The infrastructure was never the problem

The first thing everyone assumes when you say "Ghanaian barbershops are not digitized" is that it is an infrastructure problem. No smartphones. No internet. People are offline. That is not true. • GSMA (2024) reports 38.95 mobile connections in Ghana, representing 113% of the population. The number exceeds 100% because many people carry two SIMs. A barbershop owner in Accra almost certainly has a smartphone. Almost certainly uses WhatsApp. Almost certainly has mobile data. The hardware and connectivity prerequisite for digital tool adoption is not just present, it exceeds population size. So the question is not whether the infrastructure exists. It does. The question is: why is adoption still not happening?

The International Finance Corporation published a report in 2024 on digital opportunities in African businesses. The finding that stuck with me was this: firms have access to digital tools but are not using them in ways that actually transform how they operate. They called it a utilization gap. I think that framing is honest and useful. It shifts the question from "do people have phones?" to "are the available tools actually worth switching to?" And for most barbershops and laundry services in Accra, the honest answer is currently: no. The tools that exist were built for different businesses in different markets. They are too complex, too expensive, and they assume a level of operational sophistication that does not match how informal service businesses actually work. A barber who manages ten clients per day does not need enterprise software. He needs something that works the way he already works.

In 1989, Fred Davis published a paper that introduced the Technology Acceptance Model: the idea that people adopt technology primarily based on two things: whether they believe it will help them do their job better, and whether they believe it will be easy to use. The model has been cited thousands of times. It captures something true about human behavior. But it was developed in a Western corporate context. Whether it accurately predicts the adoption decisions of a barbershop owner in Accra (operating under different resource constraints, different cultural norms, different expectations of what technology should do for him) is a genuinely open question. My reading of the research suggests the core constructs hold. Perceived usefulness matters. But ease of use probably matters even more in a low digital-literacy environment than it did in Davis's original experiments. A tool that is hard to learn will be abandoned before it ever demonstrates its usefulness. The ease-of-use barrier is higher here. Which means tool design has to work harder.

Szwajca and Rydzewska published research in 2025 examining how digital customer service tools affect retention in Polish SMEs. They found a statistically significant positive relationship. Digital tools act as a mediating factor between service quality and customer retention. Poland is not Ghana. The consumer behavior is different. The business context is different. But the mechanism transfers: consistent, personalized service builds loyalty, and digital tools make that consistency possible at scale. A barbershop that sends appointment reminders and follows up with clients who have not returned will retain more customers than one that does not. What is missing is a study that examines this specifically in Ghana. That gap is what motivated the research, and what I am building Buzzba to help close in practice.