As usual, I find myself nodding in agreement with Don Slater, particularly with his observations about Ghana. Based on my (very limited) in Accra, and in the ethnographic spirit of "adding stories," I wanted to submit some other data points to Don's. Some of these relate to our discussions about how certain internet settings (hi Michelle) become the new "hot" cyberspaces. Others relate to space in the old-fashioned colonial sense of the term. Still others concern the crazy mixture of for-profit and development spaces in Africa, especially where telecommunications is concerned. In April of 2003 I left NYC for the BusyInternet Cener in Accra, Ghana (http://www.busyinternet.com) BusyInternet is a 100+ seat cybercafe/copy shop/conference space/bar located on Ring Road, which is the main drag in Accra, open 24 hours and always full of people. The computers are fast (even when one considers the whole joint has the bandwidth equivalent of ONE DSL line), surfing prices are reasonable, and the food at the bar is cheap. From daily inspection, I'd say the expat to local ratio is about 1:20, remarkable considering that due to mad inflation, the expats are the ones who always seem to have cash to burn on things like Internet use. For the past five years, Ghana's relatively stable government and economy have made it a West African Silicon Valley of sorts for those who have managed to not piss off local officials (see the NYT coverage of the VoiP laws in Ghana). Many of the startup businesses in Accra arrived about three years ago, and a number were begun by ex-dot commers from the States and Europe. BusyInternet is among them. Busy was founded by Mark Davies (Welsh), Alex Rousselt (French) and Ellen McDermott (American), using Mark's earnings from CitySearch (later bought by Microsoft), which he also founded. With the exception of these three, however, all the other management, workers and investors at Busy are Ghanaian. Of these, two managers (the General Manager and the Director of Public Relations) and about 1/3 of the workers on the floor assisting users are women. I was originally asked by Ellen McDermott if I wanted to come to Accra for two weeks (all the time I had, as I was advising at NYU) to touch base with some women's groups there, and see who might be interested in computer classes. The term they were using for all this was "community outreach." For better or for worse, Busy operates as a FOR PROFIT business, and it would be naive to think their "outreach" didn't have a bottom line attached. Though all sorts of people meet at the Busy already to use computers, socialize at the bar and sit in the air conditioning (NEVER to be underestimated in Africa), there was a feeling that more could be done to get certain populations into the center for, notably women and children. In essence, Busy was trying to combine the classic development model of "get greater numbers online" with a hope that ultimately, these folks might also wind up potential customers. When Ellen first approached me to go to Africa, I was excited, but worried. I had no prior experience in Ghana, and no experience with development in the traditional sense. I was uninterested in working with women's groups who weren't explicitly feminist, yet at that same time nervous that I might cause people more harm than good running around with my cyberfeminism hanging out everywhere. Ellen saw things differently. She thought my lack of training in the non-profit world would keep me satisfied with small-scale projects at Busy, compared to other people who always wanted to taken large-scale projects like those underwritten by groups like USAID . She also thought that whether they explicitly termed themselves feminist or not, Busy was a notable exception to the "boy/girl expat split" rule in Accra. The rule, coined by a journalist I met there, refers to the fact that men seem to work almost exclusively in the for-profit telecommunications sector, while women dominate the non-profit, NGO human services sector. Why not use Busy as a launching pad to help break that stereotype, she asked? Ellen knew I had been deeply moved by the ideas I read _Banker to the Poor_ (about the Grameen Banks), particularly Mohammed Yunnus's assertion that he began his micro-lending project the day he stopped relying on his Ph.D. in economics and took 37 dollars out of his own pocket to help someone get started. I'm planning to visit the Grameen Technology Center in Seattle to get trained in a more "official" way as soon as I kill my dissertation. I also know that there are important criticisms about the ways in which certain micro-credit schemes can harm the women they purport to help by turning them into bill collectors for the transnational banking world. However, not being a transnational bank myself, I was willing to put 100 dollars of my own money where my mouth was in Ghana. According to Ellen, an hour of computer training at Busy was 10,000 Ghanaian Cedis (roughly 10USD).If I was willing to put 100 dollars of my own money down, Busy would save the space and I could offer ten women scholarships to take a computer class. Then I would see what I could do next. Inch by inch, etc. With things broken into micro-installments like this, Accra seemed a more do-able plan to me, but sitting in NYC, I hardly knew where to begin locating women. Estelle and Amma, two of the managers at Busy, directed me to WISE, a local group whose philosophy and attitude I liked, almost immediately. WISE (stands for women's initiative for self-empowerment) provides counselling, advocacy, and job training for survivors of gender violence (http://www.wise-up.org). Begun in 1998 by Violet (Esi) Awaturi, WISE is a non-profit organization, partnering when appropriate with a number of other NGO's in Ghana and West Africa. I called Esi on the telephone (itself an event), told her that I had a connection to BusyInternet, and asked if WISE might be interested in a scholarship so that ten women could take a computer class. If WISE liked the arrangement, I told Esi, I would set up ongoing classes and raise the funds for them myself. The only thing we needed from WISE were interested women."How fast can you get here?" Esi asked me. I think that might the the only time someone asked me to be quick while I was in Africa. I understand the risk of coming off as a poor woman's Bill Gates, here. In my defense, I told Esi that if she wanted the money for something else, I would gladly donate it, but that my expertise and connections were with computer training. Esi replied that she'd rather work with someone who knew what they could bring to the table than with a well-meaning but unfocused person who 'wanted to help', and urged me to come on over. That afternoon, Esi, Frances Gwira (who helps Esi run WISE), Greg (who would be teaching the classes) and I sat down and talked about what WISE could use in the way of computer training. I had already been working for a few days with children's groups at Busy, and had already stumbled a number of instances of the colonial mind in cyberspace. For example: the simplest way to secure email addresses for new users is through Yahoo or Hotmail, and that's pretty much where we directed the kids we helped in Accra. On the sign up page for Yahoo, you'll see a pull-down menu that asks for your language and region. In Ghana, the official language is English, but although one can find English--US, English--Britain, English--Hong Kong, English--Singapore. However, a search for English--Ghana, English--Nigeria, or even English--Africa yields nothing. Faced with this dilemma, my ten-year old students, who have never known a time when England ruled Ghana, instinctively chose "English--Britain" as their default. When faced with the challenge of picking a screen name for themselves, boys chose (in order) names from the Bible, sports team names, or variants of their proper name. Girls chose (in order) variants on Lady Diana, variants on their proper name, or the name of their pet. Of course, the Lady Diana stuff is most striking here. No Spice Girls, no Kylie. How long ago did Lady Di, well, die? Because we were concerned that their very Christian caretakers would accuse us of hooking kids up to a medium that did nothing but send unsolicited ads for penis enlargement, my colleagues and I tried to teach the children who came to our classes tricks for avoiding the spam that accompanies free email accounts. Though many of the children dutifully did as told, a number of kids (mostly boys) insisted on knowing exactly what spam was before they opted out. Our most politic answer, "It is unwanted mail from strangers," backfired on us. Once the ringleader of the boys declared, "I want spam!" the rest followed suit. Yes, these are ten year olds, and yes as people become more sophisticated around Net use, their desire for online penis enlargement, uh, shrinks. Still, I hadn't realized until this moment that a big part of the challenge we have facing us in the spam wars is the legitimate desire among people around the world for contact--any contact. We're talking about an entire country that speaks English and has internet technology and a reasonable amount of capital by African standards, who cannot even get a freaking Yahoo mail designation. Should I be surprised that they'll take what they can get, even if it's spam? As Don points out, email was pretty much the exciting part of the Net for these kids, especially those who had family working or going to school abroad. Although a few kids did send email to their friends sitting next to them, most were earnestly trying to compose letters to far-flung family, or to me, wishing me Jesus's blessings and so forth for my help. That said, we did introduce kids to the Web and showed them how to surf for things. In order, they were interested in pages about sports teams, pages about musicians, and the Google search engine. At the time, I was writing about the trip in my LiveJournal, and I very much wanted to get them started using that. I had even been hoarding my LJ user invite codes to give away. Once I got to the class, however, I realized that for all the talk about youth on LJ, there really is nothing on there of interest to a ten year old. The staff at BusyInternet expressed some interest in LJ, but even they abandoned their journals after realizing that you get blog readers primarily by having the time to read and respond to the blogs of others, not just by putting words on a page and waiting for the hordes to arrive. Although Busy employees did get some free time to surf the Web and thus read blogs, there was more instant gratification to be found in things like Yahoo chat, particularly when one could get access to the webcams (there were four, and always in use.) When I went to visit the women at WISE, I thought they would want the sort of Internet classes we were teaching children. However, Esi and Frances--who already have Net access and a pretty nice Web page--weren't all that interested in that sort of thing. What they could really use--what might immediately benefit the clients- -were some rudimentary computer classes for their staff and counselors. They explained that although WISE had procedures in place for documenting cases, the quality of the documentation varied wildly, depending upon who the counselor was, and how good her word processing skills were. For instance, while many counsellors knew that photos went a long way in impressing upon police the severity of a client's case, only a few of counselors actually knew they could cut and paste digital photos into Word documents. Likewise, while their website looked professional and polished, it was chiefly the labor gift of a volunteer long since gone. Since the staff had no knowledge of HTML, the site had gone updated for a few years now. They worried aloud about whether the same thing might happen with their (first ever) database of cases, now under construction by a group of volunteer programmers. For the first time perhaps ever, I began to understand the obvious connection between a certain type of computer proficiency and women's advocacy. Esi and Frances explicitly requested classes on Microsoft Word and Excel, and I agreed to fund them. To those who gasp at the "M" word, I have to say I was met with blank stares every time I mentioned licensing issues anywhere. Overall, the feeling in Accra--at least at smaller organizations--seems to be that you use whatever someone gives you and teaches you to use, end of story. Ultimately, we hoped to offer classes for WISE's clients as well, since job training is part of their mission statement (women everywhere tend to stay in abusive environments if they are financially dependent on men), I thought we might offer data entry, word processing or "make your own business card" classes to WISE clients. Esi agreed that many WISE clients could benefit from computer training of some sort. As she put it, "Some of the women we work with say, 'I can sell my batik and my kenke to support my family', to which I have to respond, 'Accra doesn't need another kenke stand. Look where you are. Accra is an urban area, and its getting more telecommunications by the day. But to get a job at a call center you'd at least have to have some basic knowledge of computers." At first, we thought about offering client classes at the WISE center, where there are four computers and we could bring some laptops. We wound up rejecting that idea. At WISE, there are opportunities to connect with other battered women, their children, and their advocates, and of course this initial "safe space" is critical. But if further modeling is to take place, it is necessary for women to witness other women working with computers in an environment with telecenters and help desks (where these women would most likely be seeking jobs) on-premises. Like many telecenters in Africa, Busy is a social affair, and this element would be lost if we moved the training to WISE. Even offering students a cold drink in the bar after class allows these them to stop being "clients" and instead just be women interacting with the place and its inhabitants. I want to take a moment to describe the joy and the weirdness of raising money for a project like this. As I mentioned earlier, WISE is a non-profit with tax deductible status in Africa (they are working on the paperwork for the U.S.) Ideally, they would like to be able to raise funds online. However, due to the fact that Ghanaian and Nigerian ISPs seem to be on a number of "danger lists" for fraudulent practices, easy online payment venues such as PayPal aren't options for them. Now, there are some organizations that orchestrate online fundraising for West African concerns, and WISE wants to get in touch with them, but that's pretty low on the to-do list at this point. As it stands, this is how I raise funds for classes as it stands (feel free to laugh; I do): I write to friends and acquaintances, given them a URL to a page on my web site: http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/WISE/computer.htm There, they can read about the program and make a donation via PayPal to my account here in the States. (Btw, I designed this page for WISE, and really don't want it on my site, but we haven't yet transferred it to the WISE site because they are still trying to figure out an overall plan for online fundraising, and don't want people to get confused thinking they are donating to say, the shelter, when the page I designed is just for the computer training.) Once I raised enough money for a class, I transferred the money to Greg via a shared Fleet bank account. Greg withdraws the money in Ghanaian Cedis from the Barclay's bank in Accra, using his Fleet Visa card. Greg brought the cash to Busy Internet and booked the space (his teaching services are volunteer, so we don't pay for that.) Obviously this is a temporary measure. I really cannot expand fundraising until I figure out a more sensible system, but given the fact that I've only raised a few hundred dollars so far and that a long-term solution involves things like U.S. nonprofit status and tax law and blah blah, and at the time, Greg was there are ready to teach for free, so I went with this. I wish I could report that the project was a wild success, but after about six classes, WISE decided to "re-evaluate" things (although encouraging me to stay active with the group.) Esi told me that although WISE was deeply appreciative of my efforts to help ( I never met a Ghananian who wasn't deeply appreciative, or at least too kind to hurt someone's feelings) she felt that right now, there were just too many women with too many varying skill sets to be effectively taught in groups of ten. In email exchanges since, two suggestions have been floated for our next step: A) "ramp up" and organize a large-scale teaching initiative by courting development money (which would take us out of the small-scale model I had envisioned) or B) get someone like me to move to Accra and do hardcore volunteer one-on-one training to get staff and clients up to speed at their facility (which eliminates the sort of cross-pollination I spoke of earlier at Busy.) We know there are probably answers between those two poles, but negotiating with women whose main concern is (rightly) caring for their clients is taking much more time than my New York self is used to. Plus there is, you know, my dissertation. If you have read this far, I probably owe you a beer, and promise to never post something this long to the list again, as long as I live. Best, Terri Theresa M. Senft Auxiliary Adviser, Gallatin School of Individualized Study Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program New York University, 719 Broadway, Room 519 (212) 998-7333 email: terri.senft@nyu.edu