Author name: Dr Maxwell Ampong

Tech and media giant, GhanaWeb, has announced a strategic partnership with Maxwell Investments Group (MIG) on entrepreneurship-based content. This will come by way of the Entrepreneur In You video podcast series, and the MIG Business Forum. The Entrepreneur In You video podcast will be a series of short videos that follow the life of the Ghanaian serial entrepreneur and MIG’s founder, Dr. Maxwell Ampong. Within these short stories will be the lessons, trials and interactions as GhanaWeb seeks to furnish young and upcoming entrepreneurs with relatable pointers that add to growth and leadership, and generate conversation at home and with the diaspora about entrepreneurship in Ghana, and in general. The MIG Business Forum aims to engage the key players cutting across various sectors and the general populace in a solution-oriented, people-centred forum. The maiden volume shall narrow down on product and service providers, together with society decision-makers discussing viable escape routes during a current economic downturn within their respective sectors/markets. The Forum will include Twitter Spaces and other web platforms as conversations on optimising economic manoeuvrability becomes louder. “Our partnership with GhanaWeb is based on a mutual interest to positively influence their massive viewership on entrepreneurship as modern times have necessitated this,” said Dr Maxwell Ampong. “The aim is to have meaningful conversations on how entrepreneurship can drive economic growth, innovation, and social change, amongst others,” he continued. “This is a great partnership that will inform and educate the public on entrepreneurship. This project would improve economic literacy at a practical level, in a practical way, and help Ghanaians make the right decisions in personal and professional businesses,” said Mr. Ismail Akwei, Editor-in-Chief for GhanaWeb. MIG Media Contact: Communications Department: +233 (0) 20 039 4120

From the complexities of distribution hubs to a functioning nationwide logistics network, not to mention the minimum consistent business activity needed to make the whole model viable, a housing numbering system performs an essential role in the development of the next Amazon in Africa. If Amazon wanted set up in Ghana as in the US and the UK, and they haven’t, you can bet that one of the factors has been the lack of a fully functional addressing system.  Good news: Ghana has a shot at fixing that. Let’s look at the general need for a functioning address system and its role in national development. First, an optimised and functioning address system is the basic structure for quickly identifying physical properties. Second, by directing the creation and delivery of infrastructure projects and services in the urban setting, an address system is a tool used by city governments to monitor urban growth. Third, address systems assist companies in providing essential fire and police services and act as a guide for more effective and efficient mail delivery.  Also, a helpful street naming and numbering system is the foundation for intuitively identifying locations. Finally, street addresses are necessary for locals and guests to navigate (Ecklu 2011). Address numbering is a practice that allows one to “assign an address” to a plot of land or dwelling by using a system of maps and signs that list the numbers or names of streets and structures. This idea can be used in urban networks and services because, in addition to buildings, other urban fixtures like streetlights, taxi stands, and public standpipes also have addresses. The housing numbering system, as mentioned earlier, is one of the most basic techniques for service delivery utilised by institutions in the public and private sectors. It makes it possible to collect taxes efficiently, dispatch emergency services like ambulances, firefighters, and law enforcement officers, and manage utility companies’ networks and revenue collection more effectively (Mennecke and West Jr 2001; Yildirim et al. 2014).  Still, proper location identification systems positively influence the achievement of more general socio-economic development goals in most developing countries (Meso and Duncan 2002). Increasing digitalisation and the widespread usage of mobile devices today have created a space and a framework for innovation that increasingly combines physical and digital components (Nylén and Holmström 2015). According to Imieliski and Navas (1999), Roick and Heuser (2013), and Goodchild (2009), this phenomenon gave rise to the idea of digital location addresses, which makes use of significant technological advancements to transform descriptive locational information like postal addresses and named locations into an unambiguous geographic references. As a result, authorities in both wealthy and developing nations continue to look for ways to address issues with geographical addresses (Walsham and Sahay 1999). It took the world a while to discover this solution. Moreover, the fact that it is constantly being modified makes house numbering more challenging to tackle in mainly developing nations, such as Ghana. In the past years, countries worldwide struggled with their housing addressing system. Rarely have new neighbourhoods been added to the street identification systems initially utilised in city centres’ older communities. As a result, urban services were in a worrying situation due to inadequate identification methods. How can you navigate a rapidly growing country easily and effectively, nationwide? How can you swiftly send out ambulances, firefighters, or law enforcement officers? How are letters and messages delivered to private residences? In what ways are municipal services offered? How are malfunctions in the telephone, electricity, and water networks located? How do you put up a system for collecting taxes effectively? It was against these questions that the need to intensify and extend the street naming and addressing system to other parts of cities worldwide arose.  Establishing a home address is a significant issue.  Despite appearances, it is one of the most challenging in urban living. The issue is important since a person’s place of residence defines them just as much as their height, hair colour, or eye colour. Moreover, a person’s home address is now a crucial component of their personal identifying information; it can be found on their social security card and voter identification.  That said, the concept of street, housing identification or naming that dates back to as early as the 18th century in Mannheim, Germany, is considered the prototype of American cities in the 19th century. However, the first street-addressing initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa were in the early 1990s. Despite this backdrop, in Ghana, all initiatives to correctly identify and number houses from the 2000s to as late as 2015 all relatively failed. Till recently, largely even still in use, to identify buildings, people use landmarks regardless of formal street names: “Make a right at the mango tree next to the uncompleted building and look for the petty trader selling on the table top. He will tell you where to go”. There are some obvious problems with this system. The tree may have been cut down. The trader might no longer be at their regular spot.  Many communities in Ghana, including Accra, are so fast-growing that getting lost is becoming increasingly easy. Urban navigation is even harder for visitors and tourists. These are only the everyday issues. At the extreme end, taxing via real estate can be challenging for local governments in cities without addresses, and the implication on local micro and macroeconomics is huge (Osabutey, 2014). But, on the contrary, and in different countries where their street and housing address systems work effectively, the immersive benefit for individual business owners and local authorities has been unprecedented.  Take, for instance, the case of Amazon: a multinational technology business with headquarters in the United States that focuses on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and e-commerce. One of the most valuable brands in the world, it has been called “one of the most significant economic and cultural forces in the globe.”  How did Amazon get there: they took advantage of a working digital housing system that could identify and

Collective identities and trauma memories are intricately entwined in our time. For example, the memories of past and present victimization serve as the foundation for the collective identities of the majority of ethnic minorities. Likewise, social trauma victims and their descendants frequently use explicit and purposeful remembering to empower and construct identity.  In contrast, the offenders and their offspring attempt to erase and cast doubt on the integrity of such memories, undermining the empowerment and identities they provide. This dynamic is more evident than ever in the North Atlantic experience, such as the history of slavery and the slave trade that occurred some four hundred years ago. The subsequent abolishment of this trade around 1807 led to what we now call the African Diaspora.  The term “diaspora” originates from the Greek “διασπορά” (Diaspora, literally means “scattering”). The word gained popularity within the English language with its use in the Jewish Diaspora before it started being used in a broader sense to include other populations (Brubaker 2005). That is to say, and as Palmer (2000) posited, the concept of “Diaspora” is not only confined to the people of African descent. Thus far, the term “African Diaspora” has been widely used to refer to a worldwide collection of the population of African descent, mainly from West and Central Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with the United States, Brazil, and Haiti having the biggest populations. However, Africans started migrating to Europe and the Americas in greater numbers in the late 20th century, creating new African diaspora populations that were not directly associated with the slave trade (Palmer 1998); hence, in the modern context, the term African Diaspora can be used to represent a growth industry for the people in Africa.  Thus, African Union (AU) defines the African Diaspora as “people of native African origin living outside the continent, regardless of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the continent’s development and the building of the African Union.” In line with this, the Africa Union’s constitutive act declares that it shall welcome and promote the full participation of the African Diaspora as an integral part of our continent in establishing the African Union and regards the Diaspora as its sixth area or region. Ergo, within the AU, there are six (6) regions: West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, Central Africa, plus one last region, the “Sixth Region”, which is the African Diaspora. Converse to the wounds that the slave trade might have left on the African continent, the time for Africa is now. This is the period and opportunity to lick our wounds and take our destiny into our hands.  The Africans in the Diaspora have responded to this and are still contributing massively to the economy of Africa. Detty December has come to represent a time when the Diaspora comes into particularly West Africa in relatively large numbers for festive celebrations.  Away from the history lessons, let us now quantify the value of these contributions on the economy of the African continent as a whole and especially on the economy of Ghana. One of the most obvious connections between migration, Detty December, the Diaspora and development is remittances. After a decade of re-evaluating the relationship between migration and development, the conventional thinking that migration threatens chances for economic growth and results in stagnation and dependency has been challenged. International migration, defined as the coordinated or concerted improvement of economic conditions in origin and destination nations based on their complementarities, has been cited in United Nations publications as an ideal strategy for fostering development since 2006.  That said, African migration has increased more than from any other part of the world since 2010, yet most of these flows have been inside Africa. Thus, the overall number of African migrants in 2020 was 40.6 million. This represents only 14.5% of the global migrant population, far less than the shares between Asia (41.0%) and Europe (22.5%). Moreover, less than one-third of all African migrants (27.2%) reside in Europe. Other than Africa, African migrants account for less than 15% of the entire migrant population (Mo Ibrahim Foundation., 2022). In light of the above, evidence shows that the contributions from remittances far outweigh the official development assistance and foreign direct investment that low- and middle-income nations get.  Before the COVID-19 epidemic, the World Bank estimated that officially documented remittances in 2019 reached a record-high $714 billion, including $553 billion to low- and middle-income nations. Despite initial worries that the numbers might decline due to the epidemic, they remained constant in 2020.  According to recent predictions, global remittances are estimated to have reached $773 billion in 2021, with $605 billion flowing to low- and middle-income nations such as Ghana (Migration Policy Institute., 2022). A UN Report cited in The Economic Times (2022) also states that India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and Egypt were the top five remittance recipients of current US dollars in 2021.  Thus, if we’re to go by the report, India was the top remittance recipient among low- and middle-income countries, with $87 billion way ahead of China and Mexico’s 53 billion dollars, the Philippines (36 billion dollars) and Egypt (33 billion dollars). The United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland were the top four countries from which remittances were sent in 2020. Moving on, in the context of Africa, remittances are the primary source of international financing for development. Take, for instance, Nigeria, which received 19.2 billion US dollars’ worth of remittances to sub-Saharan Africa in 2021, a large majority of the region’s overall remittances.  Nigeria has consistently received the most significant amounts of all remittances sent to Sub-Saharan Africa over time. This is because Nigeria, the most populous African country, also has a considerable diaspora population. Ghana was the next recipient, with remittances totalling almost 4.5 billion dollars.  To this end, the ten (10) highest recipients of remittance inflow in