The #Paypal4Ghana Discussion

On Wednesday 20th November, this year, BloggingGhana will bring together different players in the Ghana e-commerce space to deliberate, discuss, debate and strategize. A few things makes this engagement attractive to the stakeholders and main players. First of all, as part of this discussion, BloggingGhana will put together a road map document which will be forwarded to the Ministry of Trade and Innovation, to b considered when the Ministry finally drafts its white paper on the issue later this year. Secondly this has become a discussion people are interested in because it has a direct link to the problems faced by a good number of Internet users in the country. Users are often frustrated when a service or product they want to access only take paypal as a payment option. Lastly, Google Ghana providing some support to this movement goes a long way to increase the interest of the many people who have expressed interested in pushing this agenda. The discussion will mainly take place on Google Hangout on Wednesday from 1-3pm. At the same time the discussions will be extended on twitter to engage the thousands of other Internet users who would want their voices to be heard. The hashtag which will be used on Twitter is #Paypal4Ghana. The road map document has already been created on Google Doc. BloggingGhana through this engagement seeks to populate this document with the inputs and outcomes from the discussion. Participants will be given commenting rights to add their voices to the action items which will be drafted during the event. Obviously, with this, we are moving several steps away from hosting just “talk shops”. Invitations have been sent to developers, bloggers, consumers, online shop owners, e-commerce experts, e-payment owners, mobile money managers etc to be a part of the @Paypal4Ghana dialogue. The need for this discussion arose when Samuel Darko vigorously started pushing for Paypal to list Ghana on its platform. This action has pushed many other discussion in different fora. One thing is clear though, Internet users need some form of payment which will grants its users the convenience paypal offers. You can sign up for the Hangout here. Hope to see you on Wednesday for what promising to be a deal-breaking discussion. If you won’t be available for the Hangout, there is an option to sign up for the twitter version here.