As I continue my survey of internet cafes here in Accra, one question keeps recurring. How can these small businesses survive, let along turn a profit? 15 so far in Kokomlemle and 11 in Adabraka, the two areas of Accra I am focusing on, and barely one is making its owner a living. Yet they provide an essential service for all the businesses in the area, since an internet connection costs a minimum of 90 cedis (about US$60) to start up and 53 cedis a month for the lowest bandwidth deal, which is way beyond the resources of most entrepreneurs in Accra. So they check their mail in cafes instead, at 50 pesewas an hour. However, the list of challenges for someone attempting to run an internet café is formidable:
Computers cost approximately double what they do in rich countries due to import duties, plus the inflation rate in Ghana is running at 18% and the cedi has lost about a third of its purchasing power over the last year alone. So imported computers are getting beyond the reach of most small businesses. Internet cafes tend to make do with second hand ones from abroad, bought at Tema port or through dealers in Accra – a four or five-year-old PC will cost you about US$300, which is more affordable than the thousand or so for a decent new model.
Connectivity is expensive for cafes: Vodafone, the owner of the fixed network and thus the main ISP for the country, has a business rate of 243 cedis ($164) a month for cafes. There are lower rates, but the cafes are told they should buy the most bandwidth possible, and they tend to do so because there is no information available on what they are getting. There is some debate over whether the ISP actually manages bandwidth, and whether those paying the top rate are getting any more connectivity than those paying less – but that’s for another time.
The main issue for these businesses, however, is credit. This is the word I have heard over and over again, as I have interviewed café owners all over Ghana. There is no access to credit for small-scale businesses. At all.
This seems to be down to a lack of a credit culture, which is not entirely a bad thing. Rich countries’ financial practices haven’t exactly been giving credit a good name lately. Nor have they been setting a good example for their neighbours in terms of how to use credit without destroying everything they were trying to build in the first place. However, there is a case for credit where a new sector needs to expand, and where the equipment that can build the business is in critically short supply.
What I have been discovering is that there is a credit gap where these SMEs are concerned. Ghana’s two credit markets exist at the extreme ends of the scale: if you are a poor rural woman looking for a few dollars to grow your shea butter business, or to buy soap to sell in the market, you are in luck. Some microcredit scheme will lend you $50 and charge you 50% interest on it. Alternately, if you are a Big Man on the local scene, with a long-established business and political connections, you will be able to get a bank loan, which will run you about 40% interest and which you will inevitably have to pay back within a year or 18 months. Loans for longer than a year are almost unheard of in Ghana.
So these small businesses, being a new sector, run by young entrepreneurs who don’t have a lot of collateral yet, are out of luck. I interviewed a café owner this week who had been on a fruitless search for a loan to replace his ancient computers all year. Having tried the larger banks and been refused, he went to his local smaller-scale savings and loan company (not a loan shark but a registered bank) asking for 1,500 cedis (about US$1,000). He was quoted – get this – an interest rate of 48%, and a loan period of just one year. The bank also told him they would only give him access to 1,100 of the amount, and would ‘bank’ the rest for him. Meanwhile, although they were holding onto nearly a third of the amount, they would be charging him interest on the full 1,500. Understandably, he said no. Banks tend to ask for the deeds of people’s houses and the papers for their cars when they take out a loan, and bank managers have good political connections so that if they decide to take your house, there’s probably not much you can do about it.
Credit cards, which might elsewhere act as a stopgap when businesses have to expand, are unavailable to all but the richest Ghanaians. Tim Little has covered the credit card issue in his blog: http://timjlittle.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/a-challenge-to-geeks-and-bankers/. He demonstrates why café owners, who deal almost entirely in hardware and software that is only available overseas, cannot buy anything from outside Ghana. When we need antivirus software or a accounting software, we go online. When Ghanaian businesses need those things, they go open source. It’s an open secret that Microsoft Office 2003 is effectively open source software in Ghana, since enough people have copied it from the few imported CDs that were available that is can now be shared for free. This is not because they are bad people who want to pirate software, it’s because even if they want to buy it, they can’t.
So what are they doing instead? Well, the reason I am a migration researcher surveying internet cafes is that they fill the gap with inputs from overseas. Family and friends abroad send computers directly, or bring them in person. Small items such as USB sticks are ‘imported’ in people’s luggage when they come home for a holiday. I personally helped re-equip a friend’s café when a surge from the electric grid blew up his routers and switches – I brought in 26 kilos of electronics in my luggage after a trip home, because they were so exorbitantly priced and impossible to get hold of here that it was quicker just to buy them in London and fly them in personally. So migration is a mainstay of these small IT businesses.
Of course, the only thing that’s harder for a small-scale entrepreneur to get than credit, is a visa. But that’s a story for another time.
As anyone who reads the Times knows by now, there is an international investigation going on about e-waste. The Times published a story exposing the illegal transporting of defunct computers and other electronics to Brazil and Ghana – among other things, a Ministry of Defence computer wound up in a scrapyard in Accra that has a thriving trade in still-viable hard disks, which made people a little nervous back in the UK.
The problem of e-waste is real – contractors specialise in making your electronic rubbish disappear from view, only to make it highly visible to the poorest of Accra down in the Agbobloshie scrap market district, who are only too happy to rip it apart, burn off anything not made of lead or copper, and sell the resulting metals to traders in Tema, Ghana’s main port and industrial area.
There is an international treaty, the Bamako Convention, which sets out why this is not a good idea, and comprehensively bans it. 30 African countries have ratified it, including all Ghana’s neighbours. However Ghana has not, which makes it a prime destination for toxic e-crap of all kinds. And it is truly toxic. The standard chemicals released when you break down computers include antimony oxide (symptoms similar to arsenic poisoning); beryllium (which has a fatal lung disease named after it); cadmium (lung cancer and heart disease); lead (nervous system damage); and phthalates (asthma, liver and kidney damage).
These are released most effectively when you rip apart and burn the items, although leaving them to seep into the soil over a long period is also an option.
Based on this, I decided Agbobloshie was clearly the place to be. So I went down to take a look.
It is fairly apocalyptic. The smoke billowing from the farthest reaches of the scrap heap envelops everything, casting a dark cloud over the area and wafting a smell that was worryingly familiar as one of the standard Accra smells – meaning it’s making it out of Agbobloshie to share its chemical joys with the rest of the city.
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The first part of the scrapyard is fairly standard: trashed refrigerators that predate the CFC ban, bits of bicycles and cars, all waiting to be loaded into trucks to go off to Tema for reuse. There is also a thriving trade in old car batteries, which the scrap sellers (or more often their junior brothers) break open to salvage the lead. The rest of the battery is thrown away. The scrapyard sits on the bank of the river which flows into the Korley lagoon in central Accra, where according to the local press 5,000 euros a day is being spent on a cleanup exercise to reduce its toxicity.
Further in, people are collecting the copper wires out of computers and other goods and taking them to where the casing is removed by burning. This is not a healthy activity, but is being performed by young men and boys who probably don’t have much access to information on the health effects of cadmium, phthalates, etc.
It also results in a landscape that looks like a Balkan capital after a nuclear war.
This is a migrant business: everyone I spoke to had come from the north of Ghana, which is much poorer and sends a constant stream of migrants south. The boys gathering and burning the computer parts all spoke Hausa and Dagbani, as did the girls who came by to see what I was up to.
There seems to be a rule in Ghana that wherever there are toxic and awful things going on, there are kids having an inappropriately good time. These girls, who had a blast making fun of my appalling Dagbani, clearly have a future in showbusiness:
Particularly this one:
I then found some boys taking a break, who explained that they had quit school in the North to come to Accra and make some money for their families. They told me they make 70 pesewas (47 cents) for each pound of lead they sell, and 2 cedis ($1.35) for a pound of copper, which entails burning the casing off several bucketloads of wire. This is not bad money, for Ghana.
So these are the poorest Ghanaians, migrating south, and trying to make money to support those back home. They are likely to be illiterate (northern Ghana has little education and thus an illiteracy rate of 79%), so that it’s unlikely they can read the warnings in the press about the carcinogens they are helping to release. After half an hour at the scrapyard I was high on fumes and was still feeling dizzy and sick eight hours later, so I can only imagine what happens if you work there every day.
And as with all toxic places in Ghana, people also live there. The community is unplanned, naturally, and has no water or electricity. The sewage system consists of a puddle outside the wall:
which eventually seeps into the river:
and thus down to the aforementioned lagoon.
The most powerful thing about Agbobloshie – apart from the smell – is the sense of opportunity that pervades its dumps and fuming bonfires. For most of the kids I spoke to, a job burning carcinogenic crap was a desirable career option compared to the hunger and lack of opportunities back home in the village. They were working, and this made sense to them.
What I carried away, as usual, was a feeling that this energy could be put to better use. The few responsible electronics manufacturers that want to make sure their e-waste is disposed of in an environmentally safe way (at least the e-waste that they can identify and that is offered up by their customers) have to pay large amounts to disposal experts. A coalition of relevant parties such as big computer manufacturers, environmental organisations and private donors could set up a high-tech recycling industry in a country like Ghana, involving actual standards and buildng capacity that would be unique in the developing world. Ghana could make a nice living receiving and processing e-waste properly, instead of having children rip and burn it apart with their bare hands, then having the rest of us inhale the results.
Unfortunately it’s much easier just to let things be. The kids aren’t complaining, after all. And by the time they feel the effects, they’ll be back home in Savelugu, Yendi or Choggu. If they make it to a hospital, which is unlikely, the diagnosis will be the same as it always seems to be: poverty.
Obama was in Accra this weekend. Sheer madness. The insanity started a month before – Obama t-shirts appeared, and columns in the newspapers meditated on the significance of his choosing Ghana. But the last week, ahead of his arrival Friday night, has been just crazy.
Walking through Osu on Friday afternoon, the street sellers had stopped shouting ‘obruni’ or ‘sister’ or hissing, and instead were shouting ‘Obama’ at all foreigners. There were ten types of Obama shirt, five types of Obama cloth, Obama posters, Obama special editions of all the newspapers, Obama shoes sold on the street, and a rumour from Auntie of roving sellers with Obama biscuits.
There were also what seemed like unprecedented numbers of foreigners on the street. It turned out the entire Peace Corps in Ghana had come to Accra for a speech Obama was to give at the airport as he left, but we didn’t know that and thought there must have been some mysterious seasonal migration.
The national rubbish collection company, Zoomlion, managed the most iconic celebration of Obama’s presence. He went to Cape Coast castle on Saturday after his speech to parliament – the main shipping point for countless thousands of slaves over a couple of hundred years, and one of the darkest historic sites of the world. Obama’s family are descendants of slaves, so it was highly symbolic in any number of ways. The castle, however, has been in a state of gradual readying for the tourist trade for a few decades, with nothing ever quite finished. Plus Cape Coast is a normal Ghanaian town, and is thus permanently covered in a thin layer of rubbish. Zoomlion organised a Big Push with all its available workers to get the place clean for the visit, but unfortunately didn’t have the cash to pay them. So all the rubbish collectors (the lowest-paid salaried employees in Ghana at the best of times) were privileged to work three days for free, ‘their contribution to the visit’, as their caring employer put it. So it’s inspiring to see how slavery has been eradicated for ever in the its most symbolic location.
On Saturday morning Hannah, Chris, Tamara and I decided to go and watch the speech at a café in Osu. So we set off in a taxi at 9am, only to find the roads shutting down around us and Accra’s traffic turning to gridlock. It was so bad, people stopped honking their horns. They got out of their cars and tried to figure out what was going on – the scale of the road closures had not been announced ahead of time.
Ring Road gridlock
Everyone thought it was just the main road from the parliament to the airport, but all the main roads were closed, with policemen hanging out and claiming to have no idea why they were closed or when they might reopen. People told us they had been stopped at 7am, and it was now 9.30, with no information or signs of movement. Cars and trotros pointed in every direction. People started walking.
Accra on foot
People were bewildered and cross. One man took a picture of the chaos with his cellphone, and some cops smacked him around and took him away.
We walked with everyone else down Ring Road. People were being nice, as they tend to be in surprising and dysfunctional situations. Except for one guy who was determined we were going to give him money, and when we didn’t, gave us an epic death-curse in a mixture of English and Twi. ‘Don’t mind him,’ said a passing man. We agreed we wouldn’t.
Finally, Osu. We ate brunch to store up energy for what we assumed would be a long walk back.
Aside from a small person who was dressed for the occasion in Obama cloth and an Obama t-shirt…
small Obama supporter
…Frankie’s was full of expats who couldn’t really care less about the speech, which was fortunate because the transmission didn’t really work, and one had to guess what was being said most of the time. It sounded good though. ‘Corruption… investment… security… rape… terrorists… international aid…’ all the ingredients of contemporary foreign policy.
We started walking back at 12, convinced it would still be gridlock. But bizarrely everything had cleared, and we were mercifully able to get home in reasonable time. As we were out with Aunty that evening, Air Force One roared overhead. It was a beautiful evening, with the rain briefly pausing to note the occasion and a scarlet sunset blazing against a light blue sky. We waved goodbye.
Over the last year, Ghana has experienced a wave of anxiety about sakawa – internet fraud. The fraud has been going on much longer, but there is a noticeable uptick in the level of public hysteria at the moment. As with many worrying things in Ghana, it’s popularly attributed to Nigeria’s bad influence on ‘the youth’. Sakawa has a variety of meanings, ranging from defrauding people the old-fashioned way to online identity theft.
Principally, sakawa seems to manifest in Ghana at the moment in a less sophisticated version than the Nigerian ‘419’ scams (where people email you asking for your help accessing a billion-dollar inheritance and ask for your bank account details so they can share the money with you). Here, it is said to consist mainly of young men in internet cafes going on social networking sites like myspace and befriending older women in rich countries, or alternatively pretending to be young women and befriending older men.
Once they establish a relationship with someone online, the story goes, they either get the person to send them gifts by mail, or money by Western Union. This would seem mainly to involve criminal stupidity on the part of the sender. Who is actually responding to these requests? How bored/gullible must they be? And do they know they are responsible for a miasma of post-modern Ghanaian angst? However, where the fraud involves the recipient picking up funds (as reported in the paper last week) from Western Union using the aforesaid false online identity, it also involves actual fraud on the Ghanaian end, both on the part of the recipient and the Western Union employees who are said to accept their false identity documents for a share of the profits.
There’s also another version of sakawa where the defrauding party tries to get the credit card details of their mark, and uses them to order things for delivery to Ghana. There is even an urban myth that a child managed to get a BMW delivered to Tema port last year, and drove it away, but it’s hard to believe. Any time I try to use any of my bank cards to do anything here, including take money out of an ATM after calling repeatedly to warn the bank I’m about to do so, my account gets blocked. Credit cards are still almost unavailable in Ghana, so when they are used from here, the assumption is that it’s fraudulent and security measures are activated. Ordering objects on Amazon, for delivery to my address in England? Impossible from a Ghanaian IP address. The entire Amazon account shuts down automatically, and to add insult to injury they don’t even let you know they’ve done it for a week. So if these sakawa kids have figured out how to get credit cards to work online from Ghana, I want to know their secret.
Which leads us to the most interesting feature of sakawa – the strategies these kids use to make the fraud more likely to work. These involve practices prescribed by juju priests: the rumours say that the sakawa kid will go to the priest and he will say, ‘you must sleep for a night in a coffin, then sacrifice three chickens, then give me five cedis’. If the person does all this, their fraud will be successful. If not, they are disregarding the prescription of a juju priest, which, as everyone knows, is an unwise thing to do. It usually involves you getting turned into an animal of some kind, or running naked through the market square (a common feature of sakawa stories, along with the sleeping-in-a-coffin idea). There are also rumours about human sacrifices being made – but those are not sakawa-specific. It was rumoured politicians in marginal constituencies were making human sacrifices during the run-up to the last election.
In what seems like no time at all, sakawa has gone from a rumour to a full-fledged genre of urban myth here. The president has pronounced sakawa to be a danger to the nation’s reputation, the chief of police has announced that measures will be taken (according to café owners in Accra, both undercover and uniformed policemen are now frequenting their cafes to keep an eye out for people committing fraud) and everyone has a sakawa story.
It’s not that sakawa stories are necessarily untrue – in fact having looked at some browser histories in internet cafes, it’s clear that a significant proportion of people’s online activity involves looking up the profiles of American and European men and women in late middle age, and communicating with them. And most of the clients of internet cafes are young men and boys. So there is something going on, but this is no indication that it is a) succeeding or b) of a scale fit to generate this level of hysteria.
To test the level of rumour, I’ve started asking random people what they think sakawa is. They can all identify it, but people from the non-internet generations (roughly, anyone over 40 here) have only the haziest idea of what it is. They can identify that it happens on the internet, that it is a feature of the continuing degeneracy of ‘the youth’ and that it is an issue of national importance. But what it is, precisely, remains largely undefined.
Sakawa is thus becoming a catch-all term for crime, witchcraft and general dodginess. At a conference recently, the director of a child protection NGO told me that her friend’s daughter had ‘nearly been taken as a sacrifice for sakawa’. Apparently she was on her way to school and a man pulled her into a taxi, with two other young girls, and tried to drug them. The friend’s daughter escaped, but the other two were taken off to an unknown fate. How did your friend know it was for sakawa, I asked? Oh, of course it was for sakawa, she replied. What else would it be? I suggested a more mundane but equally criminal explanation, but she was not having any of it. This was juju, and juju it would stay.
Passing through Nkrumah Circle on Friday, I saw a crowd peering in fascination at something in a corner. I stopped, thinking it must be either the football or some dying animal. It turned out to be a poster about sakawa. Posters are one way of marking cultural milestones here. If something is important, there is often a poster about it on sale. Footballers’ new cars, footballers’ new houses, and Obama’s visit have been recent poster topics. And now sakawa. So here are the bits of the poster that don’t involve beheadings or nudity:
So there you have it. Don’t do juju and try to buy a car online, or you will end up turning into a beagle. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
In the course of my research in Ghana so far, I have travelled about 100,000 square km of country, had malaria three times, been robbed twice (three times if you count the police), met hundreds of people, interviewed 80 internet cafe owners, and eaten various kinds of soup with my hands. However, the most important activity has gone unblogged, unremarked… in fact even my roommate Hannah had not seen it until today.
So there it is. I can now juggle (on Thursdays when the wind is in the right direction and the moon is full). This is all part of my Plan B for if the PhD doesn’t work out. I am going to join the circus. I have already made strategic contacts with the elephant community at Mole, and incorporated clowning practice into my research methodology by falling into drains, turning up for interviews with stripes of red dust down my face, and doing comedy linguistics as I try to greet people in the correct language.
Now all that’s left is to learn acrobatics. I’m sure I can figure that out in the next few months. Then I’m ready for conference season.
Filed under: Accra, July | Tags: Accra, connectivity, internet cafe, Research, vodafone
I am around Accra this week, surveying (conveniently) the internet cafes in my own neighbourhood, Kokomlemle.
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So far, I have interviewed 13. There should be 17 or so in all. Then on to Adabraka, across the Ring Road.
As I start to talk to small business owners in Accra, it’s evident there are some big differences from the north. First, there are female-owned cafes here. 3 women so far, which is radical compared to none of the 67 up north. Also, people are making a slightly better living from the cafes here in the city. However, when asked what they need to succeed, all of them say connectivity. ‘The link’ (i.e. the internet connection from the only provider they can afford, Vodafone, formerly Ghana Telecom) is so unreliable it’s impossible to run an internet business.
This is interesting – the same criticism has come from every cafe owner surveyed so far. No one knows what is going on with ‘the link’, why it is so bad, why the company offers no compensation unless it goes down for two weeks consecutively (which, amazingly, has actually happened in the last couple of months). It’s down about 3 days a week on average, which means that people don’t even try to come to the cafes to browse unless they have to. Meanwhile, Vodafone charges the internet cafe owners for the connection as if it were working. If there were any alternative provider, every single cafe owner I have talked to vows they would switch instantly. The network sometimes has surges that fry people’s modems, for which the company does not compensate them. Each time the link goes down locally, the owners have to call Vodafone to come and fix it. But the technicians often won’t come out unless they are personal friends of the owners. So those who don’t have a buddy in the company have to bribe them instead. Which makes the bad service a big earner for individual technicians, and probably does not incentivise them to let management know that the customers are ready to mutiny.
So what is going on? How can you provide such terrible service and still stay in business? I consulted with a friend who works in telecoms here, and he came up with some suggestions.
The real answer, of course, is that there is no one else. The national provider set up all the country’s existing landline phone service, and thus owns the network infrastructure that delivers the DSL service everyone uses for broadband. It also controls access to the Sat3 submarine cable off the coast of West Africa. So it has a stranglehold on the market.
The company has also, in its previous incarnation as Ghana Telecom (bought by Vodafone last year amid an ongoing torrent of outrage and investigation from various political factions) set up a profoundly dysfunctional system for internet service provision. As my friend explains it, IP addresses (the numbers that identify users’ locations) were set up originally as open ports, meaning that they allowed, in principle, unlimited amounts of spam and virus-laden traffic. Certain global firewall systems have been set up to combat spam, since it slows down companies’ and even whole countries’ networks. One example is SORBS (see link below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_and_Open_Relay_Blocking_System
The way these blocking mechanisms work is by identifying the IP addresses that send mass emails, and blocking them. And since the IP addresses created by Ghana Telecom are all similar, these blocking mechanisms don’t distinguish between different locations within the country, so that the whole country shows up as one big spam-generation site.
Among other issues, this makes browsing sites outside Ghana as slow as mud, and means that emails from here to any official address outside the country will be bounced back as spam. For instance, I can’t email any administrative address at my university (Sussex) from here, nor can I access the electronic journals I need in order to study. My Amazon account keeps getting closed whenever I try to order anything from here (four times at the last count), and when I try to use a credit card online I either find my account blocked for fraud or I have to go through byzantine security procedures, using passwords I have inevitably forgotten.
So the upshot of all this is that ‘the link goes down’ because Ghana is spamming on a global scale. Over the three years or so since Ghana Telecom started offering general broadband service to major towns, the speed of broadband here has gone from quite good to a snail’s pace (it can take half an hour to download an email), all because of spam clogging the system. This may be the only situation where the internet gets slower and more expensive over time – Ghana is going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world.
The solution? Until someone devises a way to stop people spamming, the only response is to get Ghana’s internet addresses de-blacklisted internationally. This means Vodafone needs to invest in its network and re-register its IP ports with firewalls that will catch the spam and clean things up. The government, according to the industry, is not going to award any new contracts to ISPs until this situation improves, because more companies providing service on the same bad network would only clog things up further. So for the small enterprises of the tech sector, the future looks bleak unless Vodafone can get its act together.
So they have to wait, some more patiently than others, while customers fall asleep waiting for their email to download. The only benefit is that owners, since they can’t do their jobs most of the time, have a lot of spare time to talk to passing researchers.
