Post date: Mar 08, 2012 8:59:56 PM
ACCRA, GHANA (REUTERS) -Holed up in an open plan office in Ghana's capital Accra that they fondly refer to as 'the incubator', young entrepreneurs spend hours everyday trying to come up with applications that could change the way people do business in Africa.
Web entrepreneurs in Ghana are developing online applications they hope will radically transform the way business is done in Africa.
They are working on creating and launching web-based programs that can measure up to applications or apps on google or popular social networks like facebook.
One of the budding entrepreneurs is Edward Amartey-Tagoe, co-founder of NandiMobile Limited, a company that offers solutions for mobile marketing and organising customer feedback.
Nandimobile won the "Best Business" award in 2011 at the Launch conference in San Francisco, beating over 100 other start-ups from all over the world.
Amartey-Tagoe said coming up with the concept was easy but getting the information to make it work was more of a challenge.
"When we started out with this business idea, we did research, built a prototype and we worked around it for about six months. What we struggled with was finding some data that we can work with. Questions like how many businesses are in Ghana? Wasn't easy to come by," he said.
Amartey-Tagoe, like all the other young entrepreneurs he works with at the incubator is a top graduate of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), an academy set up to help boost software development in sub-Saharan Africa.
MEST has been churning out young tech-savvy graduates eager to be the first to create internet-based offerings that will become the next big global app since it was established in Ghana in 2008 by Jorn Lyseggen, a Norwegian tech entrepreneur and CEO of Meltwater Group.
MEST has classrooms across the country and has graduated 40 students to date that have been trained for free and through sponsorship.
"Our objective is to create some really successful entrepreneurs and hopefully those can then be role models, maybe they can be rock stars that inspire generations not only here in Africa, but perhaps across the African continent to believe in themselves, believe in themselves, to believe in their own talent and then go out there, compete with the best of the best in the rest of the World and put Africa on the map," said Lyseggen.
Ghana, a major cocoa and gold producer that began pumping crude oil late last year, is among Africa's fastest-growing economies. It was also the first African nation to get connected to the internet in the 90's, thanks in part to Nii Narku Quaynor, a scientist and engineer who played an important role in establishing internet connections in the west African nation.
Quaynor, who is also the chairman of Ghana Dot Com, says there is a lot of potential for internet business and especially mobile phone web access.
"There is certainly great opportunity, if you consider that more than 80-something percent of mobile telephone penetration exists in Ghana then there is a huge potential for doing things internet," he said.
Africa is the second most connected region in the world in terms of mobile subscription count after Asia, according to a research done by Informa Telecoms and Media. According to a survey by industry body GSMA, Africa will be home to 738 million handsets by the end of 2012.
It is the reason many of the entrepreneurs at MEST are setting up software firms that are mobile-based, hoping to tap into a growing population of Africans who access the web through their phones.
The rise of 3G mobile networks has given millions of Africans internet access for the first time. The World Bank estimates that in Africa a 10 percent rise in broadband penetration is linked to a 1.3 percent increase in economic growth.
And with some basic smartphones now selling for as little as 50 US dollars, mobile operators see fast connections as the main edge in the race to tap increasingly tech-savvy users.
But internet access in Africa is still only at 11.4 percent compared to a global 30.2 percent according to Internet World Stats. Ghana alone has 5.2 percent penetration.
Other apps being developed at MEST are Claimsync, an online system for processing health-insurance claims, Saya, a Web-to-SMS chat application suitable for lower-end phones and BlackBerrys and Streemio, a music-streaming service.
Seth Mawuse Akumani, a MEST graduate that has been working on a web-based program for hospital management systems says he is looking forward to better internet access so that the apps developers like him create can make a difference.
"There are needs for really well developed hospital management systems and you know, very soon when the internet connectivity here is better probably we could also start looking at electronic medical records so there are really opportunities for us to grow right here in Ghana and other parts of Africa, probably the world," said Akumani.
Africa-focused telecom companies are betting that next generation 4G technology, which allows download speeds more than double those of current 3G technology, better reception in urban areas and coverage of previously hard-to-reach remote areas, will drive broadband internet penetration.