In New York Tickets, Ghana Sees Orderly City

If you are caught playing your radio too loudly in Times Square, selling ice cream while parked in a Harlem crosswalk or dumping your kitchen trash in Prospect Park, your ticket does not just go to City Hall to be processed.

It goes to Ghana.

Just days after the tickets are written out on New York City streets, they are scanned and sent as digital photographs to computers in a small office in downtown Accra, Ghana's hot and crowded capital.

There, workers try to make out the unfamiliar street names (Dyckman, Flatbush, Hudson) while transcribing the handwritten scrawl of New York police officers into searchable databases.

And through the alchemy of globalization, the tickets that bring only aggravation on this side of the Atlantic become snapshots that fire imaginations more than 5,000 miles away.

The Ghanaians can see that the city is orderly, at least in its grid. "It's easy to look at New York and see where you are going," said Christine Mensah, 35, a manager. "It's not like Ghana. With a map you can go anywhere."

And they imagine that the city is sparkling clean. Why else would people be given tickets for not cleaning up after their dogs? "I know that New York is beautiful: the streets, the flowers, and the people too," said Susuana Okine, 26, whose only ties to the city are the maps she consults daily at work. "I can also testify that it must smell better than Accra."

Ms. Okine and her 40-odd co-workers spend their days typing out the contents of the city's environmental violation tickets for their employer, Data Management Internationale, a Delaware-based firm that has been digitizing information for New York City since March. Before that, the work was done in India and Mexico for a Michigan-based company called Lason.

Charles Sturcken, chief of staff for the city's Department of Environmental Protection, which signed a two-year, $910,000 contract with Data Management, said he had no idea that the work was being done in Ghana. Although many United States corporations and some other cities rely on similar back offices to input data in distant countries, several current and former city officials said they were unaware that any city contract had ever been handled abroad.

It may not last much longer. Once a reporter started asking about the Ghana contract, Data Management said it planned to start handling New York City's business domestically and have the Accra office work on other accounts. The company worries that it will be perceived in New York as taking jobs from American workers, said William Swezey, a manager at Data Management.

From New York's perspective, it hardly matters whether the work is done in Africa or Delaware: the contract is simply a way to process the half-million environmental tickets the city hands out every year. And either way, the Ghanaians are not likely to lose their jobs. The company is planning to expand its operation there, said Mark Davies, an American who leases the Accra office space to Data Management.

It is good work, by Ghanaian standards. The typists earn 500,000 cedis a month (almost $70 — three times the Ghanaian minimum wage and more than twice the average per capita income) to type the offender's name, address, fine and offense location into a searchable database that is sent back to New York. It can then be stored electronically and used to generate payment notices, Mr. Sturcken said.

The greatest challenge, several employees said, is accurately deciphering the hasty scrawl of the ticket writers, who are employees of various city agencies as well as police officers. The company's contract requires it to return the transcribed information with an error rate of no more than 1 percent and within 48 hours of pickup.

Several employees said they were happy with the job, and especially the office's air-conditioning. "It's very hard, but to do well, you have to work very hard," said Ms. Okine, who was hired in March. Asked what she would say if she ever met a New York City police officer, Ms. Okine said without hesitating, "I would tell him to improve on his handwriting."

Although Ghana was a British colony and English is the official language, the workers initially found New York's addresses difficult to figure out, since terms like "avenue" were completely unfamiliar to many of them. Accra's streets are a baffling maze of roundabouts, circles, dirt paths and unmarked alleys, where goats wander freely. Many streets do not have names and most people don't know the names of the ones that do.

The employees work in revolving eight-hour shifts that run 24 hours a day. They are immaculately dressed and sit silently at computer terminals, typing as fast as they can in a plain office. The workers get one 30-minute and two 10-minute breaks per shift to use the bathroom, eat and call friends. Their computers have no e-mail because it could be a distraction. Soon, workers will be paid by the keystroke, with deductions for errors, a company official said.

The office is in a two-story Internet center called BusyInternet that was founded by Mr. Davies, a former dot-com executive who fell in love with Africa on a backpacking trip several years ago. "Busy," as the locals call it, is the largest Internet center in West Africa.

Visitors at the Internet center downstairs jokingly call Data Management an "electronic sweatshop." But the jobs are so popular that dozens of people apply for each opening, even when the company does not advertise.

And to many people in this city of open sewers and vast unemployment, the data entry operation represents a beacon of hope. It is one of West Africa's first ventures in information technology outsourcing, which has become a business worth more than $7.5 billion a year in India. As in some other third world countries, the Internet has been embraced ardently in Ghana. Five years ago, there were no Internet cafes in Ghana; now there are at least 250 in Accra, Mr. Davies said.

"You can go down an alley that's not paved, and where women are selling rice on the corner, and there's an Internet cafe," said Anthony Swezey, the brother of William Swezey and manager of the Accra office. He said the company chose Ghana because it is safe and the government is democratic and has been stable for 20 years. And, of course, because labor in Ghana is far cheaper than in the United States.

Data Management workers said they were surprised — but grateful — for New Yorkers' apparent willingness to break the law.

"They know the rules and they still are always violating them," Ms. Mensah said. "Maybe they don't understand simple instructions. But they have to keep doing it, because it's how we make our money."

Ms. Mensah and others also expressed a passionate curiosity about the places and names they see so many times on tickets every day. They seemed particularly intrigued by Queens, because of its royal name and large size.

Some even said they wanted to move to New York.

"I am very used to the rules and regulations of New York now," said Nora Kraku, 28, during a break. "So I think I can live there."