I showed up to my internship today and I thought my day was going to be filled designing and finishing my e-mail templates and creating invitations and flyers for an event that Penplusbytes (my internship company) is hosting in August. However, shortly after I arrived and showed my progress to my boss, he quickly sent me an e-mail stating that I was going to a presentation for the launch of M-Lab. After reading the e-mail, I wasn’t sure what it was or how it was related to ICT (Information and Communication Technology), but I was excited to go and learn something new.

Two of my other co-workers and I shared a cab to the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. We were already about an hour late, which I thought was unusual, but no one else seemed to worry about it. When we signed in we were one of the first people there. I realized that was why we didn’t show up early. Most events in Ghana start later than they normally say, and people take their time to get to events. I think this is because they have a more relaxed lifestyle than the U.S., and the traffic here is also pretty slow. It’s slow enough that it takes me 80 minutes to get to work every morning.

Eventually the presentation started and the room quickly filled with professional speakers, camera crews, professors, and other people within society and from other organizations. The started off by telling us what M-Lab was and introducing its role within the computer industry. M-Lab is essentially a program that is run online through their website and anyone can use it to determine how fast their broadband speed is. In addition, it is able to tell how good the quality of their service is.

We watched a video on why it’s important for Ghanaians to use this service and how their society can benefit from receiving this type of information. Then they had us use the M-Lab to determine our internet speed through their internet connection. Apparently this will determine which companies are giving the best service to their customers and which are not. They then did a big speech about the launch of the M-Lab use in Ghana and news crews interviewed them about the service and how it will help the country and well as Ghana as a whole.

Overall I think that this presentation was very beneficial for me, because I learned about new services that are related to computer and technology and how Ghana as a whole is still being introduced to the idea of internet within certain communities. The government and other organizations are trying to come up with effective ideas on how to create equality for all who want to have access to the internet. I hope that the launch of M-Lab will help them to achieve this goal.