By Samuel Ansah Boateng
Poised to increase the social capital of communities across the world, CEO of Comcent Limited, Kwadwo Dwomo II, has revealed how each Ghanaian community can raise up to 1 million dollars to improve infrastructure and as well provide jobs for it’s members.
COMCENT is a mobile application that connects leaders of communities to their constituent members; to stimulate responsible communication amongst them.
In a tweet on twitter, a social media platform, Mr. Dwomo explained “We have built a world-class tech product. Even though we are technologists, we built our product to serve a real need in our communities. Most of our communities are in shambles right now. Infrastructures are in deficit and decent jobs are unavailable. Our sanitation is also poor, meanwhile, people are rather on social media platforms gossiping, engaging in verbal conflict, sharing pictures of themselves, and sharing jokes and memes with their friends, family, and fans on social media platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, etc. to entertain them’’.
Currently, most people are suffering in their communities. The spotlight should rather be on communicating with people who share the same geographical community to discuss how these various issues listed above could be solved, he added.
According to Mr. Dwomoh, when Comcent first becomes available on the 8th of March, communities that wish to raise funds through the platform to start developmental projects would be able to reach out to many members of the community, ‘’some of whom may be staying abroad to donate to support. I am thereby wishing the leaders and the members of the communities which are registered on Comcent to take advantage of the platform to help their communities become successful. We have projected that if communities registered on Comcent make good use of the opportunities that we give them, they can be able to raise to 1 million dollars or more each year. Another area Comcent will help members of communities to raise this money is by giving its users the ability to form business clubs in their communities with backing from Comcent. The business clubs would be used as a vehicle to bring individuals in the community and private investors together to build legal and legitimate businesses within the community with Comcent offering marketing services for such businesses, this will help to reduce unemployment in our communities and help our users to create wealth for themselves within their communities”, he narrated.
In an interview with this reporter, Mr. Dwomo, who also doubles as a Computer Science student at the University of Ghana, described Comcent as the first community media project poised to provide users with the ability to influence policies at the community level.
His target users are those who have an interest in the discussions going on in their communities and wish to express their ideas that would improve living standards of the community that they selected during sign ups.
‘’Users on Comcent are grouped into either leaders or members. Before leaders are allowed to post, they must be verified. Leaders of the community are the ones who have been elected by members of the community and who have a responsibility to see to the successful deployment of the resources within their community.
What differentiates the account of a leader from the account of the member is that members have to begin the title of their posts with either “we” or “our” before they can successfully share their posts; leaders don’t have such a restriction. However, members have the chance to get a leadership account once they share 400 meaningful posts. At Comcent, communities are the same as constituencies and every community has subcommunities.
Thus, when users are first signing up, they will be asked to search for the subcommunities that they live in. Examples of subcommunities for the Ayawaso West Wuogon community are East Legon, Shiashie, American House, Okponglo, etc. However, the tertiary communities have been separated from the real world communities so that tertiary communities could maintain their distinct environment. For a tertiary community like the University of Ghana, subcommunities include the various halls of residences such as Commonwealth Hall, Mensah Sarbah Hall, Legon Hall, Volta Hall, etc. Comcent is a free service and it will be available forT only the University of Ghana upon its launch but will be extended quickly to every community on earth’’, he explained.
