Feature: A New Lease on Work

ACCRA, GHANA – Commuting to work was never such a challenge. Doug Auerbach trudges down a dirt road, skirting knee-deep potholes, scrawny chickens and goats along the way. By 9 a.m., the sun is already blasting down on this West African town of Accra, and traffic on one of the few paved thoroughfares in the modest middle-class neighborhood of Osu is bumper-to-bumper.

Run-down taxis of indecipherable make honk at SUVs and German luxury cars carrying diplomats and local businessmen to their morning appointments, while street vendors drag carts laden with green coconuts and bootleg videos. Auerbach, a 30-year-old Web developer from Seattle, steps over an open sewer flowing by the main road and flags down a "trotro."

Locals cram into these overloaded minivans to get around Accra, the bustling coastal city of roughly a million people and capital of the small nation of Ghana. Auerbach's sweaty, bumpy half-hour ride to his work site is part of an otherwise smooth-going pilot program launched this fall by Geekcorps, a North Adams, Mass.-based nonprofit that matches IT experts with host companies in developing countries.

Joined by five other volunteers – four Americans and one Chilean – Auerbach put his director-level job at event consulting firm Columbia Resource Group on hold for three months to gain a fresh perspective on life and work in the Third World. "It had gotten to the point where it was hard to have more in my life than work and sleep," he says. Instead of 15-hour workdays, he's dealing with a more rewarding challenge: trying to give the few entrepreneurs in Ghana a jump-start on the Net. Auerbach spends eight hours a day teaching a handful of young workers how to build HTML pages on a hodgepodge of old desktop computers and clunky laptops.

Auerbach's temporary employer is Datatel, a Ghanaian company running a networking startup out of a converted residential villa. "Before Doug, our knowledge about all this was zero. We'd never seen Linux," says Jupiter Nyamadi, a 25-year-old network administrator who wants to be part of a new Web development shop inside Datatel. "We usually leave at 5 – now we've decided to come in earlier and stay later to learn more." Under Auerbach's leadership, the young techies have developed a mock e-commerce site.

What's driving these good deeds? A few things: High-tech workers suffer from burnout and their employers can't afford to lose them; innovative sabbatical programs help companies recruit new talent; and most important, perhaps, Third World countries need help to catch up with the rest of the world and participate in the global digital economy. Such programs driven by Geekcorps and other volunteer groups are signs of a new corporate approach to philanthropy that combines aid with employee development and retention. Giving time and expertise is a win-win proposition, managers and volunteers say, because it boosts job satisfaction and hones management skills.

Global companies like Andersen Consulting (which changed its name to Accenture in November), McKinsey, Shell, British Telecom and American Express (AXP) are moving to establish a partnership with the British Volunteer Service Organization to donate personnel on a regular basis for lengthy assignments in the developing world. VSO, a charity organization based in London, has been sending volunteers abroad since 1958, and has around 2,000 people in the field. Such gigs help employees "when they get itchy feet after a few years on the job," says Willie Jamieson, a partner with Accenture in the U.K. Within 24 hours after the consulting firm posted information about the program on a Web site for its U.K. staff, more than 300 employees from around the globe responded.

Only a third of VSO's assignments focus on IT, says Michael Shann, the organization's director of business partnerships, but demand is rising faster than in any other category and will quickly outpace the supply of volunteers.

AFRICAN AMBITION Ghana is a country roughly the size of Oregon with a population of 20 million. Online accounts there have doubled in the past year to 20,000 despite the cost, which is still exorbitant for most citizens. The average monthly income is 1.2 million cedis, or $160. Internet access costs $30 to $50 a month for a sluggish dialup connection, but the number of ISPs has mushroomed: 20 companies have recently purchased an ISP license from the government, four of which are now operational. Increased competition should help lower the costs and improve the service, eventually. In Osu, there's a cybercafe on almost every other block where local youth check e-mail and try to find out about opportunities in the IT industry.

In many cases, though, the young Ghanaians have little understanding of basic computer technology and the Internet, much less how to pay for training and equipment. A single imported computer manual can cost $60 – pricey even for IT professionals who typically don't earn more than $400 a month.