I came to Davos this year hoping to talk about entrepreneurship in Africa and media attention. I’ve ended up talking about blogging more or less constantly.

In the panel on media bias, the moderator flagged me as a blogger. That’s all it took. Since then, I’ve been stopped in the halls by folks who want to know if I’m “that geek guy who blogs”. I’ve given a couple of impromptu workshops in couches outside the sessions and hope that some of my NGO friends will have blogs up before I see them next year.

It’s not clear to me why Davos folks are so interested in the blog phenomenon. It’s not like there’s a big blogger presence here - Joi is blogging, as is Loic, and Joi points, this morning, to Billmon, a working journalist blogging after hours. Compared to the tech conferences I blog, there’s no one reporting here.

But clearly something about blogging captures people’s attention. I’m wondering if it’s a reflection of a Davos attitude towards media. Media are pretty clearly treated like second-class citizens here. Working journalists have brown badges, which prevent them from getting into most sessions and some areas. My guess is that most of the folks here are so important, they’re well beyond courting media and expect, instead to be courted.

So perhaps Davos folks are interested in blogging because they’re willing to overturn the media establishment. Or maybe it just looks like those of us sitting in corners, pounding on laptops, are having a lot of fun…

One of my main reasons for attending Davos was to participate in a session on media criticism titled, provocatively, “We’re News, They’re Propaganda”. When it was originally presented to me, the panel was explicitly about coverage of Iraq, and included representatives of three major global news networks, a journalist from Nepal, a moderator from the BBC and me. The email inviting me to the session made it clear that my role was to be “critic”, a role I would have played whether or not I’d been invited.

With a new focus on propoganda, and the most jingoistic of the three networks dropping out, I wasn’t clear what to expect. The major network representative was replaced by an editor of a newspaper written by the homeless, and the Nepali journalist by a Japanese cartoonist. But we still couldn’t avoid talking about Iraq.

And that was the point of the remarks I’d hoped to make at the session. I took a look at coverage of Iraq, versus coverage of other major world conflicts, during the past year. The conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, which has claimed, according to IRC, 3.3 million lives, at least 350,000 in combat, merited 77 mentions on all CNN networks over the entire year. And Congo got a lot of attention compared to the bloody conflict in northern Uganda, or the peace process in Burundi - 3 mentions all year long.

Iraq, on the other hand, got 1100 mentions the first week of the war. It’s actually hard to say how many times CNN mentioned Iraq because the Lexis/Nexis search engine returns only 3,000 results per query. I’m estimating 10-12,000 times.

So it surprised me very little when I couldn’t get the major media figures to challenge me on media undercoverage. One of the network news heads said, “Sometimes we make mistakes. Not big ones, but everyday. And we have to make choices.” I took this to mean that it was a conscious choice not to cover the conflicts in Central Africa and to focus on Iraq instead.

But I’ll admit that I was a bit surprised when Iraq swallowed the conversation. As the two networks squared off about their very different approaches to covering the war, any discussion of media fairness, bias and comprehensiveness collapsed into the discussion of whether or not it was morally right to air footage of Bin Laden. Which, I’ll admit, may have been an interesting debate six months ago. But I have a real hard time getting interested in it now.

I just finished reading Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots and I’ve got cosmology on the brain. As a result, I’m starting to think of the war in Iraq as a black hole. Perhaps the concentration of media in Iraq became so intense that the very fabric of media was warped by attention density. We reached a media singularity - media focus so overconcentrated that networks literally might have gone out of business had the war been averted - that no other stories could escape.

Once Iraq came up in our session today, the rest of the conversation disappeared, like the spaceship inexorably passing the event horizon. And while I’m sorry we didn’t engage more on why Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and others don’t get well covered, I’m pleased by the irony that this failure itself helped prove my point.

Joi Ito’s decision to blog about the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos has convinced me that it’s not a bad idea to weigh in from this strange and surrreal gathering.

The fun of Davos is the chance to get great one on one time with incredibly smart, interesting people. The drag of Davos is the fact that it’s often difficult to get beyond people’s set “stump speeches”. It’s hard to make it to Davos without being obssessed with one or more topics. Give someone an open forum and they’ll almost inevitably gravitate to their topic of choice, whether or not is has anything to do with the topic at hand. (This morning’s discussion with religious leaders took an odd turn into a discussion of monetary policy as a result…)

So I’m trying to be conscious of my tendency to steer every conversation to developing world issues. I remember university classes that got derailed with young feminists asking “Does that include women?” after any general statement. I’m trying to avoid asking “Does that include Africans?” at every junction.

(The president of Georgia is giving an interview about ten feet away. This sort of thing makes it awfully hard to pay attention…)

But I got frustrated at last night’s dinner on wireless technology. The conversation focused on getting the maximum revenue per user (in the local terminology “RPU”, pronounced “ar-poo” from smartphone users. But, when I did my predictable “What’s the potential for wireless in Africa?” bit, folks chimed in immediately. Most impressively, the cellphone company president chairing the meeting spoke about his initial failure to understand African markets and then talked about the huge success his company is having in half a dozen African nations. We talked afterwards and he’s bullish about some of the information via cellphone projects Geekcorps is working on… as revenue earners for African cellphone companies. Very, very cool.

All of which raises the issue for me: how do we get business in Africa to be a main topic of interest, rather than an afterthought?

Geeks, by defailt, want to talk about the newest, fastest, coolest and smallest. But it turns out that the most interesting stuff may be the cheapest, most useable and most pervasive. And since cellphone penetration in the developed world seems to have hit a plateau, you’d think this would be the main topic on people’s minds, not an afterthought your humble activist blogger would need to tease out…

(Turns out the political advisor to the new Georgian president is a former classmate of mine. As a result, I got to shake the president’s hand. Davos is strange.)

I’m barely a day removed from Ghana and there’s half a dozen stories I still want to tell. But now I’m in Davos, encountering dozens of other fascinating people and there’s the danger of the new stories crowding out the old.

While listening to the very wealthy and very powerful talk about the rest of the world in very, very abstract terms, I’ve had the great experience of watching posts from the Accra BlogAfrica posts come in. I’ll link to a few of them on the main BlogAfrica site, but here’s one that came in as a comment, rather than directly posted on a blog:

Permitte me to blog on one of me concerns.

Blog Readers, just stop for a second to wread this blog of my concern bassed on Real story.

Please be the best advicer for yourself and don’t loss the world of your compititions .Your generations a going far miles away, toward their targets,their middle class-status. Please be awake to the killer diseased ,distroyer of our home,properties,resposibilies,our farmily the world as large.

“ People will only realise there is a problem

when they start to see their friends and

colleagues dying of AIDS.”

Frank was the handsum guy in my gernerations and the women lover boy during our childhood.

He start to pratices unsafe sex when he was 7years old by then it was nothing to all off us but he become used to it and what he hait must in a women was women who always mention condom to him. He alwas said to the women, “just once”. i know Frank,(kwesi) personally in kotobabi where we grew together and attended the same kotobabi 1-2 primary school. He is always on a quest to have sex with 1000 women before he got married. His mom/dad,friends,teachers,colleage and his family even setup a pastors to pray for him on several occations that his womanizing was no real said the pastors it was ther work of the evil to the distroctions of his life. Oooh ! Kwasi.

As his best friend, i spoke to him many times about the risks and stuff but he doesn’t want to listen and the worse in all that is the fact that he doesn’t always us protection, he says that it kills the vibe and the sensation and… and the worst is the fact he is willing to sleep with any kind of women…and he always have a heart desie for every woman he saw. so, just to make the equation, if this guy is HIV positive then all the time he has one night stand he doesn’t use protection he gives it to these women who doesn’t know that they are infected and then go around and spread it to other one night standers, boyfriends, husband… and the worst of it all is that he doesn’t want to go and be tested. so no one knows what he is spreadind around in Kotobabi/Accra. Frank died when he was at the age of 24y/o.The most painful death we all don’t want to see again and among the youth of my generations who new frank in the real world, its a big advice u know?

i think that it is easy to spread something like that Ghana since it is such a small country and one person can have a really bad chain reaction.

“Many west africa contries , One nigerian/south Africa”

I see HIV/AIDS and would like to blog to my brothers and sisters the world as large that HIV/AIDS is for real, its not just name named by the proffesional doctors or a common cold .

Folks, “stop this HIV/AIDS” this is a story of my friends who was inffected by the killer dease .

Frank, he died without reaching his middle class-status.

Frank the most handsum guy i know in my generation.

(Based on Real story)

Thanks to the lectures who introduce me to this wonderfull workshop. I’m going to let you hear

of me,cause you push me through u know. Be part of the team work sound great and succesfully to me

Posted by Fuseini at January 20, 2004 01:23 PM

While Ghana’s one of the most peaceful countries in Africa these days, this was not always the case. From independence in 1957 through the mid-1980s, Ghana was experienced a series of military coups, pervasive instability and human rights abuses.

In campaigning for election in 2000, Kufuor called for a National Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights abuses from 1957 to 1993. Over 4,000 complaints - ranging from torture and disappearance to seized property and difficulty finding jobs - have been reported to the commission and about 1,000 hearings have been held. As with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Comission, if a crime is confessed, the confessor is given amnesty from prosecution.

From the reports I’ve seen in the Ghanaian media, there was a great deal of interest in the process early on, with televised proceedings dominating the airwaves and people’s conversations. Watching Metro TV last night, I caught a news story suggesting that people were satisfied with the work NRC is doing, but were growing bored with the process. After interviewing a number of men on the street who reported their satisfaction, Metro showed several mostly-empty courtroom interiors and a close-up shot of a commission member asleep at the judge’s bench.

I’m willing to bet that this is about to change - the NRC just called former President Rawlings to appear before the panel. Rawlings and his former security chief have been asked to testify regarding the 1982 murders of four men. Rawlings has been linked, in the past, to the execution of three former heads of state - it’s unclear from the stories I’m finding whether the four men referred to include these three former leaders, or represent another group of victims. Rawlings is currently out of the country - the summons will be delivered to him when he returns.

As always, don’t expect to hear much about this in the Northern media. A search for “ghana reconciliation” on news.google.com gets 48 results. Other than the Reuters story linked above, all stories are from GhanaWeb or AllAfrica.

One of the legendary digital divide stories is about a service in Ethiopia that allows one to buy goats over the Internet. You make a secure payment to a webserver in the US, which results in a phonecall to Addis, which leads to a goat being delivered to your family for holidays or special occasions. It’s a cool story, apocryphal or not, and hints at one of the huge financial problems facing expatriate Africans and their families: remittances.

Africans living abroad routinely send hundreds of millions of dollars home to help support their families. In the process, they pay millions of dollars in fees to companies like Western Union, who take substantial percentages off the top on each transfer. There’s all sorts of creative ways to reduce these fees, including the brilliant hawala system using in much of the Islamic world. (Note - the use of an Interpol link here does imply an opinion that hawala is, or should be illegal. It just turns out that this interpol article is the best intro to hawala I’ve found online…)

Ghanabuys.com is presenting a very sophisticated alternative to online goat purchase. Open an account, and you can choose from a wide range of practical and luxury goods to send to your family and friends in Ghana. The goods are already in Ghana, so you’re not paying (directly) for the shipping. Your recipient can pick up the goods at the warehouse in Accra, or arrange for their delivery anywhere in the country. The goods available range from mobile phones to mosquito nets, from PVC pipe to DVD players.

I’m planning on using the system to send Christmas gifts this year, and also hope to meet with the folks behind the company during my time here. Check them out at www.ghanabuys.com.

For the last four years, I’ve been a regular at Frankie’s Hotel in Osu, Accra. While not the most luxurious hotel in town, it’s one of the most creative. On the ground floor is a patisserie and ice cream parlor. On the first floor is a fast food restaurant, serving one of the better breakfasts in town. And the second and third floors feature spartan, but reasonable guestrooms. (Okay, the singles are _really_ spartan - 2.5m x 3m, no windows.) But it’s pretty cheap, close to the Geekcorps offices and right on the main street of Osu, which means there’s always something to watch on the streets below.

In the process of becoming a Frankie’s regular, I became friends with Ama. Ama was one of the regular beggars in front of Frankie’s, and by far the most personable. I usually restrain my giving in Ghana to people with disabilities that prevent them from working (realizing that Ghana’s social safety net is somewhat lacking). Ama somehow fell outside this rule. I got in the habit of giving her the cedi equivalent of a couple of dollars when I first checked into the hotel. The rest of my stay, she would greet me fondly when I came in and out, and, importantly, chastize the other beggars, street touts, shady businessmen and others who congregated outside of Frankie’s. I was _her_ friend, and they were soundly instructed not to ask me for money.

Three years into this relationship, on my last trip to Ghana, Ama surprised me. When I first saw her, I greeted her, asked about her health and the health of her daughter. She asked me when I’d arrived, about my wife, and then turned serious. “When do you leave?” I told her, and she said, “Before then, I need to talk with you. It’s important.”

I figured the time had come to hit me up for a lot of money, so I put the conversation off until my last day in town. The night I was leaving, Ama stopped me in front of Frankie’s and asked for our talk. I had about $10 in cedis that I was prepared to give her. But she was more ambitious: “I want to stop begging. I want to become an orange seller. I need (about $50) to buy the tray, the oranges, to pay some debts and to have some security. Will you help me?”

$50 seemed like a lot for an orange business, and I suspected I was being scammed. So I offered the $10 in my pocket. She told me, “I’ll be honest with you. If you give me that money, I will take it, but I will still be begging. I need medicine for the baby and some food, and that money will pay for that. But to stop begging, I need you to give me more money.”

So here’s the thing - one of the things you’re taught when you start living and working in developing nations is that you don’t want to hand money out to people without conditions. Even gifting money with contracts and guarantees leads to problems - one of my oldest friendships in Ghana has been injured by my lending money to my friend to help him farm and his inability to pay the money back. If I gave her the money, wouldn’t I be encouraging her to look for big handouts from other people she met? If she didn’t become an orange seller, would she be embarrased the next time she saw me? Would I be angry? Would she ask me for more money? What would I say?

I concluded it was the wrong thing to do to give her the money. Then I went upstairs, found my remaining cedis, gave her $50.

So on this trip to Accra, I’d been avoiding Frankie’s, worried that I’d find Ama begging and not know what to do. Yesterday, walking to the office from lunch, my colleague and I walked past her usual corner.

Ama and her store

Ama was there, in front of her new jewelry store. She’s selling inexpensive jewelry, mostly to the tourists who walk through this section of town. She seems very happy, tells me her baby is well, and is very proud of her new enterprise.

I have no idea what the exact steps between begging and shopkeeping were for Ama - I hope to spend some more time with her before I go and find out more. And I realize my $50 was only part of the picture - I’m guessing Ama asked a number of other friends for similar sums and put them together into enough money to start the business. Or maybe someone was impressed enough with Ama’s independence and desire to change that s/he financed the booth and she’s mostly running it. And I still think that it was, logically, probably the wrong thing to do.

But she’s really happy, and I’m really proud. And if you’re walking by Frankie’s in Osu, please say “hi” and think about buying a necklace. And congratulate Ama for me…

It’s possible to keep up with news from Africa if you know where to look - some of the BlogAfrica sites, AllAfrica.com, the East African Standard, and the BBC, taken collectively, do a decent job of covering events as they occur. But it’s awfully hard to get a read for political opinion when you’re not on the ground.

On the ground, it’s another matter entirely. The Ghanaians I know tend to be wonderfully opinionated, happy to argue politics at the drop of a hat. When privately-owned radio came to Ghana, political talk radio followed along almost immediately. It makes perfect sense - it’s an easy extension of the arguments that rage in the markets, in tro-tro, in restaurants and business meetings.

I’ve been asking friends about the upcoming elections. Ghana’s presidential election is this coming December, a bit more than a month after the US elections. President Kufuor will be running for reelection and, while conventional wisdom says he’ll win (in no small part because he’s running against uncharismatic, bookish Dr. Atta-Mills, the Ghanaian Al Gore), word on the street seems to be that he might have an uphill battle.

Three years ago, when Kufuor was elected, he was the opposition leader running against NDC, the party of J.J. Rawling, who was stepping down after almost twenty years of not-quite-continuous rule. While many of his supporters were interested in his pro-business background and stance, others were voting against Rawlings’s candidate, Atta-Mills, rather than for Kufuor. As a result, the minor parties in Ghanaian politics joined with NPP against NDC, bringing Kufuor to victory by a tight margin.

(Sidenote - Many commentators believed it wasn’t possible for the opposition to win an election in Ghana - they were pleasantly surprised when, not only did the opposition win, but the election was declared free and fair, with a minimum of electoral violence. You may remember that the 2000 election in the US didn’t go quite as smoothly. As Ghanaians celebrated a successful election and voting recount debates continued in Florida, my friend Koby Koomson, then Ghana’s ambassador to the US, called me with a wonderful idea. He was planning to call President Clinton with an offer of Ghanaian election observers to help the US sort out its election debacle. No word on Clinton’s response.)

Now Kufuor’s running on his record, not against Rawlings’s past. And while his macroeconomic politics make a great deal of sense in The Economist, they’re a lot harder to sell to the man or woman on the street. Kufuor is rapidly phasing out price subsidies on gasoline, water, electicity and other essentials. While this is necessary in economic terms to help lower foreign debt, it’s a pretty difficult situation for ordinary Ghanaians trying to make ends meet.

The friends I’ve talked to are upset about price increases, but they’re more dismayed by what government money is being spent on. Motorcades seem to be a particularly sore subject. We passed one on the road to Achimota on Sunday - five police motorcycles, four black sedans and an ambulance. Given the small size of the caravan, one of our group observed that it was a ministerial caravan, not the President’s more substantial entourage. “Probably the Deputy Minister of Motorcades”, another member of our group guessed. There’s near equal dismay about ministerial and presidential travel overseas.

Fortune

My friend Fortune had the strongest opinions about Kufuor and his administration, none of them positive. A die-hard Rawlings fan (she would argue, a die-hard Nkrumah-ist), she believes Kufuor has had his chance to make a change and has squandered it. While her complaints ranged far and wide, they seemed to center on a key issue: those who stayed, versus those who left.

She, and others I’ve spoken to, associate Kufuor, an Oxford-educated lawyer, with the group of Ghanaians who left the country during its most troubled times - 1983 - 1985 - and have returned now to start businesses and take government jobs. (This isn’t entirely fair, as Kufuor was in Ghana, and part of Rawlings’s cabinet when he took power… or maybe it is, as he left Rawlings’s government after seven months to return to life as a businessman. Certainly some of the technocrats he’s surrounded himself with are “returnees”.) For Ghanaians like Fortune, who lived through the abject poverty of the early eighties, it’s hard to feel completely positive about people who didn’t share the suffering of those days.

On the other hand, the folks who are returning to Ghana are often the most interesting and creative entrepreneurs in the IT sector and the folks who give me the most hope about the economic future of Ghana.

What will this mean for Kufuor? Time will tell, and I’m looking forward to having two elections to watch this fall.

You’re not really in Ghana until you’re riding a tro-tro. Tro-tros are converted minibuses and vans, fitted with seats that take advantage of every available space and pack a maximum number of people into the vehicle. They’re Accra’s ad-hoc, independent mass transit and they inspire in me a mix of fear, nostalgia and glee.

Today’s tro-tro conveyed us to my friend Bernard’s house in Medie, a northern suburb of Accra. Bernard is a master xylophonist, the chief drummer of the National Dance Company of Ghana and one of my favorite Ghanaian entrepreneurs. For the past ten years I’ve known him, Bernard has been sharing the traditional music of the Dagara people with audiences around the world, and using the money he makes in the process to sponsor organizations and businesses for his friends and family.

Bernard (center left) and his ensemble

The tro-tro is one of his investments. A brown Mercedes truck that’s seen at least a quarter million road miles, the tro-tro is the main conveyance for the Dagara Bewaa ensemble, a xylophone, drum and dance troupe that plays for audiences around the country. When not conveying performers, it’s available for rental with one of Bernard’s relatives as a driver. Parked next to it is a taxi, also a business investment, also source of income for one of Bernard’s relatives.

The centerpiece of his portfolio is the Dagara Bewaa School, a music and arts school that also serves as his home. With half a dozen dorm-style bedrooms, the school can hold up to twenty visiting college students who come to study xylophone, drumming, dancing and the culture of northwestern Ghana. When not on tour, Bernard teaches - when he is, his vast family runs the show, feeding, housing and educating visitors. The buildings of the school are a savings account for Bernard where periodic hyperinflation can make bank savings unwise; the school itself is a major economic force and employer in the village of Medie.

There are many African artists who have found a way to make a good living sharing their culture with the world. Given the success countries like Senegal, Mali and Ghana have had marketing aspects of their arts and music, it’s clear that culture is a resource as important as cocoa, gold or timber. But what became clear to me on this trip is what a complex and successful balancing act Bernard’s life as businessman and musician is.

In the US, we generally think of artists as removed from the world of business by a layer of managers and agents. And while some artists take visible political stances, we tend to think of them more as promoters and spokespeople, less as activists and organizers. The Ghanaian reality is a bit more complicated. Bernard is celebrity, businessperson and community activist wrapped in a single insanely busy package. (Indeed, we were lucky to catch him - in five years, he’s off to the US to start a semester simultaneously teaching ethnomusicology, earning his BA in music and touring.)

When we arrived in Medie, Bernard was leading a meeting of the Medie Area Dagara Benevolent Association. The Dagara, a minority tribe with a homeland hundreds of miles from Accra, are some of Ghana’s poorer citizens. The residents of Medie, with a lot of encouragement and leadership from Bernard, now pay monthly dues into a fund that provides money for community member’s funerals, and may eventually provide support for members who are un- and under-employed.

As the meeting broke down, the Bewaa ensemble, which rehearses in Bernard’s backyard every Sunday afternoon, put on an exhibition for the crowd. As the performance moved on, the line between crowd and performers got blurrier and the audience, including our group, got pulled into the mix. (Pictured below, Andrew McLaughlin getting his groove on. Not only can he set up Internet Exchange Points, turns out he can dance, too.)

We couldn’t stay longer because the tro-tro had to return to Accra to pick up Bernard’s next load of students coming in on a 7pm plane. (No word on whether they were met with acapella or lost luggage.) Packing for his own trip to New York and his first semester as a college student, Bernard first faces a week of a dozen students encountering Africa for the first time. But it’s just another quiet Sunday in the life of a master musician, entrepreneur and community man.

Lots more about Bernard at www.bernardwoma.com; video and more photos posted when I have more bandwidth.

(Generally, only my heart is in Accra. This week, my body is too. Hence, posts that are a bit more travelogue, a bit less politics/ideas/musings. Hope no one minds.)

There’s good surprises and bad surprises when you arrive in another country. Bad surprises generally involve missing visas, missing luggage or bad cab rides. Good surprises are more unpredictable.

Arriving at Kotoka Airport in Accra yesterday, we had one of the nicest surprises I’ve ever had - an acapella serenade by local singing group, Manifest (pictured below.) Geekcorps’ assistant country director, Sam Larmie, is friendly with the group and has been bringing them to the airport to welcome new volunteers to Ghana. Travelling with new geek James Tsao, we got a custom welcome song, welcoming me and Andrew McLaughlin back to Ghana and James there for the first time.

After 24 hours in transit, soaked in sweat, surrounded by hundreds of other travellers finding their friends and families, it was a little surreal, but very much appreciated.