2013. A Chinese bank is financing the build and it needs to attract a mixture of small and large companies. As the domestic market is relatively small, it hopes to attract both international ICT companies as well as banks, VC firms and lawyers. 55 ITESGH Secretariat: The Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) Secretariat was established in 2007 under the auspices of the Ministry of Communications of Ghana. ITESGH is the component (ii) of the eGhana Project and is main task, is to attract and retain ITES/BPO investors, promoting the development of capacity building in ITES/BPO skills, and also stimulating the growth of ICT entrepreneurship in Ghana. The ITESGH Secretariat therefore addresses three (3) key drivers for increasing Ghana’s potential in making the country the preferred destination of ITES/BPO companies and includes:  Development of Human Resources in ITES/BPO Skills  Investment promotion to attract and retain ITES/BPO firms  Support to the ICT/ITES/BPO industry (ITES/BPO entrepreneurship) The development of curriculum targeted at scaling-up the ITES/BPO skills in the country is ongoing and will be deployed by the end of 2011. Due to an aggressive investment promotion drive by ITESGH in 2010, Ghana as attracted a lot of attention from several global ITES/BPO companies. One of these companies has already setup its operations in Ghana and several others are in their late stages of due diligence analysis on the sourcing space in Ghana. To boost the week ICT/ITES/BPO entrepreneurship base in the country, ITES GH will support an out-put based subsidies to up to three (3) ITES/BPO business incubators through the country. ITESGH also saw to oversaw the formation of the industry association in the country The ITESGH secretariat is also turning some unused government warehouse into a BPO center in the central district of Accra to address the high cost of real estate space for ITES/BPO companies especially GASSCOM members. In addition to the BPO center, ITESGH is also collaborating with the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) under the Ministry of Trade and Industry to building a Technology Park in Tema , a surburb of Accra. Ghana Multimedia Incubator Centre (GMIC): Established in 2005, the Government through the Ministry of Communications aids start-ups and young businesses that have ground-breaking and innovative ICT ideas to mature into viable business ventures. The Project provides its clients (tenants-companies) with office space, utilities, internet access and a shared resource centre which gives them access to various secretarial services. GMIC has 12,000 Sq ft, 15 tenants, 82 employees, 6 virtual tenants, an E-Learning platform, and a number of IT solutions. It offers tenancies of between 3 and 5 years. It believes SMEs have a crucial role to play in stimulating growth, generating employment and contributing to poverty alleviation. SME’s represent over 90% of private businesses in Africa and contribute to more than 50% of the employment and GDP in most African countries. 56 MEST40: It was set up 4 years ago by the non-profit arm of a US software company called Meltwater. It identified an opportunity for job and wealth creation in Ghana for ICT start-ups as entry costs were low. It believed that with the right combinations of skills and support, it would be possible to launch ICT start-ups. The programme operates in three phases. Phase one is a training course in software and entrepreneurship for university graduates. This lasts six months and prepares students to make an investor pitch to be allowed into MEST’s incubator. This second phase in the incubator gives them office space and support combined with seed funding and appropriate expertise. The third phase sees them leave the incubator and set up a company which is then mentored by someone expert in their field. It has had two groups of thirty students who have graduated and currently has 19 students. Its more successful company start-ups include: Nandi Mobile and Retail Tower. Nandi Mobile has developed a customer service application to connect customers to operators via SMS. Often when customers want to complain they do not want the expense of a voice call or have access to the Internet so they turn up in person at the operator’s premises. This allows them to SMS their complaint and has a dashboard through which they can follow subsequent messages. The company started a couple of months ago and is starting to generate revenues. Retail Tower is a piece of software for online retailers to push their products on retail price comparison engines and is targeted at US markets. Nandi Mobile also won an award at the prestigious US West Coast event Launch and is currently in the testing phase. AITI-KACE41: Established in 2003, through a partnership between the Government of Ghana and the Government of India, it works to stimulate the growth of the ICT Sector in ECOWAS and seeks to provides an enabling environment for innovation, teaching and learning as well as practical research on the application of ICT4D in Africa. It works in three areas: research, training and networking and consultancy. AITI-KACE training courses cover networking, web development and software training with an emphasis to developing practical hands-on skills. It has arrangements with Cisco and Oracle to teach their software products. Many core course offerings are based on curriculum developed by its partner in India, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. It has a special project the i2CAP (I too can programme) builds programming skills among students in Senior Secondary Schools. Corporate training programmes are geared towards improving productivity and profits towards overall competitivity. The three major areas of focus are Security including cyberforensics; business simulation modelling and a set of specially targeted 40 Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology 41 Advanced Information Technology Institute – Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence 57 training for the sub-region's nascent Chief Information Officer (CIO) cadre including e-leadership, e-procurement. It has been the neutral site for the location of the local IXP, GIXP, the Google local cache server and it hosts the IPV6 Ghana Forum and an IPV6 Test Lab; Mobile Monday, the World Summit Awards and Garage48. GASSCOM: Launched in November 2007, the Ghana Association of Software and IT Services Companies (GASSCOM) is a trade association for the IT software and services industry. GASSCOM's member companies are in the business of software development, software services, IT-enabled/BPO services and e-commerce. Its members include:Persol Systems Ltd, IPMC, Exzeed Company, Somuah Info Systems, Platinum Technologies, ACS BPS Ghana, e.Services Africa and SofTribe. GASSCOM was set up to facilitate business and trade in software and services and be a strong advocate in soliciting government and other public sector support and encourage the advancement of the industry as a key and strategic sector for the growth of the Ghanaian economy in the next millennium. The primary objective of GASSCOM is to act as a catalyst for the growth of IT- enabled and BPO industry by playing a key advocacy role to influence government to prepare the enabling environment through appropriate legislation that will foster the growth of the outsourcing industry. Other goals include facilitation of strong bonds and trade between outsourcing companies in Ghana and develop strong association with global outsourcing trade groups, and collaborate with investment partners to promote the industry. In addition to these building and programme based organisations, there are both training and finance organisations. These include Enablis which provides “on- demand� training for business skills for small businesses and start-ups and IPMC which offers ICT training at a variety of levels across the country. As many of the new start-ups address social issues there are a number of social impact investment funds including Acumen (which is opening a West Africa office) and Root Capital. The USAID-funded West Africa Trade Hub offers training and assistance to small-scale exporters in non-ICT sectors but also form part of a wider network addressing growth issues. Other bodies that are not directly focused on ICT like the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Ghana also undoubtedly have a role to play in validating and encouraging an entrepreneurial culture. The existence of data centres42 will help support the roll-out of cloud computing on both mobiles and PCs. When it is sufficiently reliable, cloud computing will offer several cheaper access routes for Africans: many already use it through their web-based e-mail browsers so the next step to a wider range of uses is not so large. 42 Private sector data centres include MTN and one based at Busy Internet as well the Government data centre. 58 Busy Internet and Explainer DC: These two companies (one an ISP and cyber- café operator and the other a long established web design company) have come together to create a joint venture that has launched West Africa’s first carrier neutral data centre. It is a 100 sq m, tier 2 data centre that guarantees 99% up- time. Its customers are mostly corporate, including consultancy companies, banks and NGOs. This is the first of what will become many more data centres offering their services. Both Vodafone and MTN will launch third party data centres in the not- too-distant future. These data centres are vital building blocks for offering cloud- based, ICT-enabled services. Development of mobile payment systems The experience of the rise of M-Pesa in Kenya (with its 13.5 million users) shows the potential for this kind of mobile-enabled payment system. Other countries like Ghana may not adopt these systems as quickly but it will only be a matter of time before a critical mass of users makes everyday use of them. Once these kinds of m-payment systems are in place, all kinds of different services and applications can be built on top of them. Indeed, as M-Pesa and others begin to build their network of retail merchants, these services offer the equivalent of a debit card. The ability to enable electronic payment transactions has long been the missing piece for both mobile and Internet in Africa: financial institutions are now catching up with the available technology and realising its power. In the early days of mobile phones, there were no interconnection agreements between operators. Most of the larger ones felt that they had a more powerful case for expansion based on the size of their subscriber numbers. Once interconnection between operators became an established reality, it became clear that the networking effects of being able to ring larger numbers of people enabled even larger expansion of subscriber numbers. The same arguments apply to m-money payment systems: users do not have a need to pay only people on MTN, Vodafone, Tigo or Airtel. If all payment systems are interconnected, networking effects ensure that the overall number of users is greater and this will help the market grow. Currently there are only half a million users of m-money systems through mobile operators and is important to ensure that this figure grows as quickly as possible. Experience from elsewhere shows that it is important to have both experiental marketing (to explain to customers how it works) and a large agent network to be able to deliver physical cash. Africxpress (txtNpay): Founded in 2007, Africxpress received a licence (distribution partner of a bank for the unbanked sector) in late 2008 to operate an electronic money service in Ghana. The company offers remote payments (hospital bills, school fees, insurance payment) and transfers services via mobile 59 devices and/or laptops under the label “txtNpay�. The service is available in the whole of Ghana. The company currently has 90,000 customers and processes around 100,000 transactions per month. A majority of the service users make payments or transfers via a txtNpay agents rather than through their electronic wallet. Over 95% of the transactions are via the agents. Competition has been a stimulant for as other m-money services from operators have entered the market, its user numbers have doubled. Its sees the constraints on growth as follows: a serious cash shortage in rural areas (even the banks don’t have the cash) to pay out the money transferred and a lack of trust in electronic payment systems: users feels that they can trust an agent but not a system. To solve the rural cash problem, it is thinking of partnering with micro-finance organisations that collect savings to recycle their deposits. It wants to scale up its services by adding international remittances and expanding its number of retail merchants. In partnership with a local company in Nigeria, it has been granted a licence to offer services there. eTranzact: It is an electronic payments company that operates in six other African countries besides Ghana including Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire and Kenya. It claims to be compatible with any platform or protocol. It also has a card (costing GHC5) which can be used to withdraw money from some ATMs. It has partnership arrangements with several banks including Ghana Commercial Bank. Buying airtime using the service is free (the operator pays) and up to 50 p on other transactions. It can also be used for the sending and receiving of international remittances. It has 100,000 clients in Ghana. GhIPSS (Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems Ltd)/ezwich: GhIPSS was founded in 2007 and is owned by Bank of Ghana. It operates a payment infrastructure offering interoperability for the banking system including rural banks and micro-finance organisations, operating like a clearing house). In 2008, GhIPSS launched a secured payment system labelled “e-zwich� (National Switch and Biometric Smart Card Payment System) which is used by all the banks. It enables access to any ATM and any POS across the country. In parallel to the rollout of a smart card payment system, “e-zwich� has allowed GhIPSS to offer virtual bank accounts linked into the prepaid “e-zwich� card (all banking information are stored on the card) to retail customers. GhIPSS has over 500,000 customers with 40 to 45% actively doing transactions (e.g. payments of employees’ salaries, POS transactions, transfer from bank account to card). The prepaid debit card operates online and off-line in real time. The transaction information kept in POS until it goes online again). It has been used for payment of civil servants and farmers and for student loans. There are 11 local clearance houses across the country. The constraints on growth are: potential users do not trust electronic payment; more participating banks are required to generate revenues and cover the 60 investment cost; and low use of POS at the merchants. There is considerably potential for growth, particularly at the regional level in the ECOWAS zone via GIM-UEMOA (http://www.gim-uemoa.org/). 61 Appendix 3 List of People Interviewed (Names are alphabetical by surname) 1. Marie-Dominique Aboukan, Sales & Marketing Manager, AfricExpress (txtNpay service) 2. Shika Acolatse, Country Representative, Enablis 3. Alex Adjei Bram, Gen Manager Sales, SMSGH 4. Yvette Adounvo Atekpe, Regional Managing Director, Internet Solutions Ghana 5. Eben Afari-Kumah, PhD student, member of GINKS, working on a thesis on the adoption of ICT for health service delivery. 6. Theo Agbeko Marketing, Airtel Ghana 7. Charles Y. Aheto-Tsegah, Deputy Director General, Ghana Education Service 8. Kwami Ahiabenu II, African Elections Project 9. Estelle Akofio-Sowah, Country Manager, Google 10. Jimmy Allotey, Transit Manager, GCNet 11. Maximus Ametorgoh, Managing Director, popOut 12. Carlos Avice, Social Protection Specialist, UNICEF 13. Patrick Awuah, Ashesi University 14. Jude J. Azumatse, Global Bid 15. George Babafemi Chief Operating Officer, eTransact 16. Fiifi Baidoo, developer 17. Richard Balfour, CEO, JobsinGhana.com 18. Victor Bannerman-Chedid: Head, Product Management, Consumer Mobile, Vodafone Ghana 19. Sarah Bartlett, Esoko 20. Ventura Bengoechea, Lead Water and Sanitation Specialist, World Bank 21. Catherine Casey, Innovation Manager, Acumen Fund 22. Herman Chinnery-Hesse, CEO, SoftTribe 23. Ben Coleman, ICT Adviser, West African Trade Hub 24. Derrydean Dadzie, CEO, DreamOval 25. Kofi Dadzi, CEO, Rancard Solutions 26. Lance Dickerson, Acting CTO, MTN 27. Nana Manu, Head of Consumer Fixed Promotions, Vodafone Ghana 28. Professor Mumuni Dakubu, GHANET, University of Ghana 29. Mark Davies, CEO, Esoko 30. Emmanuel Darko, Deputy General Manager, GCNet 31. Frederick Francs, CEO, GhIPSS 32. Dorothy Gordon, Director-General, Kofi Annan Centre 33. Waqar Haider, Sector Leader, Sustainable Development (Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone) 34. Thomas Hess, CEO, Explainer DC 35. Kojo Hayford, CEO (President, GASSCOM), e.Services Africa Ltd 36. Richard Hlmomador, CEO, KNet 37. Alwin Hoegerie, General Manager, GCNet 38. David Hutchful, Grameen Foundation 39. Jojoo Imbeah, developer 40. Ibrahim Inusah, GINKS 41. Rexford Koney, Co-ordinator, ICT Capacity Building Centre, Ministry of Information 42. Martine Koopman, IICD 43. Yoku Korsah, COO, GhIPSS 44. Joe Lamport, West African Trade Hub 62 45. David Maldima, CEO, NetAfrique 46. Seyram Mankra, Synovate 47. Colin McElwee, World Reader 48. Jaqui Moller Larsen, Grameen Foundation 49. Dante Mossi, Senior Operations Officer, World Bank 50. Emmanuel Nahr, Managing Director, Step Technologies 51. Eunice Nyadu: Head – Finance, GhIPSS 52. Nelson Offei Osae, eGhana Project Co-ordinator, Ministry of Information 53. Jerry Okantey: Software Development Manager, Persol Systems 54. Philip Okullo, Synovate 55. Osei Owusu-Korkor, CEO, Zipnet 56. Eric Osiakwan, Internet Research 57. Yaw Owusu, Managing Director, Gateway Innovations 58. Thomas Phillips, Director – System Integration, Persol Systems 59. Edwin Provencal, formerly Managing Director, National Communications Backbone Company,now Head of Strategy and Planning, Vodafone Ghana 60. Girijesh Rai, Globacom 61. David Risher, Worldreader.org 62. Praveen Sadelage, Managing Director, Busy Internet 63. Bridgette Sexton, Google 64. Bright Simons, CEO, mPedigree 65. Philip Sowah, Managing Director, Airtel Ghana 66. Ylva Strander, MEST 67. Alex Sulzberger, CEO, Ecoband Networks 68. Jonathan Tawiah, CEO, Ostec 69. William Tevie, Director-General, NITA 70. Florence Toffa, Head of local branch, Mobile Web Ghana 71. Lawrence Totimeh, Sales and Business Development Officer, Esoko 72. John Totoe, CEO, Mobile Content 73. Prince Tutugri, Manager, Netplus Cybercafé 74. Kofi Worlanyo, GASSCOM 75. Damian Y. Zaato: GM- Business Services, GhIPSS 76. Ever Zalazar, Enterainment Manager, Tigo 77. Alhassan Umar, Director, ITES 63 Appendix 4 Background documents A Model of National ICT Policy for Sustainable Development of Ghana, Dr John Thones Amenyo, 2003 Ghana National Wood Tracking Scheme: Forest Governance 2.0 – A Primer on ICTs and Governance, Profor, 2011 ICT for Accelerated Development Policy’ (ICT4AD), Government of Ghana, 2003 ICT – Policy and Strategy for the Health Sector, Ministry of Health, Undated ICT Policy Guidelines, Ghana Prison Service, Undated ICT Policy Report for Botswana, Ghana and Uganda, McCarthy Tetrault, 2003 Readiness for the Networked World: Ghana Assessment, Magda Ismail, Center for International Development, Harvard University, 2002 ICT for Accelerated Development Policy’ (ICT4AD), Government of Ghana, 2003 64