Mark Leger, centre, worked with Liberian refugees who produced a newspaper on their camp outside Accra, the capital of Ghana. They faced many technical challenges, from not having a reliable source of power to a lack of communications technologies like cellphones. (Ryan Bolton)

Early mornings are quiet and cool in Accra, the Ghanaian capital city of five million; it’s the only time to jog in this otherwise unbearably hot and congested West African city. So there I was early one Saturday in August, running down a largely empty main street, when what do I see coming toward me? Hundreds of people parading in yellow-and-blue shirts and baseball caps.

It turned out to be the Ghanaian equivalent of the original Macy’s Day Parade. The cellphone company MTN had their employees marching in the streets, celebrating the acquisition of rival Areeba. The night before, MTN had seemingly swept across the country and re-branded nearly all of the red Areeba outlets in MTN blue.

The parade was a measure of the importance of the cellphone in Ghana (and perhaps most of Africa). It’s both a status symbol in a society largely free of electronic gadgets, and a necessity because no one seems to have a landline.

Ghana is one of many developing countries in Africa that skipped a generation of telephone technology. There were some public pay phones, but in the eight months I spent there, I never came across a landline in someone’s home, whether rich or poor.

If they had landlines, people didn’t seem to use them, but they did use cellphones. There were 19,000 subscribers in 1992, the year mobile phones were introduced in Ghana. In 2005, there were more than three million users. MTN alone now claims it has 3.4 million customers.

A man smiles during Ghana's 50 year independence celebrations at Independence Square in Accra, Ghana, on March 6, 2007. (Olivier Asselin/AP)

The cellphone revolution isn’t entirely a good news story, though. Despite the gains made in the past 14 years, only one in four Ghanaians has a phone. Many people still don’t have them because they’re expensive: a low-end phone costs $35 U.S. while the average Ghanaian still lives on less than a dollar a day.

One of my friends lived in a makeshift shack erected along a concrete wall on a side street in an otherwise affluent neighbourhood, for example. She and her two daughters don’t have electricity or running water. Another friend works as a cook at a small guesthouse. His salary barely covers his transportation to work, let alone his rent and food. For these people, a cellphone — any phone — is a distant priority.

When foreigners arrive in Ghana, the first thing many of them do is buy a phone. The last thing many of them do before leaving the country is give away their phone to a Ghanaian who doesn’t already have one. Mobile phones are coveted items; many locals secure the promise of a second-hand phone months before the foreigner actually leaves the country.

The acquisition of a phone is often as much a curse as a blessing, though, because phone cards are expensive, especially for locals, many of whom are expected to pay for personal and work calls. In my first week in Ghana, a fellow Canadian went through $22 in phone cards.

Ghanaians get around this expense in a couple of ways. One, they use the phone a lot between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. when it’s free to make calls. I learned this the hard way when I organized a conference and asked for an RSVP from participants. Over the course of a week I received more than 50 calls in the middle of the night. For some reason, I didn’t mute the phone until I’d already lost two nights of sleep.

Two, they "flash" each other.

Flashing means that you call someone and hang up after the first ring. That person is supposed to return the call and incur the charges (in Ghana, the receiver isn’t charged any airtime minutes). Under this system, foreigners are flashed all of the time because it’s assumed they can afford to take on the charges.

Despite these financial challenges, cellphones are ubiquitous in Accra, more so than in comparable Canadian cities. People buy their phone cards mostly at roadside stalls, which are generally little wooden shacks or card tables with an umbrella to protect the seller from the sun. These stalls are everywhere, as common as coffee shops in Canadian urban cores.

In Ghana, cellphones aren’t merely an urban phenomenon, though the connections aren’t as good in the rural areas because there aren’t enough towers to service some areas. However, I did encounter a sign of the growing importance of the cellphone in the rural areas when I was traveling by bus from Accra to Wa, a remote regional capital in the northwest. It would be an eight-hour ride on an average Canadian four-lane highway but in Ghana the journey can take 14 or 15 hours, largely because of a long stretch of unpaved road that’s quite rough in spots.

At one point during the trip, I was taken by surprise as we bumped along past a newly built cellphone tower in a fairly remote area. It seemed an apt metaphor for the country’s current priorities and capabilities: A major roadway linking two cities isn’t paved, but it does have a well-maintained and guarded cellphone tower.

The author teaches journalism at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick. He returned to Canada in August after spending eight months in Ghana working as an expert trainer with a human rights organization.

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