"Everybody is trying to make sense of whether technology can be this wonderful magical cure for the woes of development, and there's a lot of hype," Davies said. "It's quite hard to feel your way through that and know what's for real and what's really going on."
In addition to providing the technology for the center in Accra, BusyInternet plans to bring together entrepreneurs, educators and investors to exchange ideas and promote training for the local population. "We want to provide the resources and champion the programs that will stimulate local entrepreneurs and businesses to examine how best they can use these tools to increase their efficiencies, exploit new opportunities -- locally or overseas -- and learn from others," Davies said.
He envisions the center as a place where all kinds of individuals and businesses will share information, from health practitioners presenting interactive seminars on HIV prevention to companies learning how to set up e-mail systems. "Our philosophy is to say nobody really knows what's right for Ghana," he said, "and the technology is sort of culturally specific in terms of how it's implemented and how it works. So the best thing you can do is create these little incubators, if you will, where you're bringing people together and coming up with solutions on their own."
Although there is still much work to be done to get the technology center ready to open next month, Davies compared the excitement of the start-up to Western fervor about the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.
"It was great to come back into a place and a time where it was still about invention," he said. "It was still about doing things because you love to do them and it was a great idea and you had that conviction, rather than you just felt it was the next way to make two million dollars."
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