Rising With Keyboards

Francis Quartey is building an army of young men and women and preparing to storm Accra, the capital of Ghana. His uniform may not be typical: he wears glasses and a suit. And his soldiers use motherboards, not machetes. But his objective is nonetheless revolutionary.

Quartey wants to take Ghana into the high-speed communications age. Educated in Britain and America, the 36-year-old Quartey spent eight years working for AT&T in the United States before returning to his native country in 1994. Four years later he set up one of the first Internet cafes in Africa, and he now runs an Internet service provider called Intercom Data Network. As he sees it, Africa must get hooked up to the global economy as fast as possible. "Information technology is the last opportunity for people in this part of the world," says the businessman. "If you're not online now, you're not in the game."

That is a refreshingly brassy attitude. For generations, the most talented young Africans didn't go into business. "Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall follow," said Ghana's founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, in what may be the most apt and destructive aphorism for Africa's history. But in some places, that mind-set has changed. Ghana, in particular, is buzzing with high-tech energy and entrepreneurial zeal. In Accra, young people surf the Web, chug caffeinated sodas and plot Africa's IT revolution; hundreds of women sit at keyboards typing in back-office data for American health-care firms. The Ghanaian government is even getting into the act: it's hired a private contractor to help set up an online system to manage the country's ports, which might help thwart corruption. There are at least 300 Internet cafes in the capital now, and their service will soon improve. A coalition of telecommunications firms is laying a deep-sea fiber-optic cable around the continent, linking coastal African nations with the United States and Europe.

To be sure, Ghana has more basic issues than Internet connectivity. Like most of Africa, the country's economy seems perpetually stuck in low gear. Per capita income in 1957, when Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to win independence, was more than $400. Today it's $340. Predatory governments have in the past swallowed good ideas (and good money). As Bill Gates has noted, most Africans are much more concerned with finding food and medical care than cruising eBay.

Nevertheless, the West African nation is starting to embrace the importance of education and self-sufficiency. Ghanaians speak English and work eagerly for minimal wages. Though only a fraction of the population even makes it to high school, computer-training institutes are popping up in major cities. The country's overall literacy rate has been rising. Entrepreneurs are taking advantage: several have started firms that provide data-input services for foreign companies. In downtown Accra, Affiliated Computer Systems (ACS) has hired 850 employees to type data from medical files into computer databases for U.S. companies such as Aetna and UnitedHealthcare. Once the data are entered, ACS beams them back to Kentucky via satellite. ACS started with 20 employees in 2000 and quickly expanded. Its employees take home about $200 a month. Some may call ACS an electronic sweatshop, but that's a lot of money in a country where most people don't earn the minimum wage of 76 cents an hour. "There's a difference between earning a dollar an hour and a dollar a day," said U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill outside the firm's headquarters in May. U.S.-based Data Management Inc. is using Ghanaians to create a database of individuals who've been ticketed by the New York City Police Department.

Local businessmen get the idea, too. Albert Owusu, for example, runs a small coconut-processing business with about $500,000 in annual export revenues. He goes online a couple of times a day to check prices and to e-mail documents to his international partners.

African politicians have a history of corrupting new enterprises. But Ghana's new president, John Kufuor, sees the wisdom of the new approach. He's visited ACS several times and is letting the firm operate in a special exporting zone. Ghana won't become the next Silicon Valley any time soon, but it's made a promising start.