Black star: Ghana, information technology and development in Africa

An excerpt from the article follows:

"Accra is technologically marginalised by any measure. But over the past ten years, the introduction of the Internet, wireless technology and freer radio broadcasts have vastly expanded communications and information. The Internet is widely available. E–mail usage is soaring. Wireless telephony is growing rapidly. Radio stations are proliferating. Once mired in information poverty, the people of Accra now face the challenge of using information and connectivity to their best advantage.In examining how Accra adapts to technological change, we gain a better understanding of how people in poor African cities use technology and what they want from it. Debates over the so–called "digital divide" can be enriched by close studies of lived experience in parts of the world where the revolution in information technology remains more prospect than reality....

In this essay, I will concentrate on the role of information technology in the economic and social development of Africa. Among Africans, advances in computers and communications have attracted a great deal of interest and enthusiasm in recent years. Since the mid–1990s, shifts in computing and communications have been rapid, even in poor countries, partly because of liberalization in government telecommunications policies and partly because of sharp declines in the cost of computing and communications equipment. As recently as five years ago, wireless telephony and Internet access were a rarity in African cities. Yet these same places today boast a burgeoning community of plugged-in, switched–on people. While disease, disaster, civil war and government failure shape Africa's present, information technology - applied intelligently and fairly - could write the region's future to an unexpected degree...."

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