After a very successful first training, which took place six months ago, the second instance has now started. Twenty new entrepreneurs have joined us to learn all about mobile business and technology.

What’s new this time? Now all the trainers are Ghanaian, and Franco and I have been monitoring the newly appointed ones: Astrid Larssen, teaching UI/UX), Alfred Anyan, whose team won the first prize on the last training, and now teaching Mobile Business, and Nana Baah Gyan who also works with the Foundation on the W4RA project, teaching Voice applications. Nii Okai Quaye, who already taught SMS now also teaches Mobile Web.

Nokia is now the sponsor for the post-training competition prizes, and have kindly offered devices for testing new applications developed by the trainees.

The profile of the trainees has also changed. From my standpoint as technology supervisor, skills have improved greatly: many more of the applicants had good web development skills than in February. Why? Probably because Florence has done a good job at advertising MWG all across Ghana and now more people with a relevant profile are aware of us and what we offer.

About half-way through the three weeks, things have been going pretty well, here. The projects presented by the trainees are exciting (eg, apps to track quality medicines and sachet water, mobile todo reminders, or student timetable enquiry), and the trainees themselves are motivated and keen.

We’ll be blogging more about the training on the MobileWebGhana blog. In particular, the trainees themselves will be writing on their experience, their projects, and their hopes. But we’ll continue reporting the main news right here.