Our meeting marathon continues! 2 more days, Thursday and Friday, leading to the terrible Friday night match (Ghana lost its World Cup football quarter-final match to Uruguay in penalties)! One of the most quiet 3 hours in terms of traffic in Accra in the memories of the oldest inhabitants!

Coming back to our meetings, Thursday was relatively soft compared to previous days, but heavy given that it was an official public holiday day in Ghana. We spent the morning debriefing on the first days and defining an action plan. We will publish it in the next 2 weeks.

Then we had a fruitful meeting with Kofi Appenteng, who is among other things member of the board of trustees of Ford Foundation. Kofi underlined the issues around access to capital in Ghana, and in particular access to capital for IT projects. Kofi mentionned that for development-oriented services, it might be easier to focus on donor funding for initial capital. They are more likely potential investors than traditional business angels.

Ebenezer, Nienke, George, TESA member, TESA member, Franco, Dom, Steve (and behind the camera Steph)

Our visit of Accra and with stakeholders continues. After our first day, we went on and met a couple of very interesting people.

The Tuesday started with a meeting with three representatives from a student association of the Ghana Telecom University College. The university has a few student associations focusing on different topics. The one we met is called TESA (TEchnology Students Association) and as its name tells, is focused on technology. Not all students of the world are so forward thinking and pro-active. The three people we met, including the president Ebenezer Kwaku Ofori Atiapa, contacted us after reading our blog posts on the launch of the project. They understand clearly the potential of mobile technologies for the future, and the added-value for their members. Very impressive.

As announced recently in a previous post, the Web Foundation is running a fact finding mission in Accra, Ghana this week, related to its Mobile Entrepreneurs in Africa project.

Our team includes George Sadowsky, one of our consultants, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, a W3C staff member doing volunteer work on this project, and Nienke Akkermans, a student of VU Amsterdam, who is working on exploring the potential of W4RA project in Ghana. We are also accompanied by two Vodafone staff from UK, Steven Wolak, and Franco Papeschi.

The objective of the mission is to talk to all potential stakeholders — ICT companies, universities, business sector, telecom operators, professional training institutions, mobile entrepreneurs, students, NGOs, etc. — and refine our plans to fit with the local context and identify promising partners.

The first day was very successful in that regards. On Monday we spent most of the day talking with Vodafone Ghana, and then met with Mark Davies, a very successful entrepreneur in Accra, founder of busyinternet, busylab and esoko project (aka tradenet).

Next week is going to be the real launch of our mobile entrepreneurs project, under funding from Vodafone. While the project officially started 1st April.  We are now going to Accra and start the work locally.  During a week, George Sadowsky (Web Foundation consultant), Dominique Hazael-Massieux (volunteer), and I are going to visit different people and organizations and start building our plan for this program. We will be accompanied by our colleagues from Vodafone UK: Steve Wolak, and Franco Papeschi.