Madam Eva Lokko, the vice presidential candidate for Progressive People’s Party, was my guest on Frontine on Friday 30 October.
Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom of PPP on Frontline
Tonight, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom is on Frontline. I am happily typing this from home, not at all worked up about the upcoming show as it was taped already on Tuesday morning.
I think it was a good discussion, but time just went too fast. So many more questions to ask a man who wants to lead this country. Well, a few answers were given, others were avoided however I appreciated his initiative on transparency issues, now we just have to see if the other parties will take up the challenge Dr. Nduom threw to them:
will they be declaring their assets and campaign funding before Election Day?
It is a good question to ask.
Family Fufu
Today being a holiday, I will lay low, spend the day with my daughter and the rest of the family. For a Ghanaian day with family to be complete, there has to be fufu so on my stove a big pot of light soup is simmering away and the starchy foods for the fufu have been peeled and are now boiling.
So don’t wait up for me. I’ll be back here after the long weekend! (And after tonight’s Frontline with Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom!)
Street “Hawkers” in Ghana, Handiwork and Child Labor
I just came back from a weekend in the Western Region and really enjoyed my time there! On the way back, we stopped a few times along the road to stock up on different food items. Our first stop was Elmina, where we bought crabs.
The street vendors or “hawkers” as they are referred to in Ghana catch these crabs and then tie them in sets of 8 to a large grass straw. How you tie a live crab is beyond me, but it is exquisite, beautiful handiwork!
Crabs and numerous other things you can buy from your car. Many times, just like you see in the collage above, the items are sold by children. In Ghana, 1 million children do this type of job according to the International Labour Organisation.
But that is a different blog post…
Swedish Media Personalities Visit Ghana: Gina Dirawi and Kodjo Akolor
A friend just sent me a tip about this 30 minute travel program featuring two Swedish media personalities. It aired on Swedish TV earlier tonight. In the program, Swedish Ghanaian radio profile/comedian* Kodjo Akolor visits Ghana together with his best friend Gina Dirawi, known from Sweden’s first web-TV-series*.
See the trailer below which leads you to the full program if you click on it.
I actually heard through the Swedish Ghanaian grapewine that Kodjo and Gina were here in June to record the program, but had kind of forgotten about it. I love seing Swedish productions from Ghana, last time it was Felix Herngren and my friend Magnus, because they often capture something about Ghana that I also see.
I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what it is, but it is something like the yellow light before the sun sets, the brightly painted houses and the quirky details of Ghanaian everyday life.
(* as I have not lived in my native Sweden since they became celebrities, do not quote me on if this is how they are actually known).
The Power of We: Three Examples from Ghana
Blog Action Day 2012, or #BAD12 for short, is a day where bloggers all over the world together write on one topic. Over the last years, I have participated on themes such as “poverty” and “climate change”. This year a slightly more poetic theme has been chosen: “the power of we”. I thought of providing examples of this “power of we” from three organizations I am involved with here in Ghana. The way I see it, the power of we is about both building a community internally and working for a greater good, together. There are definite overlaps in all three examples:
1. Ashesi University College
Pillars: Leadership, Scholarship, Citizenship.
Mission: to educate a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders in Africa; to cultivate within our students the critical thinking skills, the concern for others and the courage it will take to transform a continent.
The power of we at Ashesi: Except for stating in our mission statement we are interested in fostering concern for others and change in our community, we locally on campus cultivate an “Ashesi community” by
- having campus wide events where everybody from the security man to the students and lecturers to the President Patrick Awuah are expected to attend,
- having a shared emailing list,
- celebrating eachother’s success and also
- including graduates or workers who leave as part of the community.
Personally, I value this community as a treasured part of my remuneration for the work I do and try to give back by inviting the community to events I organize like and helping to build capacity, especially in social media.
Learn more about Ashesi or read my other posts on Ashesi University College.
2. BloggingGhana
Pillars: Friendship and Technology
Mission and Objectives: to bring the Ghanaian blog community together in real life!
- Serving as a forum for bloggers in Ghana to network and exchange ideas
- Building capacity among bloggers in Ghana
- Accessing new audiences for our blogs through a mutual website (aggregator) and other activities
- Promoting citizen journalism in Ghana
- Educating the general public in Ghana on the opportunities of social media
The power of we in BloggingGhana: For this organization, the power of we became glaringly apparent when we last year decided to upgrade ourselves from a group of friends who had met every month since 2008 to discuss society and social media to a registered non-profit organization. We were hesitant of taking that step, I guess worried that it would take the fun out of the group. Eventually we dared to take the step! Registering as an official entity has allowed us to partner with other organizations and look for funding, and only 1,5 years after receiving our documents, we have come a long way in promoting and improving social media use in Ghana. And we are still having fun!
Join BloggingGhana or read about our projects, BlogCamp and GhanaDecides.
3. Nubuke Foundation
Pillars: Record, Preserve, Promote
The power of we in Nubuke Foundation: This art foundation located in Accra does excellent programs and bring together people from the whole artistic spectrum in Ghana. They have the NuFriend program for people who want to promote and help the organization, but that was never enough for me. I have been volunteer since the first time I set fot on their premises, and not just me, the place has many volunteers and almost every month a new face can be seen helping out! Why is this? I believe the directors of Nubuke, the Ghanian artist Kofi Setordji and the art collector and curator Odile Tevie are excellent leaders who really see the people around them and recognize how we can help. Still today when I have less time to volunteer (the few hours a month have gone down next to 0 since I had my child), they always greet me with a smile, tease me about something and call to check in. They know, I am a volunteer for life and treat me as such!
Visit Nubuke Foundation or read my earlier posts here.
Conclusion: Two levels of the Power of We
So all these three Ghanian groups have a strong culture where individuals feeling a part of the family is key to the success of the organization. But even more important is that they all have missions that guide us to do something bigger, something better, something that resonates with the longing for the “we” in the human individual. Or as Margaret Mead puts it in one of my favorite quotes ever:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Read fellow Ghanaians who have written on the Power of We here: Maya’s Earth (our co-founder also wrote on BloggingGhana!), African Feminist Forum, Ghana Humanists and Obed Sarpong.
My Blogger of the Week “Twitterview” Hosted by BloggingGhana
I have collated all Q&A’s in a blogpost here inspired by the first BloggingGhana Blogger of the Week, Mighty African.
The Twitter interview or “twitterview” took about 1 hour and a half and it was a lot of fun. Again, I am introduced to a new and interactive way of using the Internet that just blows your mind away – there can be meaningful discussion with people you have never met in real life.
Ok, so here you go, courtesy of Google Docs.
Frontline 2012 Online
The second episode of Frontline 2012 where I interview Dr. Abu Sakara of the CPP is now available on the TV3webteam YouTube channel.
What do you think?
What We can Learn from Sister Deborah’s “Uncle Obama” Video
Over the last week or so, the music video of “Uncle Obama” with Sister Deborah has been moving round the social media sites like wildfire here in Ghana. Already from the title of the song, we can hear that it’s beckons attention and after just a few seconds of watching, we realize what kind of attention that is…( if you haven’t seen it, and hence do not know what I am getting at, the next line goes “I like the size of your banana”…).
Everybody has an opinion about this song, some say it is cheeky or catchy, others say it is controversial or that Sister Deborah should act instead of sing! I have also heard comments along the line of that artists with resources should have a message instead of just joking around.
Regardless of what you think of the song, I believe there are several things we can learn from this video.
- It does not matter if the content is silly, if the video is of high quality, people will watch. Today the video has more than 235 000 views on YouTube!
- We all love cameos. In this video, Wanlov, M3nsa and Mutombo (and some employees of a well known multinational, I have heard thru the grapevine) add to the flair.
- If you are a skilled social media user, you can create a hype in days.
All of this could come together to create and promote many more Ghanaian music videos that actually gets watched world wide with very little effort. Another example of the same “silly song” phenomenon is the Korean Gagnam Style music video that I also cannot get out of my head… Again a premium production of a very silly song… The other day, a friend was saying how the local Ghanaian Azonto craze never really caught on in other parts of the world,but what if someone would do a high quality video, throw in some cameos and start hitting the social media sites. I have seen on Twitter that all messages mentioning the “Uncle Obama” song are retweeted or responded to, for instance. That goes a long way for creating a hype.
Finally, we can learn that people like silly dances they can copy, but maybe Sister Deborah went just too far there. I am yet to see someone copying her “size of your banana”-move. Or have I just been spending too much time in the office?
Guest Post: BloggingGhana in Zanzibar
Here is a guest post from my BloggingGhana colleague Nana Darkoa from the trip she took to Zanzibar on behalf of the group.
Three flights, two transfers and a 1-hour bus journey later, I arrived at Melia Hotel on the island of Zanzibar. My first view of Zanzibar was an aerial view from Precision Air. It was like looking at a picture of all those idyllic places I have only ever seen on postcards and what I imagined places like the Maldives, Tobago and yes, Zanzibar to look like.
The bus waiting to take us to the hotel was trotro-like but the hotel was like no destination any trotro would go to. Melia hotel sprawls across at least a 100 acres of fertile land, and is covered in lush vegetation, hibiscus flowers and various species of trees. This was the destination for a ‘Tech Camp’ for finalists of the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC). I was there with Nehemiah Attigah to represent Blogging Ghana, a network of over 200 bloggers based in Ghana, of Ghanaian heritage or blogging about Ghana.
The very first night we arrived at Tech Camp, there was a networking event on a jetty, which overlooked the Indian Ocean. After downing 2 glasses of red wine, and indulging in canapés I participated in a speed networking event where I had to explain Blogging Ghana’s project to groups of up to 8 people. Then I had to repeat details of the project to the next group. I must have done this repetition to about 8 different groups. Justin Arenstein, ANIC’s Manager happened to be standing next to me the first couple of times I explained Blogging Ghana’s project, and I think it was in my second go round that I mentioned that Blogging Ghana had 200 members. “Ah, you should remember to mention that” he said, and so I did…throughout the Tech Camp, and this was a detail that seemed to impress people.
Training at the Tech Camp lasted for 3 days…the day of the speed networking on the agenda had been described as ‘day zero’ so depending on how you like to count, the tech camp was 3 or 4 days. Highlights for me included:
- Learning about data visualisation – Blogging Ghana’s big idea is to build a data website which would provide data sourced from civil society organisations on one easy platform. It is our hope that this will become the go to site for members of the media wishing to write original content. This way, our journalism is driven by facts and figures sourced from Ghana (and, perhaps, in time the rest of the continent).
- Learning about all the different technological innovations out there – mapping projects, innovative examples of citizen journalism and the various ways in which mobile applications are meeting multimedia platforms. For someone who loves technology yet is not a geek, it was wonderful to share the same learning space with geeks from all over the world.
- Meeting developers and innovators from my home country Ghana. There were 4 project finalists from Ghana – ACT Now, Code for Ghana, Truth Gauge and Blogging Ghana. It felt good to know that innovation and entrepreneurship is alive amongst a sector of the youth in Ghana (*ahem* not counting myself amongst the youth in Ghana). The largest delegation came from South Africa, which perhaps was only to be expected. However, I was surprised that there was only 1 black South African amongst the South African tech finalists.
Tech Camp is over now and I’m writing this on a bumpy Fly540 flight from Zanzibar to Nairobi. From there I have a 7 and a half hour layover, before getting on a flight to Addis Ababa. My mind boggles at catching a flight to Addis before connecting to Accra but I know the organisers of Tech Camp had to fly about 80 people to Zanzibar on a budget. Once this trial of a journey is over, I am looking forward to submitting a final proposal to ANIC and hoping that Blogging Ghana gets the jump start it needs to encourage data-driven journalism in Ghana.
Thanks, Nana for your report and hope to have you safely back in Ghana soon!
Watch this space for updates on our proposal.
Blogger of the Week : Kajsa HA!
This week, I am featured as BloggingGhana‘s Blogger of the Week, BOW for short. So what does being BOW entail?
Well, first of all, it is a highly prestigeous nomination! I am only the third blogger in Ghana to be granted this honor! Earlier BOWs are Nana Darkoa/Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women and Ato/Mighty African. It involves the group highlighting my blog on their Facebook page and on Twitter (@BloggingGhana), sharing selected blog posts (so far, they have picked up on when I saw Obama and a very special love story). I will also contribute with a post on why I blog and on Friday, there is a live “Twitterview” where questions people have posted on Facebook or Twitter will be put to me!
What would you like to ask me?
Yes, You in Front of the Screen
I have noticed I have plenty of new readers on my blog! Welcome! Akwaaba! Välkommen! Now, who are you?
My statistics are regretfully not so clear, so I have to guess why traffic on this blog is up from an average of around 50 viewers per day to well over 1500 (!). I am guessing this has something to do with my new career as a TV host in Ghana?
Or was the interview on Swedish radio last week with a link to this blog from their website?
Maybe it is all my new students wanting to check out their new teacher?
Or did my this blog’s brand new look, courtesy of some recent hackers, make thousands of you flock here?
If you are new here, please let me know! Drop a line in the comment box below:
- Who are you and
- Where did you hear about me and this blog?
Thanks for helping me soothe my curiosity and do come back soon!