[ 2012-05-17 ]

Ghanaian women in ICT advocate govt funding for ICT start ups
Two young women who have blazed the trail in
developing and offering ICT solutions in Ghana
have appealed to the government to set up a proper
fund to support ICT start ups in the country.

The two women are Sheila Penelope Bartels-Sam, CEO
of Incharge Global Limited, and Anne Amuzu, CEO of
Nandimobile.com.

Sheila Bartels-Sam noted that Ghana was rife with
young ICT programmers with the potential to
develop relevant solutions to the numerous
challenges facing both public and private
institutions in the country, but the major problem
facing such young people was lack of funding.

“I am aware government has some multimedia
incubator of a sort but most of my colleagues who
went into that programme say there is not much of
any help there so I think government should
establish a proper all inclusive ICT incubator
like in other countries where young ICT
programmers do not have to worry about start up
funding,” Anne Amuzu said.

The two were speaking in separate exclusive
interviews with Adom News Editor Nii Narku Dowuona
in commemoration of this year’s World Telecoms and
Information Society Day, which fall today, May 17,
2012, and focuses on women and girls.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
and the UN General Assembly set the day aside to
mark the establishment of the ITU, signing of the
first International Telegraph Convention in 1865,
and to focus on the importance of ICT and a wide
range of issues related to the information
society.

The theme for this year’s celebration is “Women
and Girls in ICT”, and Adom News sought to throw
the spotlight on the two young women who were
among many other women making an impact on the
Ghanaian society with their ICT solutions.

Sheila Bartels-Sam founded and runs Incharge
Global which develops e-payment solutions for at
least 15 corporate organizations, including banks,
telecom operators, oil marketing companies (OMCs),
restaurants, major entertainment events like Ghana
Music Awards, and Adom FM’s Ghana Gospel Industry
Awards among others.

Sheila said the e-payment solutions from Incharge
Global come in the form of swipe cards, which
could work as gifts cards for shopping, for the
purchase of e-tickets for events, for fuel
purchase, for musicians to get paid in real time
when their music is downloaded online, and very
soon for people to be able to buy mobile phone
credit on a particular network.

She said the company is developing a special swipe
card for one of the telcos (name withheld) that
would be used to buy phone credit as well as shop
for other products.

“We also develop ATM (automated teller machine)
cards for at least six banks, two of which fully
depend on us for all their ATM cards, but the
remaining four use us as backup just in case their
in-house fail of run out of material,” she said.

Her first customer was Goil (Ghana Oil), and she
developed the swipe card on which staff could load
money to purchase fuel and also have the
opportunity of reloading the card any time they
run out, unlike other cards that are programmed to
be loaded at specific periods only.

Sheila Bartels-Sam said there is a great future
for the ICT industry in Ghana to the extent that
the youth are interested in ICT solutions and a
lot of young people are also getting into
programming, adding that the challenge, however
was lack of funding, “and that is where I believe
the state can come in.”

She also urged the young ICT wizards to
collaborate with each other to establish start
ups, saying that “no one is going to give you
money for startups so you need to collaborate and
make things happen for yourselves,” she said.

Sheila has no background in ICT whatsoever, but
she said of herself “after my A-level at Swedru
Secondary School left for the US and worked in a
lot of sectors and ended up establishing a travel
agency – that was where I realized that there were
no e-payment systems in Ghana for people to pay me
for tickets and hotel reservations
electronically.”

Sheila said when she returned to Ghana she made it
a point to provide a solution to that e-payment
challenge and the result was Incharge Global,
which started in 2010.

“I am aware the ICT demands a lot of concentration
and tend to make practitioners rather anti-social
but at Incharge we are having fun creating great
solutions for our clients,” she said.

Nandi links up organisations with potential
customers

On her part, Anne Amuzu actually trained as a
Computer Engineer at the Kwame Nkrumah University
of Science and Technology after which she and
colleagues started Nandimobile.com two years ago.


Anne is the main developer and CEO at Nandi
Mobile, which is a company that develops marketing
and customer services solutions for organizations
with large customer base to interact with their
customers through SMS and other mobile
applications.

Anne said Nandimobile provides short codes and
other mobile avenues to which customers could send
SMS and get information from and about companies,
and the company could also get more details about
the customers so they could develop relevant
solutions to suit them.

“Our customer service solution is an alternative
to call centers – instead of calling a call center
to lodge a complaint about a service, you can use
our customer service short code and that promises
to get you quicker response to your request,” she
said.

She said Nandi for instance has a short code, 1945
to which people could send queries in the form of
words like ‘FIND’ and Nandi would assist the
customer through SMS exchanges to find exactly
what they want, adding that “this makes it easier
for people who do not have access to the internet
to find companies, address or any other
information they need.”

The clientele of the company are over 50, and they
include NGOs, Airlines and several others which
have large customer base, and it is in the process
of developing solutions for telecom operators as
well.

Anne said the first client was an NGO (Centre for
Gender Survey), to which it provided a short code,
which they (the NGO) used to collect complaints of
sexual harassment from victims without the victims
having to narrate their entire ordeal on phone.

Both Anne and Sheila noted that the ICT industry
is a good for ladies because one does not need
‘strength’ to do it, saying that a good
understanding of the internet and how computers
work could put ladies on the path to providing
relevant ICT solutions and making some good money
for themselves.

Source - Adom News

... go Back