Hurray!

I don't know about you, but I do get frustrated each time I'm filling in some web form and I'm asked for ZIP or Postal Code. Now, being from Ghana, everyone knows there are no such things as zip codes. Some web forms are designed properly enough to not require zip codes when you select Ghana as your location, but most others are not.

So when I stumbled across a public domain database of longitude and latitude pairs for most towns and cities in Ghana (and in fact Africa) it occurred to me that zip codes could be generated quite easily from these unique numbers. After using them for several months, now let me share the love--Accra's zip code is 43F 8E3. And for kicks, the state is the country code GH.

So one of the very peculiar problems I've been looking to solve--to no avail is this:

How do you participate in the global economy when you are in Ghana?

Let me give a specific example.

A young web design firm in Accra run by one of my friends is doing good business but they have a fundamental challenge. This is the challenge they have: their clients--mostly mid-sized Ghana-based entities--want to put up business-card websites. You would think that was an easy thing to want but a close look at the steps involved makes it obvious that it isn't so easy.

To get a website up and running you need two things: