Take Her to Sea

The time has come. Tomorrow (today?) at 6am, the baseline survey I've been working on for the past several months will officially launch, dispersing teams to various locations around the country. Basically I spent today practically equipping an army, counting out all sorts of supplies, allocating them amongst all our interviewers--it took 11 hours!

My Kelty backpack bills itself as the ideal 'day-and-a-half' pack. We're about to make it the 'week-and-a-half pack.' My itinerary will take me first to Western Region, around the Takoradi/Tarkwa area, then to Mpohor Wassa near Elmina, wrapping up with Assin Breku and Cape Coast in the Central Region. I'll return to Accra for a few days before visiting our teams in other regions. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures. This also means that I won't be updating my blog very regularly for the next few weeks.

Ghana in Oil Deal with CNOOC

allAfrica reports that the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation have started a collaboration on offshore oil exploration. The article is a bit short on the details of what this collaboration would entail, but I am a bit concerned about this deal from a governance and transparency perspective, given China's oil dealings in other, less well governed African states. Though, to be fair, this is not a concern solely applicable to Chinese oil firms.

I get the feeling from this article that President Mills is attempting to soften the energy crisis by creating these domestic oil deals. Doing so for populist reasons would be bad; I doubt that Ghana yet has the institutional capacity to manage such windfall oil revenues well. Though I have noticed that many young Ghanaian graduates, who are suffering through a terrible job-hunting process, especially with public-sector hiring frozen, are looking into graduate programs in Norway, a country that did a fairly decent job managing its oil revenues. Hopefully they can bring back some lessons from there.

I'll look further into this deal over the next few days.

Happy 100th Birthday

To Dr Kwame Nkrumah, a leader of the struggle for independence and first president of Ghana. There's been a good bit of ceremony and celebration in Accra, and today was a national holiday.

Entertainment

So our new residence in Accra sits on a road that forms a T-junction with a busy thoroughfare, on which taxis frequently pass. This has led to my fellow RAs and I creating a new (soon-to-be-Olympic) sport:

Competitive long-distance taxi hailing. (CLDTH ... we are currently accepting nominations for better names/acronyms of this sport.)

Several months of field research in Ghana have led us to believe that taxi drivers have an innate sixth sense: obruni-radar, or obruni-dar, for short. Some days we'll walk out of the house, we'll hear a honk and out of seemingly nowhere a taxi will appear. Some people see things like this and ask 'why?'; we see things like this and ask 'why not make a really cool, pointlessly competitive game out of this?'.

How this game is played:

1.) All players must be walking on the road our house is on (the vertical part of the T-junction).

2.) Players attempt hailing taxis from the main road (the crossbar of the T). This is more difficult than one may think. There are trees at both corners of the intersection, so taxis only have visual/audio on potential hailers for a brief second, as they are speeding down the main road. This requires excellent timing and 'hailing-carrying distance' on the part of the hailer. Players who hail repeatedly when no taxi is in visual range are shunned and penalized heavily. No non-human aides, such as loudspeakers, metal whistles or those annoying football horns, allowed.

3.) Successful hailer wins and shamelessly celebrates. Distance from the T-junction is noted. Current record held by Noah--something like 60 meters.

But, wait, there's more. Bonuses:

1.) Nonchalance: Extra points for hailing with only one finger.

2.) Economy: Extra points for negotiating a lower than average price with the driver.

3.) Greed: Having multiple cabs stop with one hail.

4.) Nightvision: Winning this game at night. Obviously.

5.) Supremacy: All of the above.

This sport is still in its developmental stages, so I will keep you updated on new rules, forms of competition, etc.

President Kufour to speak at MIT

John Kufour, President of Ghana, 2001-2009. Chair of the African Union, 2007-2008. Image sourced from MIT link below.

Cambridge-based readers: MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship will be hosting former Ghanaian President John Kufour on 21 Sep 2009. The title of his talk is, "Entrepreneurship, Government and Development in Africa."

The event is open free to the public. It'll be at 4pm in MIT's Building 34, Room 101, but seating is limited, so it's recommend you get there by 3.30.

Here's the link.

See you in South Africa

Tonight Ghana became the first African team (aside from South Africa) to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, with a 2-0 victory over Sudan, featuring stunning strikes by Sulley Muntari and Michael Essien. Kumasi is relatively quiet actually, but I can only imagine what it's like in Accra right now.

Ghana links

Things have been quite hectic on the research project front, and I am back in Kumasi for more data collection. Hopefully in a week or two things will be back to normal and I can attend to my blog more regularly. In the meantime, here are links to a couple of stories that are on the front pages of Ghana's papers right now:

From the BBC, the UN warns on West African floods. Basically there has been torrential rain in Burkina Faso and other West African countries, which has displaced some 150 000 people in that country alone. As a result, the Burkinabe authorities opened the main gates of one of their dams o the Volta River, which displaced and killed many Ghanaians. According to IRIN, Ghana had fewer than 24 hours' notice that Burkina Faso would be opening these gates.

Last week's The Economist featured a story on Sodom and Gomorrah, one of Accra's biggest slums, and how it represented Africa's rapid urbanization and falling fertility rates--the so-called "demographic transition". Just as this Economist story went to press, several people in Sodom and Gomorrah were basically cut to pieces in ethnic violence, prompting (reigniting?) calls to close down the slum and relocate the squatters, a move for which few offer solutions for the inevitable instability.