Contrary to popular belief, Africa is not completely absent from the Internet. In fact, the continent at large is undergoing a connectivity revolution unlike anything it has ever seen. Mobile phones in particular are propagating at an incredible rate, with penetration ranging from 30% to 100%. The average is 30.4% and there are 280 million subscribers in total, making Africa the fastest growing mobile market in the world.
The point of this series is to highlight African contributions to social media and, in turn, reveal how social media is changing Africa.
Part One of this series looks at social media contributions from Africans, Part Two looks at mobile and connectivity innovations and Part Three looks at how local Governments, NGOs and nonprofits are being affected. If you like this series of articles, I cover these topics daily at the African social media news blog Appfrica.net, as does Erik Hersman at WhiteAfrican.com and Ismail Dhorat at StartupAfrica.com.
Things aren't perfect; the continent still suffers from disproportionate amounts of poverty, the vast majority of people remain without reliable electricity and the spread of AIDS claimed about 1.6 million African lives in 2006. Historically, that's all the world has known about Africa - but the facts are changing and other aspects of the continent deserve attention. For one, Africans are embracing the web and all things associated.
Technology unconferences and Barcamps have sprung up all over the continent, everywhere from Kenya to Nairobi to Madagascar to Uganda and Senegal. Although terrestrial broadband infrastructure is still a problem, VSat has provided internet connectivity in areas that don't even have electricity. There were a number of protests from the continent when Twitter shut down it's international services.
It's no wonder, then, that a number of companies, investors and entrepreneurs have taken a second look at the continent. Google especially seems to have taken an interest in supporting the burgeoning tech renaissance in Africa. They recently agreed to facilitate Barcamp Africa at their world headquarters at GooglePlex in Mountain View, CA, U.S.A. Beyond that, they've launched a blog to document their operations in sub-Saharan Africa and a complimentary forum.
The three biggest success stories of independent social media projects taking off in Africa are Afrigator (a South African aggregator of African blogs and news), Zoopy (a YouTube/Flickr like service also out of South Africa) and Ushahidi (an SMS crisis reporting and mapping engine from Kenya). All three have drawn international attention which resulted in a major investment for Zoopy and Afrigator's acquisition (ReadWriteWeb's coverage). Meanwhile Ushahidi has successfully raised several rounds of funding after winning the Net2 Mashup Compeition prize of $25,000.
Afrigator
Afrigator defines itself as "a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the web." They made a big splash in the social media space when Marshall Kirkpatrick reviewed their site here on ReadWriteWeb last year. Afrigator adopted the XFN microformat standard very early on allowing their users to use their blog rolls to import friends. Afrigator makes heavy use of a proprietary filter based on an algorithm that uses page rank, incoming links and the site's overall traffic to determine what's "hot". Afrigator was created by Justin Hartman, Stii Pretorius, Mike Stopforth and Mark Forrester.
Zoopy.com
Zoopy is a South African social media tool created by Jason Elk that allows users to upload videos, podcasts, and pictures and share them on the web. Although, it can be used by anyone, it targets the niche local market of South Africa. Zoopy also uses XFN to import friends from the aforementioned Afrigator. Zoopy recently attended the Web 2.0 Expo 2008 in New York where they showcased their platform.
Ushahidi
Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was built in the aftermath of the Kenyan 2008 elections. When violence erupted, Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh, Daudi Were, Segeni Ng'ethe and Juliana Chebet used their collective talents to create Ushahidi, a web app that maps SMS reports of violence by location. Ushahidi relies heavily upon GoogleMaps, which it uses for mapping reports of incidents. It's built on the Zend framework for PHP and uses a number of different protocols for SMS, GPRS and mapping data.
Although these three standout applications are the most well-known home grown social media projects from Africans, there are an increasing number of social media websites coming from the continent. Here's a round-up of several. If something gets overlooked, please add it as a comment along with a description.
I've deliberately only included applications that I know were created by people from Africa. In Part Three I'll list social applications created by foreigners and nonprofit groups.
Top image: whiteafrican
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
Hey Jon,
Thanks so much for this! I spoke to a guy working for MIH in Kenya and there are talks of serious broadband improvements in Kenya by next year, which would be fabulous. Maybe you should find out more for all of us?
Cheers man!
Posted by: Stii
|
October 3, 2008 2:31 AM
Does ubuntu count in the conversation of African innovations ? Great article Jonathan.
Posted by: Neil Phillips | October 3, 2008 2:40 AM
The applications to follow are definitely the ones that leverage the mobile telephony infrastructure. An overwhelming portion of African users have no convenient access beyond cellular terminals - and that has spawned very innovative solutions based on existing and widely accessible technologies such as SMS. Examples abound such as Mpesa, Celpay, Etranzact and everyone else who is thriving in that formerly almost entirely cash-bound insecure environment. Underdeveloped banking and underdeveloped fixed telecommunications infrastructures are huge opportunities.
Less interesting in my opinion are the aggregators such as Afrigatorand social networks such as PHPizabi based Naijapals (hi Dguy !) who are busy at niche marketing replicating existing technological models to fill the nooks and crannies that mainstream social sites are neglecting. But because of the low penetration of PC-type personal computers, they will only thrive among the diaspora and the educated elite.
Posted by: Jean-Marc Liotier | October 3, 2008 2:47 AM
The applications to follow are definitely the ones that leverage the mobile telephony infrastructure. An overwhelming portion of African users have no convenient access beyond cellular terminals - and that has spawned very innovative solutions based on existing and widely accessible technologies such as SMS. Examples abound such as Mpesa, Celpay, Etranzact and everyone else who is thriving in that formerly almost entirely cash-bound insecure environment. Underdeveloped banking and underdeveloped fixed telecommunications infrastructures are huge opportunities.
Posted by: Jean-Marc Liotier
|
October 3, 2008 2:58 AM
Hey Jonathan,
Great article, and its nice to see Africa getting some focus for a change. Often, tech news here is shadowed by what is happening in the rest of the tech world.
There's a lot happening in South Africa, and not just by start-ups. Companies like Naspers/MIH/Media24 are investing heavily in internet initiatives too. As an example check out http://blogs.24.com to see a highly active blog community using platforms built and hosted in South Africa.
I look forward to seeing future African articles.
Posted by: Neill Adamson
|
October 3, 2008 3:08 AM
Less interesting in my opinion are the aggregators such as Afrigatorand social networks such as PHPizabi based Naijapals (hi Dguy !) who are busy at niche marketing replicating existing technological models to fill the nooks and crannies that mainstream social sites are neglecting. But because of the low penetration of PC-type personal computers, they will only thrive among the diaspora and the educated elite.
Posted by: Jean-Marc Liotier
|
October 3, 2008 3:18 AM
Sorry for the spam. Please RWW moderators remove my duplicated and truncated post.
Apparently Friendfeed has a comment length limit... And in addition the edits made on FriendFeed are not reflected back on RWW...
Posted by: Jean-Marc Liotier
|
October 3, 2008 3:22 AM
You left out quite a few worthy entries
http://www.bandwidthblog.com/2007/09/14/south-africas-web-startups-to-watch/
Posted by: Charl | October 3, 2008 4:41 AM
Great post Jonathan, nice to hear about what's going on in Africa :)
Can't wait for part 2, hope it'll be an ongoing serie...
Posted by: Fabrice Epelboin | October 3, 2008 5:29 AM
we start on november 15 out of Cape Town a new social network called www.mindz.com. The Dutch version is now in public-beta...
Posted by: ronald van den hoff | October 3, 2008 5:51 AM
Nice article. This week, we launched the South-African version of NETLOG, Europe's largest social network. You can reach it at http://af.netlog.com. It's still in an early phase, though.
Regards,
Davy
Posted by: Davy | October 3, 2008 6:17 AM
Hi Jon
Great article, really enjoyed reading it. Thanks so much for the mention too :)
Regards
Posted by: Neville Newey | October 3, 2008 8:56 AM
How about Mauritius??? :(
I hope you'll be talking about Mauritius, which has a mobile penetration at 100%, Africa's cheapest broadband, the highest broadband penetration in Africa, the world's only country-wide WiMax connection. HSDPA (3.5G) has just been launched & there are plans to implement an island-wide FTTH network.
:)
Posted by: carrotmadman6 | October 3, 2008 9:37 AM
This is great information. It amazes me how diverse Africa can be, not just in the people but also in their accessibility to different types of technologies. Some are in the internet age, while others struggle to obtain basic needs such as clean drinking water. Hopefully those with access to technology can help those without, and spread the word with social media.
Posted by: Bryan | October 3, 2008 1:46 PM
Jos.... Great post and Thanks for the mention.
/Ismail
Posted by: Ismail | October 4, 2008 12:45 AM
Thanks for highlighting the great stuff going on on our beautiful continent. We're all in the same new media family, after all :)
Posted by: Jason | October 4, 2008 5:54 AM
Great to see Africa, and especially South Africa (my home country), getting some good publicity here.
Technology in South Africa is alive and well, and is leading-edge in cerrtain areas like banking and mobile apps. Recently even Microsoft bought a share in one of our largest airtime distributors. Many ex-South Africans have done superbly well in Silicon Valley and other technology hubs. I hope Jemstep will do the same when we launch in Palo Alto :)
Thanks for the great post.
Posted by: Kevin Cimring | October 5, 2008 3:15 AM
Hi There,
Excellent article, just a quick note - Amatomu was spelled wrong and the link doesn't work - it's amatomu.com
Cheers,
Charl
Posted by: Charl van Niekerk | October 6, 2008 4:52 AM