Telephone Conversations: A History of Telecommunication Economics and MTN in Ghana

Ivor Agyeman-Duah

sept 2019 · Ayebia Clarke Publishing

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Many world economies and cultures are in the throes of mergers into the dreamt global village. Technology with it’s many euphemisms such as: the “information super highway,” a “period of hyper-change,” “cyber universe,” “digital revolution and renaissance,” etc., are changing the lives of many. Africa, as the author of this book – an experienced and prolific development specialist explains, was only two decades ago classified as a backwater with the presumed characteristic failure of: unstable governance systems, antiquarian agricultural infrastructures, commodity virility for lack of value addition, and low export earnings. Now at the forefront with close to a billion mostly youthful labor and skills markets, its telecommunication networks and economies including start-up digital companies have gone global. From South Africa with the pessimism that greeted post-Apartheid period has come the multinational, Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN) whose impact on all aspects of development in Africa, the Middle East and Asia is phenomenal. By 2018, MTN controlled a substantial share of the three hundred million market subscriptions in Sub Saharan Africa, the highest growth region in the world. In Ghana, which is the focus of this book, is about how the MTN Group at one time under the chairmanship of Cyril Ramaphosa, later President of South Africa, entered West Africa to lead the market in Ghana. With a largely homegrown skills bank, a new generation is using this technology to grow the country’s economic trajectory in the form of rural agriculture and coastal or blue economies. From cottage industries to mobile financial services and capital markets, the provision of African development via technology influenced solutions and apps to demonstrate how corporate philanthropy is built into venture enterprise.

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Ivor Agyeman-Duah is the founder of the public organization, Centre for Intellectual Renewal in Ghana. He is the author and editor of several books including An Economic History of Ghana, Bu Me Be: Proverbs of the Akans, which he edited with the late Peggy Appiah and her son Kwame Anthony Appiah and Pilgrims of the Night. Born in 1966 in Kumasi, he was holds MA from the University of Wales and an MSc in Economic Development from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is the winner of several international awards including ‘The Distinguished Friend of Oxford 2012’ at Oxford University.