Grasscutter vs. Agouti
Yeah, let's do it. I want to see a showdown between these two rodent delicacies. I haven't tried either one yet, but I hear they're both quite good. Unfortunately I find them to also be quite cute, so if someone presents one to me someday, please present it in meat form, not in "fresh" form. But I want to hear from those who have tried both. Which is better and why? Or does it really just depend on the sauce as it seems to often be the case in West African foods?
The end of telecenters in Senegal
While earlier I wrote an article about the decline of internet cafes in Senegal, the PDF report in this new link talks the initial inception of telephone landlines in the country, the increase of them, and now the decrease as mobile phones have taken off. Sorry, it's only in French.
Ivorian blogger, Manasse's blog. Yes, sorry, only in French again, but it's quite easy to use Google Translate to read what he's writing and he's a solid blogger, so it's worth your time.
Attention shift to local content
I always enjoy Rebecca's articles and this one is even more interesting to me as whenever I meet African web developers, I always put out the question of: Why not develop African content for Africa hosted in Africa? It's typically a very reserved response that I get, but now that Kenya actually has a fund aimed at stimulating local web content growth, it will be interesting to see what becomes of this. Probably a good test case for if it can take off or not.
I came across this good read yesterday about the closure of Senegalese internet cafes. For those reading this blog right now, it might be a tough go as it's in French, but Google Translate can be a good friend if you want to look it over and get a tasty overview of the internet situation in Senegal currently.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that the monopoly is a huge problem in Senegal. Sonatel (who apparently offer the iPhone) is the current government-owned monopoly on the main internet connection to the outside world. Naturally, since they have no competition, they don't really care about offering competitive prices. No matter if it's Orange, Tigo, or relative newcomer, Expresso, it doesn't matter that they offer data plans as they all have to buy bandwidth from the Sonatel connection and costs work out to generally the same. This is a common problem throughout most of Africa unfortunately.
In Senegal, the situation was exacerbated by the fact that internet usage took off and people got in to getting online. This in turn made for more internet cafes. More internet cafes made for more competition. The prices for users dropped from about $3 USD an hour to $0.65 per hour. This of course made for even more people getting on the internet, but only once those price points were reached.
These prices it turned out, were not tenable for business. Despite a massive demand, internet cafes have been closing left and right simply because they can't afford to pay the connection fees and offer service at the prices people are able to afford. Naturally, the connection fees didn't drop with more usage, which has been the inverse of this situation in the US, Europe, and Asia, with a number of Asian countries making out the best on price vs. speed (Japan is spoiled rotten with 100Mbs per second at $25 USD.)
Tossed in to this is also the case that a growing number of people have been able to connect at home through the growing ADSL network, especially in towns such as Dakar. It's all been downhill for those on ground trying to provide cafe connections for the masses.
While the circumstances are a bit different, one does have to wonder how much life an internet cafe has left anywhere in the world? Outside of tourists locations, they seem to be drying up everywhere to some degree as more and more of us travel with laptops or at the very least, wifi/highspeed data enabled phones that can do simple browsing anywhere we go. And this is a trend you see in Africa as well. Like I found in Cape Coast, Ghana, there are a number of growing cafes that have ceased to be the typical cafe of the past. They offer more of a place to plug in and work for the day, aka, the coworking space.
Obviously when your outbound connections are controlled by one entity, any change in the market is treacherous as the free market is anything but. Even still, I'm not sure that only connection costs are to blame for less internet cafes in a country like Senegal. User habits as to how people get online are changing the world over and I ask if the public internet access point soon be a relic? As I watch people wondering the streets, checking Facebook on the iPhones, I say yes, although it's a yes I don't necessarily like as the 21st coffeehouse was something I was enjoying.
So 2009 appears to be going down in the books as the Year of the Cable in Sub-Saharan Africa what with all the cable lighting up in East Africa and now the Glo-1 landing in Lagos over the weekend which will provide additional bandwidth to West African countries. Friends in Ghana were excitedly talking about this when I was there last month as it will open up a second route out of the country above and beyond the single line that they currently have which is tied in to the old SAT-3 line.
Throughput is going to start out at 640 Gbs and eventually be cranked up to 2.5 Tbs. There's been a bit of coverage on it which you can read at 27 Months, TechMasai, Vanguard, ITNewsAfrica, and This Day. I'm probably missing a lot of others as cable landings are a pretty big deal and this one is made even more so as it's being deployed primarily by Globacom Limited who are a Nigerian company.
The only thing that should probably be mentioned in all of this is that from Ghana to Senegal, the cable leapfrogs six countries (yes, I am indeed counting The Gambia in there). I'm not sure if this is because these other countries didn't want in on the connection (which colleagues in Côte d'Ivoire tell me is often the case) or if the countries were simply left out. It's a shame about this as a lot of Information Ministers are going to hobble their countries in the future if they don't have enough connectivity coming in. They'll have to run connections to neighboring countries who do have it and then pay a premium for something they should have had directly in the first place. So it goes apparently, but bandwidth is decidedly becoming a hard currency around the world and countries need to get in on it when they can.
Bloggers and website owners in Africa are getting taste of a new scam. Naturally, it's probably not originally created to be a scam, but it's turned in to that for those in Africa who use Google AdSense. For those unfamiliar with the term, AdSense is a program that people can enroll in to get a snippet of code to place on their site. Google then scans the content of pages the code is placed on, displays relevant text ads, and the website owner gets a small payment for each ad click-through. Overall it works quite well. I use it on a few websites of mine and make enough money to pay for the basic costs of the sites. I'm not getting rich on it, but I don't have to do anything to earn the money, so that's a win-win.
People with larger sites that get more traffic can make a great deal more though. This being the case, a number of website owners in Sub-Saharan Africa have taken to using Google AdSense on their sites. Again, it works well overall and they appear to get a good number of click-throughs which result in some pretty decent earnings for these guys. The problem comes when they want to actually get at the money coming to them from Google.
The quite excellent Atelier des médias, a ning network based on a radio show in French (ning doesn't like Google Translate by the way) broke the story about what has been happening to a lot of these guys with the checks that they get sent from Google. For those running AdSense, you may be asking right now, "They mail the checks? Really? But Google just does a direct deposit in to my bank account. The check is a last resort" Yes, they do direct bank deposits when you're not in Africa. This is explained a bit more in the article:
Google does not offer the possibility of electronic transfer to its customers residing in Africa and they only offer the sole option of receiving their payment by check, a check they have the greatest difficulty in cashing.
But there is an added layer of trouble to even starting a Google AdSense account in the first place as Serigne Diagne, the fellow who is the main subject of the article and owner of senactu (a Senegalese new portal), mentions in a comment which appears to single Africa out as a "problem" region:
...google only accepts payment by check for a person who is in Africa, for people who open the adsense account in Europe, America or Asia...
I have to admire the fact that Serigne is able to comment so evenhandedly on this as he has received good payments from Google that he cannot access as the article stated:
Serigne is quite angry because his site, senactu.com displays advertisements from Google (via AdSense) and has received two checks in the amount of $208.84 and $233.55 [USD]. The two checks are from CityBank, that banks located in the Dakar will not cash, not even at the local branch of CityBank.
And you can go on to see similar stories in the comments from prominent African bloggers that are in agreement with the article. I just have to ask, what gives? First off, why checks by mail? In general, postal systems around the world are not known for always being that great. When mailing to Croatia, I tell people, "Okay, I sent it in January, you should see it in February." to which they always reply, "Fine, but which year?" African postal systems can work in their roundabout way, but at the same time, there is no need for this. Why no direct bank transfers like website owners in the Americas, Europe, or Asia can access? That would seem to be the easiest option. Or, barring that, how about phone credits? This is a highly-used form of complementary currency in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's almost like Google doesn't want the payments to be received...
Let's face it, while Google is making strides to have a presence on Africa, they're a bit timid. They don't really want to invest themselves wholeheartedly, but at the same time, they want it known that they're there. They're fine with their AdSense being displayed on African sites, but how many AdWords (the other, paying-to-Google side of AdSense) clients are they going to have there? Most likely, the clients are based in France or Belgium as shown by some of the ads that I clicked on senactu. Is the mighty Google with their secret sauce afraid that they'll get taken in some African scam? Is Google really working to develop a web economy in Africa? Why do their Western Union payments not include anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa? Does Google really want to pay these African website operators or just take the AdWords client money without paying the AdSense money? From where I'm sitting, it would appear that they don't and it's a nasty scam to those who started using AdSense in good faith. Hopefully others will chime in on this and show some proof to the contrary.
