New Institute for Advanced ICT in Ghana

By Anna Bon

Just a few steps from the place where the famous Ghanaian Star beer is brewed and bottled, a new institute for higher education in ICT just opened in Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana.

The institute bears the name of the celebrated Asantehene, king of this region, and is officially named The Osei Tutu II Institute for Advanced ICT Studies, but it is usually referred to as The Institute. The letters ICT in the school’s name are said to be an acronym, not only for Information and Communication Technology, but also for Innovation, Cooperation, Thinking. The Institute was officially inaugurated by the Ghanaian Minister of Trade, Mr. Joe Baidoo-Ansah, in behalf of the President of Ghana, John Kufuor. Tom de Man, president of Heineken for Africa and the Middle East, an official from the Dutch Embassy, and the Managing Director of Ghana Guinness Breweries Limited were among the special guests who attended the opening ceremony of The Institute.








This is the first school in Ghana to teach ICT at MSc level. The very first batch of seventeen students started here last August. If these students succeed in all the tough examinations, they will obtain their Master’s degree in 2009. They will be taught according to the newest insights in information and communication technologies, computer science, entrepreneurship and management.

The institute was designed and created by one man, the Dutch professor Maarten Looijen, who is now rector. The initiative for this school came from Heineken International. The sponsors now are Ghana Guinness Breweries, Diageo, Coca Cola, Unilever and Barclays. The Dutch government gives a substantial financial support.

Ghana is taking off economically. The World Bank reported an economic growth in Ghana of 6 % for the last year. Ghana is now one of the best-performing economies in western Africa. When you visit e.g. Accra and Kumasi, you can see numerous new hotels, businesses, shopping malls, conference centers. Many, many new residences are being built, all over the country. ICT is in everybody’s minds. Mobile telephony expands every year. One out of four Ghanaians owns a mobile telephone nowadays. There are internet cafes all over the country. The road infrastructure is in good shape. You can drive on asphalt from Accra to the far north, and even cross the border to neighboring Burkina Faso.

E-business, semantic web, internet technology, are just a few of the subjects taught at the Institute by professors from Holland, South-Africa, Italy, Bulgaria. Although internet in Ghana is still of very low-bandwidth capacity, due to monopolies and an unregulated telecom market, new technologies are desperately needed to support economic growth. Ghana will need many, many more graduates in ICT than this institute can deliver each year. Most computer businesses are now run by foreigners, entrepreneurs from India, China or Europe. Skilled Ghanaian network specialists and system administrators can be found, but Ghanaians as Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are still hard to find.

This institute is a good first step to enhance Ghanaian education in ICT. I hope many ICT professionals will be delivered to African society by this institute. And let these professionals reinvest their capacities into African economy. I wish there were ten institutes like this in Ghana!

Four students at The Institute

Click here to visit The Institute's website.

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Internet in Higher Education in Africa

Read my new article, published in the International Journal for Education and Development using ICT

Click here to view the abstract

Slides: The Internet Bandwidth Issue in Africa

Poor internet connectivity is one of the serious underlying causes of the digital divide between developing and industrialized countries, and is hampering the transition to the global information society.
Web2.0 social software offers a great opportunity to communicate with peers, exchange exciting new ideas, form new communities on the web and access all sorts of information.
But what if you don't have the internet? Is there a solution to this problem, or will developing countries get more and more isolated, by missing the opportunity to join the global social network?

View a presentation about this subject, held at the Web2fordev Conference,
24-27 September in Rome, during one of the Open Spaces workshops.

The Internet Bandwidth Issue in Africa; Special Case Ghana

View this slideshow

Slides from Plantage and the World

Supercomputers of the World: this one in Ghana

By Anna Bon

I never expected to find a supercomputer in Ghana, until I accidentally ran into one. My interest in globalization and information technology in relation to development made me visit the Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in ICT, in Accra, a training centre for ICT personnel. My contact person was a gentleman named Mohammed who showed me around in the premises. Here, at the Kofi Annan Centre, is where the Ghana Internet Exchange is hosted. The exchange consists of a network switch where the glass fibre networks of local telecom companies are interconnected, enabling them to exchange their internet data traffic flows.

I was already surprised by this high-tech centre, when I suddenly became aware of a sign pointing to the HPC Department. As a former employee of the Dutch Supercomputer Centre, SARA, I am familiar with the concept of High Performance Computing (HPC) also called supercomputing. One does not come across supercomputers every day.

Supercomputers are not for common users. Supercomputing is only used for highly calculation intensive tasks, such as weather forecasting, molecular modeling, and nuclear physics. Besides, supercomputers are tremendously expensive and they require special operational skills for maintenance. Supercomputer owners are mainly universities, military centers and multinationals such as Shell. Why on earth, I asked myself, this centre here, was hosting a supercomputer.

The server room and rack were opened for me and I had the privilege of seeing the system. It was a Param Padma, designed and built in India by a centre called CDAC. The government of India donated this system to the Kofi Annan Centre.

Until that moment I had never thought other companies but the American giants IBM, Cray, SGI, Dell, or the Japanese NEC, or even the French Bull were into this HPC business. I could hardly believe my eyes. Supercomputing in Sub-Saharan Africa, using a system made in India.

Supercomputers have in common with pumpkins that they compete in size. A supercomputer competition is held every year for “benchmarking” the fastest system in the World. The 2007 TOP500 list shows IBM’s Blue Gene as the fastest supercomputer with a peak performance of 280 TeraFLOPs, which means it can make 280 trillion Floating Point OPerations per second. (A floating point is a number with a dot, such as 2.1; an operation can be e.g. 2.1 x 344.78). Because of their price and purpose most supercomputers of the World are located in the US and Europe.

As we all know, the US government, and especially the President Bush administration, is concerned about world security matters. They are worried some countries might use supercomputers for evil causes. Strict supercomputer export regulations have been set up to countries of “proliferation concern” which are countries with a nuclear program. Many countries, including India are not allowed to buy any supercomputers. India took this import restriction as a challenge and entered the era of supercomputer development. The Param Padma was launched in 2005, a machine originally consisting of 248 nodes, having a peak performance of 4 TeraFLOPs, i.e. four trillions floating point operations per second.

Now China is even more ambitious. China started a huge project to develop the world’s largest supercomputer, called Lenovo in 2005. This system will have a peak performance of about 1000 TeraFLOPs, which is more than 30 times as fast as the current world champion, the IBM Blue Gene. China’s economic growth is enormous. If they cannot buy a supercomputer, they will simply build their own system.
In our globalizing World technological bases are shifting from west to east, and probably some day from north to south, creating this Flat World, which was described by Thomas Friedman.

And I believe we should not underestimate the developing countries’ emerging innovative talent.

Technorati Profile

Web2fordev, a hype, a dream or an opportunity?

By Anna Bon

Web2fordev
I attended the Conference about Web2.0 for development in Rome, 24-27 September 2007, at the FAO.

Is Web 2.0 an internet hype? Just a tool, a new technology? And what can it do for development, for rural development, for natural resource management, for poverty reduction? What can internet do for the poor ? These were the questions I had when I went to this conference in Rome. There were many people there, American, Italian, French and Dutch people, people from India, Australia and several countries in Latin America, people from Kenia, Zambia, Ghana, Niger, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Tanzania, Senegal and many other countries. We were talking, listening to each other and brainstorming. The topic was not as evident as it seemed. After the first day of the conference I asked myself what this conference was all about. Does Web2.0 really exist? Is it of use? Is there anybody using it for anything valuable? And what about the internet connectivity? Do poor countries have enough bandwidth to use these tools? Is Web2.0 for development just a dream?

Consider the digital divide, the inequity in access to the global information society between the rich and the poor. Internet does exist in Africa. I know, because I have read my email in very remote places. But I do have my email account, my laptop, and the skills to use them. And what if you do not? What if you are a farmer, if you cannot read and write, if you live from what you grow on your own land. If you are a woman who is working on the field carrying your child on your back? Is the internet also there for you? What can information mean for you? What difference can a mobile phone mean for your life?

During the conference lots of time were spent on the assets of Web2.0. How you can create blogs. How you can publish your digital photos and videos to the World. How you can create news feeds. How you can become a smart bookmarker. How to create a podcast. Everybody was interested, because many of these tools were new to us. I like to be an innovator. I adore hypes. And I am always fond of gadgets.

Web 2.0 is social software, it is about fighting the information overload, about internet communities, about multimedia. Web 2.0 is new in development. Not many people I have met know it, or use it. Does it have a potential for developing countries? I met people who believe it does. People who record the local languages from Aboriginals in Australia, and make podcasts. People who make software to provide farmers in Uganda with the updated market information, so they can sell their coffee for better price. Journalists from Zambia who publish on there blogs, who empower communities with their interesting opinions. People who don’t need hardcopy to reach there audiences. People form Congo-Brazzaville who create blogs to inform people with HIV/Aids about their disease. All these activities are embryonic, but I really think these smart people will find there way within the global web.

We came here to learn how Web2.0 is used in rural development. The answer is that it has not yet been implemented. Is that disappointing? I think it is not! If we had organized a conference twelve years ago, a conference about Mobile Telephony and Rural Development, would anybody have taken it seriously? Could we have foreseen what mobile telephony would do for developing countries?

Web 2.0 may be new, but communication is of all ages. Where do we go from here? How can we shrink this digital divide? Does Web2.0 change people, their behaviors, can it remove prejudices? Is it about collaboration, trust, identity? Or is it just another internet hype we will forget within a short while?

The future will show us.

Crossing the border from Burkina Faso to Ghana

Tree in Bolgatanga, Ghana

This baobab always reminds me of the threat of these trees for extremely small planets, as described by Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

Roads of the World

Une conversation à Ouagadougou

When travelling to Accra...

Amsterdam, February 2007

New visit to Ghana

School children in the Netherlands

School children in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

School children in Sunyani, Ghana

School children in Sunyani, Ghana.

More roads of the world

Roads in the world

A road in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a road in Koforidua, Ghana.

Beaches of the World

I always like beaches without tourists.

You can see the Fort St. Jago on top of a distant hill on this picture. This fort was built by the dutch in the 17th century and was then called Coenraadsburg.

I visited Sunyani in 2006. There was this strange brownish - red color all over the place, probably caused by dust from the red soil.

It had been raining, as you can see from the green landscape on this picture, I made from my window at sunset...

Road in Zambia

Melon boat

This "objet" was made by our young, 7 year old artist Leeuw.

Em homenagem ao grande poeta...

Campus at Wa

Visiting the polytechnic school at Wa, NW Ghana.

My last visit to Ghana was in November. The beach between Elmina and Cape Coast is fortunately not yet discovered by mass tourism.

Besides walking on the beach before sunset, I worked at the University of Cape Coast, where we are setting up a Resource centre and a computer lab.

New weblog

I hope to hear from your voyages.