‘Blogging Ghana’ to Establish Country’s First Physical Social Media Hub · Global Voices
Kofi Yeboah

Blogging Ghana's proposed Social Media Hub. Photo used with permission.
Internet penetration in Ghana is about 14 percent and has been on the up and up for the last decade as more Ghanaians, especially young people, have hooked up to the web. As a result, the number of Ghanaians on various social media platforms is also increasing rapidly, and some now see a need for a physical social media hub to facilitate the activities of the many people who use social media or want to learn about it.
Enter Blogging Ghana, the country's largest organization of bloggers and social media enthusiasts with more than 100 members. The group launched a campaign on January 20, 2014 to establish Ghana's first ever social media hub, explaining on their website:
A physical meeting place, a hub, will go a long way to provide a platform for the experienced bloggers in the organisation to train students and professionals on how to use blogging for creating #MoreStories and use social media to advance their agenda as citizens in Ghana.
As part of the campaign, Blogging Ghana hopes to raise 10,000 US dollars through crowdsourcing platform Indiegogo. The hashtag used for the online campaign is #morestories. The organisation also launched a video campaign on YouTube:
Africa on the Blog, a multi-author blog by people of African heritage, which is supported by Babs Saul and Sarah Arrow, explained the history of blogging in Ghana:
The blogging and social media scene in Ghana has improved in the last five years. The West African country has seen the number of bloggers in the country grow from just a handful in 2005 to several hundreds this year. This trend was facilitated by a bold step taken by a Swedish blogger who had moved to Ghana some five years ago. Kajsa Hallberg Adu who is now the Chair of Ghana’s biggest association of bloggers brought all the bloggers who were active online under one roof to discuss their passion. With time, this small group of internet users decided to introduce blogging and the use of social media tools to many other people who may be interested but just didn’t know how. This selfish desire to spread such knowledge lead to what has today become the nation’s biggest blogging and social media event.
Edward Amartey-Tagoe, the director of corporate services at Blogging Ghana, also recounted how things were half a decade ago:
Some five years ago, there were only a handful of bloggers in Ghana, since then, bloggers and Internet enthusiasts have been organised under one umbrella body to build capacity, learn and share ideas from one another. Today, we are an influential organisation with a yearly event and awards ceremony who produce local content online on blogs and on various social media channels. We want to share our skills and create #morestories!
ENews Ghana published the campaign on their website:
Bloggers in Ghana are creating Ghana’s first Social Media hub for bloggers and social media enthusiasts to meet, interact and share more local content from and we think it will make a great feature on GOOD.
Social Media is growing in Ghana and we (Blogging Ghana) has over the past 5 years been a leader in Ghana. In 2012, with funding from USAID, UKAID, EU & DANIDA, we used social media to cover Ghana’s elections; raising awareness of the issues and empowering politicians and citizens. We also in 2013 organised Ghana’s first social media awards which was huge success. The organisation’s work has been featured on Joy FM, Citi FM, Mashable, Aljazeera and BBC.
We want to do more and get more Ghanaians to use social media to tell their stories. We want to overcome the internet and power challenges bloggers face.  We have therefore launched a crowdfunding campaign to create a haven/hub with a co-blogging space to and create the much needed local content.
Spy Ghana, an online news agency, quoted Blogging Ghana Chair Kajsa Hallberg Adu (@kajsaha):
It makes sense for a social media organization to use our online network and do crowd-sourcing to fulfill our dreams. We think Ghana in ready for a meeting place for social media enthusiasts and we cannot wait to create #morestories about Ghana for the world to read!
Award-winning blogger Macjordan (@Macjordan) expressed his support for the social media hub on his blog:
BloggingGhana is pleased to launch an Indiegogo campaign towards the creation of a Social Media Hub in Ghana for bloggers and citizen journalists to be trained in Social Media and increase local content creation.
BloggingGhana – Ghana’s largest community/network of bloggers, citizen journalists and social media enthusiasts is reaching out to all and sundry to chip-in and support this worthy cause.
I’m very pleased and honored to be a part of this organization and would appreciate your support in any way.