It used to be that travelers passing through the sub-Saharan nation of Ghana were besieged with
requests for their home addresses. Ghanaians on the whole are passionate about connecting with
the outside world. One American claims he had more than five hundred requests for his Kentucky
home address in just two weeks.
But nowadays in Ghana, they are more likely to ask for your e-mail than your snail mail
address. Internet users have doubled in the last year alone and on steamy nights in the
city of Accra, hundreds line up at the ramshackle Internet cafes that have sprouted
like mushrooms in the last two years.
Communicating by e-mail to far-off places like Paris, New York and Amsterdam is exceedingly
popular in Ghana, but actually surfing the Web is still just a pipe dream.
Internet connections are maddeningly slow. By comparison, the "Boston Globe"
newspaper has more bandwidth in its newsroom than all twenty million Ghanaians.
Ghana does have its own indigenous Internet pioneers who, along with the Geekcorp, are working to
change all that. Livelyhood introduces viewers to the people striving to make the Internet
and information technologies a bigger part of Ghana's future. They believe that with proper
training, this nation of cocoa farmers where the average person earns only a buck a day can
become a nation of web page builders, programmers and software developers.
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