I learned a number of interesting facts over the last weekend at BarCamp Abidjan, mostly from the Google Africa team that was there. It turns out that despite being spread across multiple countries on the continent, their staff totals 23 people. Most of these seem to be working in outreach and communication of Google brand projects, but there are a few in the mapping department as well.

Maybe there are some coders too, but I didn't meet anyone who fessed up to being a hardcore coder. I got the gist, based on the conversations about the various Google products that seem to be targeted towards the African market that these are developed in the famous 20% time of other staff in other countries, which means they're not developed by those using them firsthand. In general, this isn't the worst thing in the world as you can apply a good deal of theory and construct artificial testing environments (code wind tunnels if you will.) But I can tell you that actually living in the market your application is working to serve shows you endless shortcomings as well as unknown strengths. Google needs more coders in Africa.

To that end, I learned a very interesting and potentially brilliant setup in that CEO Eric Schmidt wants there to be the same percentage of developers in each country of the world as those countries stack up for internet users in the world. I don't know what the current amounts are of coding staff in the US, but under this plan, only 40% of Google's development staff would eventually be in the US as 40% of the current internet users are in the US. It's quite a genius tack that I applaud and hope will eventually become a reality... especially in Africa. This also goes a long way to explaining why there are only 23 staff here as African internet users are less than 1% of the total in the world. They could still use a few more hires though.

I've really getting neurotic about mobile phones. Not so much in developing for them or their being the new-new data platform but mainly due to the fixation in how Africa is the fastest growing mobile market in the world. Yes, it's true, but that's because penetration is so low, whereas in North America of Europe, the market is saturated already.

I've said it before but the growth figures are way out of line. I have two numbers with two different carriers here in Côte d'Ivoire: Orange and Moov. I have to have both of these numbers as at any given point at least one of them is without a signal and that is often when standing directly below a tower. The networks are overloaded.

This last week put me over the top when both phones were without data access and voice at various points with 2-3 hour delays on SMS's. It makes people pouting about 3G access on their iPhone seem paltry. Although, after talking to a friend of a friend who was in Myanmar for the last three years, the networks here are blissful by comparison.

I'm seriously thinking about getting a third and looking like a true idiot with all these devices dangling off of me. But, it's the case that the mobile systems here, as in many parts of Africa (I've personally experienced the same problems in Ghana as well as Congo) are purely set up for the extraction of wealth. What mining and rubber harvest was to Sub-Saharan Africa during Colonial times, the mobile phone industry is to Modern times. Put in as little money as possibly to get out as much as possible. This explains why there are so many mobile players out there and they all offer pretty much the same kind of deal--a less than stellar one.

Sure, the market will continue to grow and with every person getting two or three numbers, it's going to look huge. But, for anyone actually using the networks on the ground, they leave a great deal to be desired, no matter how large and pretty their billboards down in Zone Quatre appear.

I am seriously the Mister Grumpypants after last weekend. It's not because I didn't enjoy BarCamp Abidjan--I did. It's not because I didn't meet interesting people--I did such as with the good chunk of Google Africa who were there among others. It's not because the internet connection for the event was down most of the time--that happens and I've since caught up. And of course it's not from being in Abidjan for the weekend as that's always a very good time.

No, what partially put me in a bad mood was "content" as in "local African content" as in, there is extremely little of it. But this is something that can always grow, so in and of itself, this is not what's bothering me. What my big problem is that the #1 complaint amongst all the Ivorian attendees at the BarCamp was how to monetize their websites, since it seems that they can't, due to the majority of advertising/monetizing systems being closed off to them as they are in Sub-Saharan Africa. I would agree with this in part, but the fact that no one makes the direct correlation between local content and ad revenue was the very fiery lightbulb that went off over the weekend and I've been annoyed by it ever since.

As Google Africa people were at the event, they got drilled on why people couldn't get AdSense payments in Côte d'Ivoire. I think that Tidjane handled the explanations quite well on this and you could get the sense he's used to dealing with that question quite often. But, no matter what Theophile says in regards to his Ivoire Blog setup, there is simply not enough content to drive ads in Africa currently.

If this doesn't make sense, look at the fact that it just so happened the rise of Google AdWords (started taking off in 2002) came at the same time as the rise of blogging (started taking off in 1999). Note that the start of blogging and thus the rise of freeform online content happened three years prior to widespread AdWords deployments. People were creating content before there was any option to monetize it.

All of this is not a coincidence because if I write about a restaurant on a local San Francisco blog I maintain, then there is a good chance that that restaurant would want to buy ad space on the blog article for themselves. This works. Google has made money from it. The restaurant makes money from the advertisement. I make money from posting the ads on articles I enjoy writing. That's three mighty happy entities.

But when it comes to Africa, this ecosystem doesn't exist as two of these three components are missing and it won't exist until there is more first and foremost, local content. This means more bloggers writing about more topics. If the content is there, then the readers will follow. Once those follow, then so will the advertising. The advertising will not come first. There needs to be a corpus of content; a body of text to base the advertising on. There are no protests to march in or online petitions to sign that can change this fact. But this is changing as the AdSense running on the top level of this site is switching from voluntourism to being more product-based.

I'm really upset with myself because I was happily joining in on the pitchfork shaking at Google. I stand by the fact that some of the things they have done weren't probably done as well as they should, but they are indeed learning as they go. It's a new market for this type of thing and while they've had billions of dollars of success doing it elsewhere, that doesn't directly translate to Africa where you have countries like Congo with less than 1% of their population online. So in this sense, I do have to defend Google and not just because I enjoyed talking to the gang over the weekend, but because their tack on this is perfectly plausible and realistic. What isn't realistic are the people who think that tossing AdSense on a blog will make them rich and so why can't they have it now. I think I make about $500 a year on my account which has ads displaying on six or seven separate sites. I won't get rich from this, but it drives the internet's economic engine and pays my hosting costs.

It just needs to be remembered that when it comes to this type of economy in Africa, there is one fuel: content, oodles and flowing oodles of local content written by Africans in Africa.

The BBC has put together a nice, animated map showing how internet penetration has spread over the world up through 2008 (not sure why 2009 is the ugly stepchild year in all of this.) As is usual, the big blank spot on there is Africa, with the exception of Morocco, who seem to be doing pretty well, most likely due to the proximity to Spain which allows cable to be deployed quite rapidly.

Nothing on this map should come as a surprise to anyone following African technology and it's all part of the BBC's large SuperPower report they're doing on how the net is changing lives around the world. But, that said, it's not changing the lives of too many in DR Congo with the 0.45% penetration rate there that they even make special note of, although I assume that will change a good deal once their inland cable reaches Kinshasa and potentially, 10 million new users. Also on that note, not including 2009 really skews things a just a wee bit as the East African cables have changed the game a great deal on that side of the continent.

Anyways, a map worth a look is you enjoy all thingies animated.

The Kamusi Project has just tossed their hat in to the ring of folks who are working to get African languages adapted to 21st century technology terminology. They made the official announcement about a site they've set up to try and further the goals of getting Swahili words adapted to computers. I mean, after all, according to Google Translate, 'computer' in Swahili is 'kompyuta' which for some reason I don't really buy as being a terribly Swahili word.

This frustration is further belied by Rebecca in a recent tweet:

Just done an interview abt @iHubNairobi with #BBCSwahili; I need to practice Swahili more....whats a domain in Swahili? More research needed

Again, according to Google Translate, 'domain' (as in web domain name) is 'miliki', which does sound like a proper Swahili word, but I'm assuming it has a completely different meaning probably having to do with rule of land or something. And that's the issue, do you adopt some "3rd party" loan word for these purposes or do you come up with a new word because let's face it, no one is probably going to call the 'web', 'mtandao' as it's just too long and everyone knows the word web now.

Let me emphasize that this doesn't just affect African languages. The problem exists everywhere which is why a word like 'web' is just 'web' in Spanish despite there officially being no 'w' in the alphabet. It's also why Speakers of Croatian will say SAD instead of Sjedinjene Američke Države for the United States of America due to the length.

I suppose that in the end there needs to be a balance of ease with authenticity when it comes to adding new words to a language. I just hope that efforts like the ones from Kamusi and ANLoc (site appears to be down?) gain some traction because it's a problem that isn't going to go away and will only get worse as time goes on. Just look at German, which currently has 8,000 loan words from English. At what point is your language (and thusly, your identity) no longer yours?

The picture above pretty much reiterates the title more than anything I could hope to explain. Sadly, I see wrecks like this all the time when making the trip from Abengourou to Abidjan. I've also seen them in Ghana, as well as in Congo. Typically they revolve around some idiot truck driver who isn't properly trained on driving a a tractor trailer who then picks up a load that is horribly, horribly unbalanced. One wrong turn or one tap of the brakes at the wrong spot and suddenly the truck jacknifes and goes to hell due to... oh I don't know, multiple laws of physics such as: a big ass overloaded truck in motion will want to stay in motion unless acted upon by the mis-negotiation of a simple turn.

That said most of the wrecks that I've seen have been have been pretty tranquil in comparison to this which happened next to a village called Aniassue about 30km south of Abengourou. The entire trailer is on its side and the truck cab is up in the air like a tree. I mean, look at that wreck. It's mesmerizing in its absolute destruction. Thankfully, there was a village side road that allow us to bypass this nightmare lest we would have been stuck there for the rest of the day undoubtedly.

It also appears that few if any were hurt in this wreck. That's because the worst are the logging trucks, which are always incredibly unbalanced with these massive multi-tonne logs cast about the trailer and lightly held in place by a thin chain. It's often the case that these will lose a log that then flies off to side and kills innocent people who were just standing there. These guys bother me the most, especially as we tried to pass one last Friday who then proceeded to swing in to us and nearly toss our truck in to the bush. Thankfully, there were just a couple of scratches to the paint and we were able to get around him after that with a proper one-finger salute, which fell on blind eyes.

Suffice to say, trucks around here are incredibly dangerous as they just work to haul as much as they can, as fast as the can out of the country for export. This is a shame given the great wealth of talented craftsmen in the country that could actually export finished products instead.

This article on Koranteng's Toli was a great read. Actually, in general, his blog is a great read, but this article really stuck out as it's about the fact that Ghana doesn't appear to exist in the world of Apple:

Yes, take your i-something, open the Contacts App, create a new contact and add a new address. Alternatively just try to edit an existing address. Now try to change the country field to Ghana. Note, if you will, the result: Ghana is not in the list of countries. Search under "Africa (Western)" and you'll see nary a trace of Ghana.

He goes on to talk about how it's probably just a bug and that it will be updated at some point in the near future, especially if a stink is to be raised about it. But, it begs that question as to why it's not there in the first place. It's not like the list of all 193 countries in the world is that hard to find and yes, Ghana is on that list.

I could buy the bug issue as I saw this first hand when working at a company and looking at their international shipping to see that my country, Croatia wasn't in the list. I really scanned through the list and then found it under Hrvatska, which is how you say Croatia in Croatian. But, this was the only country like that. There was no España or Deutschland in the list. I asked my manager what the deal with that was and he admitted that they had just cut and paste the list from another site. So, in this case it was abject laziness and it could be in the Apple iApp situation that the same applies because Americans and by association, American coders are often unaware that Africa is a continent and not a country, they probably just screwed up.

But then there rises the issue that Jean-Patrick Ehouman ran in to when trying to run ads on Facebook in that when you choose a country to target in their system, Côte d'Ivoire is not in the list. Oddly enough, in this instance, Ghana is in the list as well as Nigeria. But, in West Africa the following countries are not available for ad targeting on Facebook: Mali, Cameroon, Liberia, Benin, Togo, Guinea, Senegal, The Gambia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Mauritania. That's a big list and I didn't even check for the rest of Africa.

So here is where you get in to a chicken and egg problem. Businesses will claim that there is no market for them in Africa. But, they are in effect creating the barriers to any kind of market developing by simple acts of non-inclusion. If Apple does some kind of Big Brother thing (which I wouldn't put past them) and looks at all the contacts that all their iPhone users have registered, they'll see none in Ghana and assume that there is no business in Ghana. The same goes for Facebook. They can easily say that they won't bother with West Africa because no one is buying ads for the region. Likewise, Google can claim that AdWords in Africa don't work because you can't register or get paid for running AdWords for most everyone on the continent.

The solution to all of this is basically for companies to stop sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to Africa. As I've said before, Google is making a good deal of headway in this department, although it's slow going. Facebook, Apple, and a great number of others still have some way to go. But just having all the countries in the world available as options would be a rather massive first step. An important second step would be to incorporate more languages. So what if you don't see any French or Spanish users on your site or for your product? Maybe if that version is made available the market will suddenly explode.

It all boils down to the fact that at some point, you gotta say screw it, roast the chicken, boil the eggs, and take a chance that in all likelihood will pay off big time.

I am typing this on a laptop that is just nearly four years old. This day and age, I can easily afford to upgrade. I mean, I could purchase a new Thinkpad (my preferred model) for as little as $450 USD, which is an amount that most any American can afford, even in this deep economic crisis that the country is in, albeit maybe spread over a couple of months' payment. Obviously, the more you spend, the fancier the laptop you get and further down the road potential upgrades might be, but that's not the point. The fact is that I could have upgraded manytimes by now, but I haven't.

There are many reasons for this, the first being that everything still works very well on this Thinkpad Z60m. I can edit video/photos fine and for web programming, it's a champ. It's still running Windows XP. I don't see it running Windows 7 though and at some point in the future, I will indeed have to upgrade, but until Windows XP user percentages drop below their current numbers by a large degree, that isn't going to happen.

But, the main reason I keep it around is waste. Andrew McConnell has a superb photo gallery up on his site about an electronics dump in Ghana, just outside of Accra. I've seen this dump and the cloud of horrid smoke that rises from it. If you had seen it and knew what it was, you would probably hang on to your electronics longer as well.

This is a big problem and it's only going to get bigger. It's one of the things that makes me truly cringe about the information age in that the leftover components are all getting dumped in countries such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. People have few ways to fight back other than to deal with what is dumped upon their shores. And when they do fight back, suddenly, they're called pirates.

I despise the electronics industry for their constant push for people to upgrade and yes, I will bash on Apple right now as most any avid Apple enthusiast will tell me that when you have problems with the machine, that means it's time for an upgrade. An upgrade means more waste. More waste means more toxins shoved off to foreign lands on people who just have to take it and deal with the health consequences of toxin-laced groundwater and air.

For anyone who thinks that they need the latest iPod/iPhone, or laptop marvel, they should come and stay for awhile in rural areas in Africa where the trash is burned daily and you're breathing in an ungodly amount of things you'd rather not know about (mainly damnable petrochemicals.) For me, in a few months, I won't breath this anymore, but for the people here, it's constantly in the air and it's only growing more. Think the next time you buy an electronics item, stop and think if you really and truly need it. I doubt that most will heed this, as people like whatever is new and shiny, but if we can just even slow down consumption, we can buy time to deal with this growing mass of waste.

As a carbon-related side note, how much carbon waste is being generated in Africa with this Africa Carbon Forum and how much carbon will it reduce? I would like to put forth the strengths of teleconferencing, although I know that means a number of people won't get to travel business class to do it...

"Je suis low batt." In French, this literally means, "I am low battery." It doesn't make much sense on its own, but in the context of how Michaela Wrong talked about it in her book, "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" it is a phrase that she uses to sum up the great wealth of issues which plague the Congo. It harks back to when the first mobiles arrived in the country, which had a very annoying tendency to die after some 20 minutes of talking. Thus, the speaker would typically always have to tell the listener that they were out of battery and had to either switch phones or go charge. The term took on something of a life of its own and came to mean that something in general had run down.

We are at a point now here in Abengourou where the power cuts (or délestage if you will) have become regimented in that they're from 01:00 to 09:00 every day which coincides with no water during that time plus another 3-5 hours afterward as the system rebuilds pressure. Living life around this schedule is not what I would call choice, but it is doable, especially as you know that it's coming.

It just so happens that for the first time today, I heard of someone being asked how late he was out last night to which he replied, "Oh, we were out past-cut." meaning past 01:00. I'm sure that others are saying to make sure not flush the toilet until post-cut as well. As this way of life has become unfortunately ordinary (which is a shame as the resources do indeed exist) we have taken to incorporating it in to everyday language. No one probably even notices this, but happens all the time like when we say, "go Google it" when we mean to look something up online or "grab a Kleenex" when we mean a tissue.

I don't have the perception that people in Africa do this any more or any less than anywhere else in the world, but I find it more noticeable given that when it happens, it's usually a bending of pre-existing words or phrases, whereas in North America or Europe, it's the straight up adoption of a product name given the constant media and marketing blasts that permeate those societies a good deal more. Of course, many people here in Côte d'Ivoire keep insisting that the word for pen is "bic" instead of "stylo" or to grab a "Lotus" (a local brand) instead of a "mouchoir" so, I suppose the jury is out to some degree even still. We humans do enjoy our products; the power cuts, not so much.

A quick message to say that I'll be taking advantage of having owned subsaharska.com for some time in that I'm changing the blog address to be one Maneno's newest hosted blog and use the abilities that affords. All the old links will still work and forward to this domain as the platform has been created to be flexible in this manner. The main thing to take note of, is that if you follow my feed, that address will be changing to subsaharska.com/eng/feed/ so take update your feed readers if you'd like to get notice of my article updates. I'll probably put this in place later today, cheers.