Agony of an African programmer

I reckon a big piece of being productive involves learning how to get as many needed resources available offline as possible. If you have offline resources, your biggest hurdle is limited to electricity availability, which I imagine can be solved with batteries and renewable energy.

Currently the barrier to this solution are the immigration controls inspired by irrational fear (rationalized by unquestioned assumptions and generalizations).

Fixing African institutions to a point where they can compete with the rest of the world will take decades or even a century or two. The process could be accelerated by returning expatriates.

Before I go any further I would like to state first that I'm speaking from the point of view of a Ghanaian entrepreneur and not an African entrepreneur because I am more familiar with the situation here at home and I would only be speculating about what transpires in other African nations.

Cost of equipment:

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It's true that the duty slapped on the importation of IT equipment makes you wonder what the rational is because I was under the impression that one taxed heavily the importation of luxury goods or items that are manufactured locally to protect indigenous industries. However the market is flooded with used computers/laptops from abroad that are cheap and can get the job done (albeit a bit slower that one would prefer). A core 2 duo desktop with a 15" lcd monitor and a UPS will set you back Ghc700 ($260).

But if the cost is still prohibitive then you have to come up with an alternative solution. For example, when I got my first freelance project, I couldn't immediately afford a pc so I leased one from an internet cafe and agreed to share the work and revenue with the owner.

Availability of learning material:

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I think IT is one of the few industries where so much leaning resources are available online for free and more so now with the advent of MOOC. If you don't have an internet connection at home or a usb modem then go the an internet cafe.

PayPal blacklisting:

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Now this is a very annoying and unfortunate situation! West Africa is made up of the following countries: Benin. Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa). Of all the listed countries PayPal isn't in 4, namely: Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Liberia (https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide). One of the reasons PayPal doesn't want to do business with us is because of credit card fraud which I think is a rather lazy excuse. If Skrill can make it work then really...

However iTunes, Skrill, iStockPhoto, Hetzner.de, Linode, AWS, Rackspace, Register.com, Gandi among others all accept visa cards from Ghana so you can get by without PayPal (although you can't register your copy of Sublime Text so you have to I've with the annoying reminders or switch to Komodo IDE).

Banks here don't issue Visa Credit cards willy nilly but you can more easily apply for an international Visa Debit card and if your bank doesn't offer one then change to another institution!

I'm going to end this comment here because it's getting too long and I'm running on a UPS (lol) but my main point is that yes, there are challenges but they are surmountable. You either solve them head on or work around them but there is always a solution. And besides entrepreneurship is all about the fun of solving challenges anyway so come over to Ghana and have some REAL Fun!

You need a visa. But it's impossible to get a visa to work in US/Europe unless you have a job. And even trying and applying for a visa costs more than most people's monthly salary. And there is no money-back guarantee.

But finding a job is also not easy. Applying to some IT company in the US without being able to show of significant work experience? No college education from a well-known university? How can you get job experience that is sufficient to apply for an IT job when you live in a country that has the problems the article talks about?

And no, you cannot just apply to some junior entry-level job. You won't get a visa unless you are so qualified that the host country has a huge demand for people with your skills. And this is just one of the hundreds of problems you're facing when deciding to leave Africa.

So yeah:

>Get out of Africa. Africa will steal your life.

Thanks for that advice. Very helpful.