In
the early 2000's in most west African countries including Ghana,
Nigeria and Senegal when the internet cafe was a new phenomenon, many
youngsters spent most of their time at the cyber cafe surfing the
internet. There was however a worrying trend that began to take wave
in most of these internet cafes. The young men found darknet websites
that gave them unlimited access to credit and mastercard details of
people in Europe and America. They used this details to shop for
clothing , gadgets from ecommerce websites like Ebay and Amazon. When
shipping of the goods were not allowed directly to Africa the
fraudsters would use their family and friends abroad as middle men /
passage routes to receive the products and further ship it to them in
Ghana and their respective
countries. Most of these poor and disadvantaged youth found a gold
mine in this trade and they spent almost 24 hours shopping and
fishing for credit card details to scam. Others went as far as using
the paypal accounts of vulnerable account holders to orchestrate this
dubious activity.
Somewhere
around 2004 after thousands of legitimate users of Paypal , amazon
and ebay complained about unusual purchases and huge sums of money
were getting lost in their accounts. These technology giants decided
it was time to curb this fraudulent activity of credit card fraud.
They simultaneously decided to blacklist so many West African
countries from using the platform for their illicit activities. Some
of the countries that were blacklisted included Ghana , Nigeria and
many other African countries. Over the next decade that followed it
was impossible for people resident in Ghana and the other blacklisted
to make or receive payments on the PayPal platform. With many online
merchants using PayPal, sometimes exclusively, to receive payments
for products and services, Ghana's 24 million people, like many more
in other blacklisted countries, were unable to transact business.
If
you are wondering what Paypal is , paypal according to their official
website was founded in 1998, they continue to be at the forefront of
the digital payments revolution, processing almost 11.5 million
payments for their customers per day. PayPal gives people better ways
to connect to their money and to each other, helping them send money
without sharing financial information and with the flexibility to pay
using their PayPal account balances, bank accounts, PayPal Credit and
credit cards. With about 162 million active digital wallets, they
have created an open and secure payments ecosystem people and
businesses choose to securely transact with each other online, in
stores and on mobile devices. PayPal is a truly global payments
platform that is available to people in 203 markets, allowing
customers to get paid in more than 100 currencies, withdraw funds to
their bank accounts in 57 currencies and hold balances in their
PayPal accounts in 26 currencies.
Fast
forward to 2015, the year of the digital revolution where smart
phones are not seen by many Ghanaians as a luxury but instead a
necessity. You should by now understand the immense role paypal would
play in our cashless society. We live in a time that many Ghanaian
entrepreneurs with innovative products and services would offer real
value to buyers around the world and contribute to economic
development locally, are now been cut off from much of the world
where PayPal is a major platform for receiving payments. This is
anti-business. Similarly, there are lots of social enterprises and
charities that are working to improve lives and communities in Ghana
and around Africa that are unable to accept donations via PayPal. All
over world, online donations have powered a variety of social
innovations and charity projects. Being blacklisted means many
innovative social enterprises and charities in Ghana are deprived
access to potential donors. This isn't progressive. This are the
words of Samuel Darko, a District Rotaract Representative.
In
2013 many African youth decided to use social media and other mediums
to gain the attention of Paypal. I will name two of the notable
campaigns whose aim was for paypal to be brought to their respective
countries. One of them is the outspoken change maker Samuel Darko
whom I mentioned earlier on. He started an online petition here
https://www.change.org/p/rupert-keeley-enable-paypal-in-ghana
to make it impossible for people resident in Ghana to make or receive
payments on the PayPal platform. His target was 5,000 signatures and
was able to get about 2,486 signatures and a lot of social media
buzz. The second campaign was started by a Nigerian company called
Creativity Kills , founded by Neo Ighodaro and they were also able to
gain 597 supporters. These initiatives were very essential proving
that the new African is able to take the necessary steps for them to
be heard.
.JPG)
These
campaigns gained a lot of recognition but paypal was unresponsive for
a long while until they finally decided to hear the plea of certain
countries. According to Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of
the EMEA region of PayPal, as at Tuesday 17th of June, 2014 users
from Nigeria and other countries from sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern
Europe and Latin America were finally given access to be able to use
the online payment platform. That meant that PayPal now is been used
in 203 countries.
This
came as a shock to the Ghanaian technology community since we also
petitioned and were blacklisted along with Nigeria but they were
given access to the platform but not us. It made a little sense since
Nigeria now has the fastest economy in Africa and as well one of
Africa biggest country with a population of 173.6 million as of 2013.
Ghana on the other have a lesser population of about 25 million.
In
my humble opinion the reason paypal ignored us was that we made a lot
of noise internally on only our social networks especially our social circles about the petition and as a result the message did not get to the right
desk at the Paypal offices. We should have instead made good use of
institutions like the Ministry of foreign affairs to intervene on our
behalf and as well went further on to get the message out there to
the our networks in the Diaspora about the rise of young Ghanaian entrepreneurs who
paypal will further enhance their work on a global platform.
FYI:A representative of Paypal, last week revealed that, apart from South Africa, Nigeria is the second largest market for their payment solution, followed by Kenya.
“We are happy to see that PayPal has been widely welcomed by Nigerians since the launch of the service in the country last year,” the Head of Business Development Sub-Saharan Africa, Malvina Goldfeld said.
Till
then some of us will use resources available to us to bring paypal
back to Ghana.
This story appeared on yesterday's edition of the General Telegraph.
