language

(This is from my talk on mobile phones in Africa, at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam this morning.)

Africa is brimming with innovative people, projects and organizations. The fact that I’m standing here today proves this out – you see, I’ve been writing about those stories for the past 3 years.

Some of you are already familiar with Africa’s mobile stats, but not everyone is. Let’s run through some numbers, and take a minute to really appreciate the staggering growth of just one industry on our continent.

Statistics

• At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%
• Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100%
• Look at the diversity in penetration rates among countries, just in Africa. It’s good to remember that when we speak about “mobile phones in Africa” that not all are created equal.
• Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
• Increased competition as more operators come online in each country (11 in Nigeria, 4 in Kenya and SA, 3 in Egypt and Morocco)
• Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region

How fast has it grown?

• The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers.
• In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

What sectors does this touch? All, of course, but mobile’s have proven especially effective in:Transport, Micro-commerce, Finance, Healthcare, Governance, Education, Infotainment

Examples of innovative services

Mobile payments and mobile banking

• MPESA – This is what happens when the rest of the world ignores your need for a payment system. One of the golden children of Africa’s mobile revolution, when anyone brings up a successful mobile service in Africa. It works, and we’re all extremely happy to have the idea of mobile micro payments piloted and tested by Safaricom, but it also promotes a carrier monopoly in an industry AND continent that is crying for a real payment solution.
• Wizzit – Mobile banking in South Africa
• Celpay – Zambia – An innovative payment solution that allows consumers and businesses to complete cash transactions from their mobile phones. CelPay eliminates the problems that accompany dealing in cash visits to the bank, waiting in lines, counting and recounting money, fear of theft, and forgone interest payments. Instead, consumers with CelPay can use their mobile phone to do anything they would with cash, thanks to a payment system that works like a bank account.

Africa News Mobile Reporters
The Dutch group behind Africanews.com has put together a fleet of reporters around Africa using high end mobile phones, equipped with video and camera, to report short interviews and events from the field. Nokia/Reuter’s mobile newskit – Nokia N71

Ushahidi – Citizen reporting during a crisis (now an open source project).

mPedigree
Ashifi Gogo created a way to use SMS to authenticate drugs in Ghana, a system that simplifies and decreases the cost of doing this and that can be replicated anywhere in the world.

Winafrique’s Wind-powered cellular towers
Hybrid wind and diesel turbine systems for powering cell phone base stations.

Agricultural markets
Tradenet
A free service for farmers in West Africa to see local agricultural market prices around their region. It enables farmers and traders in agricultural commodities in Africa to conduct business through the use of SMS.

Manobi
Senegalese company Manobi, which operates online systems for businesses in the developing world, first launched the trading platform for farmers and fishermen in the west African nation, and says it has signed up 40,000 customers there. Farmers can access the information on a web-based trading platform via Internet-enabled phones, or can request prices and make trades via SMS, or text message.

How is it being used?

Projects, products and services created as secondary services by individuals and organizations all over the continent.

Restricted mobility
A cell phone operator in a remote African village where competition is tough, offers his customers some privacy, by allowing them to try out a cell phone, tethered to a long wire.

Steve Mutinda‘s 3 java applications
Shows an individual using his free time, and trying to create applications that are value added and will make him money. He epitomizes the smart, young entrepreneurs of the continent.

Morris Mbetsa – “Block & Track” auto anti-theft system

Feedelix, dealing with government censorship (Ethiopia)
The Ethiopian government instituted SMS filtering services, which caused some enterprising Ethiopians to launch Feedelix, which is an SMS-like client that supports Amharic characters. The Java application then uses the ability of many phones to transmit data via GPRS through internet protocols to mimic SMS.

Ethioblog – Literacy and/or linguistic challenges
There are challenges to in Africa too, where there are higher rates of non-literacy, or where they don’t speak the language available on their handset. Last year in Ethiopia, some guys got together and developed 200 Amharic language characters that they used to develop a phone book, message and phone settings in Amharic.

Mobile phone equipped bicycles – Bodaphone (Kiwanja), Wheelchair bikes equipped (Ruud Elmendorp)

Phone charging stations/businesses
Most of the time this takes the simple form of a car battery, but you’ll also find enterprising people using other methods (legal and illegal) to run business that only do this.

In Summary

The truth is that there are some very interesting, and surprising, developments coming out of Africa. Every culture modifies use or the device itself to meet local needs – this is no different in Africa, and we’re seeing that evolution happen right before our eyes.

The default device in Africa is the mobile phone.

Here’s one more compelling thought. The challenges brought about by bad governance, poverty, low bandwidth (all the negative things you associate with Africa) also provide an incredible opportunity. The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

(Africa News has the video up already – video’d through their mobile phone of course. )

Earlier this year a new blog burst onto the African tech scene, and it hasn’t let up. In fact, it’s growing from a blog into a place for open source developers to work together. The man behind Appfrica is Jon Gosier, an energetic and proactive developer now living in Kampala, Uganda. Below is a short email interview that I did with him last week.

Q: What do you do?

Jon: I’m a glorified computer geek who works as a self-employed web developer and social media consultant in East Africa.

Q: What inspires you?

Jon: I’m a big fan of what’s going with the internet right now, specifically all the theory and development related to the semantic web (microformats, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics and dataparsing) where all that is heading. Simply put, technology inspires me.

Q: How did you get interested in Africa? Why Uganda?

Jon: I’m in Africa because of my girlfriend. She (also from the United States) works for an NGO called Water For People and they hired her as the African Regional Manager to supervise the launch of new offices in Rwanda, Malawi and Uganda over the next three years. At the time, I was spending a lot of time in San Francisco trying to find funding for various start-up ideas. It became clear to me that Silicon Valley VC space was becoming very insular, people were funding social networks built around other social networks and web apps for tasks like sorting email. My work was more social entrepreneurial and the response in the Valley was lukewarm at best. So I decided I’d go to Africa with her and execute my own ideas.

Q: Appfrica.net sprung onto the scene earlier this year. Where do you see that going, and how will you utilize it as a platform while in Africa?

Jon: App+frica is an initiative that facilitates African software developers and internet entrepreneurs. It’s entirely self-funded. Unfortunately, there aren’t many organizations outside of Africa that see the benefit of mentoring students and entrepreneurs in technology.

Appfrica also organizes events and workshops for local developers. Things like the Facebook Developer Workshop (18 October 2008) and Kampala Barcamp (19 August 2008), the upcoming µganda (Mobile Apps Uganda) and App+Asia. I also do hands on workshops where I’m teaching young developers programming and web development skills that will make them more competitive in the world market. You can read more at Appfrica.org.

The blog is Appfrica.net. Essentially it’s about innovation, development, social media and the internet as it all relates to Africa. There’s been some pretty healthy discussions around the content and Although I currently write everything, I’ve reached out to some local people who are considering joining the staff.

code.appfrica.net is a software repository that hosts and facilitates African developers. You might call it an Amazon S3-like service for Africa. Because there is no easy way to purchase things via the web in Africa (because many financial institutions don’t offer credit cards), something that many people don’t really have is access to is personal space on web servers outside of school. An even bigger problem is that there are very few local servers here and using anything hosted outside of the continent can be incredibly slow. It’s my goal to offer free, local server space to developers so that they can learn from each other, communicate freely and share. The site consists of a forum for African programmers, a subversion (SVN) server and a web version control system (TRACS). It also offers distributed file storage for developers like S3.

Beyond that, I try my best to help reshape misconceptions about Africa in the west by participating in technology conferences around the world. Even in the age of information people are surprisingly ignorant about Africa…especially when it comes to technology. When I mention Africa to people in the western business world, they overwhelmingly start asking questions about Darfur, Idi Amin and Robert Mugabi. It’s especially difficult to get technology conferences to let anyone in to even represent Africa or African technology companies.

The people of Africa account for over 14% of the worlds population and despite the AIDS epidemic, that number is growing (according to the C.I.A’s World Factbook). Why do people to often look the other way when it comes to technology and business here? Are businesses really afraid or do they just not understand the African market enough to care? The blog has largely become a way to get people in the West noticing all the wonderful things going on in the IT space here while also reporting the latest tech news for Africans.

Q: What is Question Box and what are your plans for that project?

Jon: QuestionBox.org is a project launched by Rose Shuman who lives in Los Angeles, CA in the United States. Her idea was to essentially allow people in rural areas around the world to use the internet via their mobile phones. It works like this: people in rural areas call or SMS the service with their question. A local operator consults a database (which also includes web searches) to discover the answer to those questions. The operator then responds in the local language.

My role as Chief Technical Officer is to build the software backend and to help direct growth and scalability. The service will allow for use via mobile device, the web or phone. For the SMS portion we’re integrating a micro-messaging application. When people SMS in their questions, we can index them and add them to a database that can be searched quickly offline. We can also publish the database online for the benefit of researchers or people using the web. Since internet connections aren’t as reliable as they are in the West, the service is built to work offline and only crawls the internet when it has a connection.

This allows people in rural, developing areas to get access to relevant information without the need for computers which are often not an option. What is an option, often already available, is mobile devices which have very high penetration numbers in the African market.

It’s our goal to democratize information in emerging markets using technology. So far the pilot programs have been huge regional successes. QuestionBox ran pilot programs in India last year and it encouraged her to expand to other areas of India as well as Africa starting with rural Uganda.

Q: You’ve been on the ground in Uganda for a couple weeks. First impressions?

Jon: One month exactly and we’ll be here for the next three years. We just got a house in the suburbs of the capital city Kampala. Getting reliable internet has been a huge chore, but that could be expected. I love it so far. Kampala is great, it’s very diverse and friendly. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Africa. I’ve got meetings next month in Rwanda and Tanzania and I’m working on going to Kenya and Egypt which are among the leaders of ICT development in the region.

One of the guys that I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know over the years is Ken Banks. He’s a tireless believer, and more importantly practitioner, in the field of mobile phone as change agent in the world. His FrontlineSMS mobile phone software has been making waves from Chile to Nigeria, and it’s use is only accelerating.

Since its initial release in 2005, FrontlineSMS has been adopted by NGOs in over forty countries for a wide range of activities including blood donor recruitment, assisting human rights workers, promoting government accountability, keeping medical students informed about education options, providing security alerts to field workers, election monitoring, the capture and exchange of vegetable (and coffee) price information, the distribution of weather forecasts, the co-ordination of healthcare workers, the organising of political demonstrations, the carrying out of surveys and the reporting and monitoring of disease outbreaks.

As of today (9am GMT), the new and improved version of FrontlineSMS will be unveiled. The software will continue to be made available for free to non-profits, available in Windows, Mac and Linux formats in six languages; Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili.

Knowing Ken personally has a few perks, like the chance to see the new version early and know the amount of work he’s been putting into making this come into being. On top of that, Ushahidi will be utilizing FrontlineSMS as an extension to the new version of the tool we’re creating – and I know that InSTEDD plans to do the same. You know you’ve created something remarkable when you’re starting to make an impact on the NGO and the technology sides of the world.

Keeping up with Ken is difficult, as he’s a road warrior constantly speaking at conferences or in the field with his software. My suggestion is that you join the his Social Mobile Facebook group, catch him on Twitter, or read along on the Kiwanja.net blog.

Ken, congrats on this, I know it’s been a long time coming. Next drink is on me!

Barcamp Nairobi ended up being quite an event, with 228 attendees and an overwhelming amount of good conversations. The list included bloggers, web and mobile developers, government officials and students. We had people from all over Kenya, as well as a couple who came in from Tanzania. It was truly eclectic and exactly what we were hoping it would be. Josiah Mugambi has the full run-down of topics covered in each room.

Pictures
Can be found on Picasa, Flickr and Facebook (you’ll have to friend John Wesonga for the Facebook ones).

Videos
I’m working on uploading a couple videos from Barcamp Nairobi. There were some really good conversations started, not all of which I was able to get on video, or even be in the room for. Hopefully, we’ll get some blog posts and videos from others who were there as well.

• The guys from LightingupKenya.org showed up to talk about ICT and rural energy
• Stella, of Fahamu, encourages women bloggers to begin blogging
• Daudi and I show the room and discuss the attendee numbers
• Ken speaks about response to his blogging for cash talk
• Kahenya Kamunyu, of Virn.net, talks about how he finances young web companies in Kenya
• Permanent Secretary of Information, Dr. Ndemo, gives the closing talk

I’ll continue uploading additional videos throughout the week on YouTube.

Barcamp Nairobi Bloggers (let me know if I missed you):

O’Reilly Radar (Programming Languages Survey)
Al Kags (gov’t perspective)
Rob Rooker
The Deeper Meaning of Life (Liz)
John Wesonga
Wilfred Mworia
Josiah Mugambi
Clement “Omesa” Ongera
Peperuka
Frontline Interactive
69mb (poster) (post #2)
Louder than Swahili (post #2)
Startup Africa
Notes from the Road (on Ndemo)
SportsKenya
Tech Talk (NY Times columnist)
Girl in the Meadow
The Gitts Zone
Brian Longwe
Kenyan Poet
Open Source Africa
Do Good Well
Business in Focus
Odyssean
Network World

My parents were linguists, they worked to create a written language for the Toposa of southeastern Sudan. From a young age the importance of language was impressed upon me, but it was academic… How many other 8 year olds do you know that are aware that there are 134 distinct Sudanese languages of which 8 are extinct?

Academic understanding of language barriers becomes real-life frustration for me as I try and cover the web and mobile space in Africa. For instance, I’d love to know more about, and do a write-up on the following:

• Ivoire Blog – The new blogging platform for Cote D’Ivoire
• Akopo – A social media and blogging platform for Cameroonians
• Mboasu – A new West African mobile remittance product

However, it’s hard for me to track, contact and write about services like these that are popping up in Francophone or Arabic-speaking Africa, simply because I lack the language skills.

Sometimes I come across what looks to be an interesting blog – usually due to visuals since I can’t read it. I then filter that blog through a tool like Google’s Translation service and get back a nicely garbled bunching of English words that I then work towards deciphering into usable chunks.

(did you know that approximately 50% of the African continent speaks French?)

PALDO – An African Language Initiative
These types of thoughts were running through my head, when I got an email about an upcoming meeting (April 2, 2008) and initiative called The Pan-African Living Dictionary Online (PALDO). They are attempting to create an interlinked multilingual dictionary for African languages. It is being built upon the foundation of the well-known Kamusi Project, which developed a useful online Swahili/English dictionary.

PALDO is particularly hoping for participation from programmers, linguists, database experts, lexicographers and past users with experience in other online dictionaries.

It’s encouraging to see that this is in partnership with Kasahorow, who is working to solve the problem of localized computer input methods for languages. Basically, create a keyboard that works for multiple language clusters.

A couple years ago I wrote a post about technology versus tribal languages in Africa. It’s a HUGE hurdle to overcome when creating web and mobile platforms that you would like to take to the whole African market. It’s why so many companies do great stuff in their local market, maybe even their region, but fail getting pan-African adoption.

It’s unclear how PALDO will solve some of these issues. However, I’m always interested in seeing how aggregation and visualization of data can be used to create better products, or bring insight into areas where things are so confused.

One thing is for sure though, PALDO won’t solve my personal communications issues – what I need to do is go learn French and re-learn Arabic.

[NOTE: This is different than the original time we asked for your help. We found out that was only to give us stars, but that vote doesn't count towards the real ballot. Please go vote again!]

Ushahidi is an African initiated project used in Kenya to map reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis. Our goal is to increase the scope and capabilities of Ushahidi so that it can be used by others around the globe who find themselves in the similar crisis situations. We need your vote in the NetSquared mashup challenge for a chance at winning some money to use in further development.

How to vote:
1. Create an account (or Login if you already have an account) at NetSquared.org
2. Vote for Ushahidi by clicking here, then click the red “Vote for My Mashup” button.
3. Vote for at least 4 other projects. Here are four that I recommend, but you can choose whichever you like. Just make sure you choose a total of 5 minimum.

• Assetmap.org/Uganda
• Rosetta Project – Minority Languages in Google Earth
• Agri Mashup: Data Utilization in Inclusive and Sustainable Agriculture at the Base of the Pyramid
• CorpWatch – Government Data on Corporations

4. Click “View/Cast Ballot”, or click here: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/vote/ballot. Be sure Ushahidi is listed as one of your chosen projects.
5. Click “Cast Ballot” on your screen. That’s it!

Thanks, and we’ll keep you updated on the outcome!

I’m currently at DEMO ’08 in Palm Springs, California. Mike Stopforth and Juliana Rotich are here too as part of a panel that will be speaking on Africa and what’s important to know about it as an emerging market. That happens tomorrow, so today I get to just sit back and watch some of the new products being introduced.

Here are a couple that I find interesting so far:

Skyfire
Both a well done demonstration, and a really impressive looking product. Skyfire allows you to see the full PC web on your mobile phone. It handles all types of complicated things, ranging from ajax to Flash to DHTML. They showed us live head-to-head results versus the top phones and other mobile web browsers including the iPhone and Opera Mini. Honestly, the had me when they pulled up a complicated site like ESPN.com so quickly on it. It’s launching in public beta today, so give it a try.

SpeakLike
This is a real-time automated translation service. It allows you to chat with people and translates back and forth in real-time. This is a very intriguing product, you type text in your language, and others see it in theirs. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a number of ways that this could be highly useful in Africa. I’m going to talk to them at their booth to find out a little more about available languages, and the ability for users to adjust the settings to take into account local language differences.

Kids and Education
Leapfrog just announced a new product called “Tag”. It’s a small pen-like device that reads their specialized books and has allows children to interact with books in ways that I’ve never seen before.

Education.com launched a new “school finder” feature that looks good too. They’re starting to call themselves the “WebMD of education”. They seem to have the right type of content and connections, so I can see how that could be true.

Favorite moment so far: demonstrator for Taktumi curses as his presentation doesn’t work…

Other bloggers and resources at DEMO ’08
Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW
Frank Gruber of Somewhat Frank
Shel Israel of Global Neighborhoods

DEMO 2008 Toolkit by RWW
Live video from DEMO 2008
Twitter updates (seem broken at the moment) but most people are sending comments to @Demo08

Chris Abani, Nigerian writer and poet, gives one of the most moving talks that happened at TED Global. He discusses the differences between African narrative and news on Africa – an important distinction.

A couple good quotes:

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature. And not just Things Fall Apart, because that would be like saying I’ve read, Gone With the Wind, and so I know everything about America.

Language complicates things.

(more about Chris Abani at TED)

One of the reasons that so many people re-attend TED conferences is because the talks are so incredibly powerful. Here is George Ayittey, speaking with all the fire, passion and visually creative language that inspired so many of us:

I know not everyone agrees with my sentiments about George Ayittey’s explanation describing the differences between the “cheetah” and “hippo” generations in Africa. However, the discussion on this has just begun. TED has just released the new TED Talks videos that were shot at TEDGlobal in Arusha in June.

Look for more TED Talks coming out this week. Let’s hear what everyone else has to say after seeing and hearing these talks for the first time!

[Extra: Catch another interview of George Ayittey on PBS by Bill Moyer]

Ken Banks is the 6th in the African Digerati series of interviews. Ken has become a recognized leader in the mobile space in Africa, primarily through his open source text messaging hub called FrontlineSMS. He speaks regularly around the world on the use of mobile technologies to meet the demands of the real world in places like Africa.

Blog and/or website:
You can find more information on Ken Banks at www.kiwanja.net. Including information on his projects, his mobile database, pictures and blog. It’s one of the best resources for information on mobile technology for Africa on the web.

What do you do?
I use a mix of 22 years in IT, 14 years working on and off in various parts of Africa, and a degree in Social Anthropology with Development Studies to help local, national and international non-profit organisations make better use of information and communications technology – particularly mobile – in their work. I’m usually based out of the UK (where I have a small flat in a lovely Cambridgeshire village), but am currently a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University on the Reuters Digital Vision Program. To pay the bills I do a mixture of paid consultancy and pro-bono work for a range of NGOs, working mostly at grassroots level, a place where I strongly believe the greatest change will come

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This is the year or the rebirth of news coverage in Africa. It’s driven partly by the growth in non-traditional news stories brought about by blogs, but it is also a part of the greater change on the internet that is taking place. More people are getting involved – and the people are in control.

We’re seeing the beginnings of a new wave of websites and a new way of reading news. Here is a basic rundown of the current new offerings that cover news on a pan-African level:

African Path
Joshua Wanyama started African Path at the beginning of the year. He acts as an editor, bringing in stories from the AP and Reuters, filtering them for the most interesting news in Africa. More importantly, African Path has a stable of 38 bloggers who weigh in on issues that are interesting to people in the diaspora and within Africa.

AfricanLoft
AfricanLoft launched in May, just last month. Imnakoya, a well known African blogger living in the US, has put together a website that aggregates African news, African blogs and creates a sense of community. There are areas to upload images and video, as well as a stable 20 bloggers (which I’m sure will grow soon), that also write about Africa-focused issues.

Afrigator
Afrigator, also launched this year, is a blog aggregator for Africa. The Afrigator team informs me that they are tracking close to 800 blogs from 32 countries. Though the number of bloggers, and those who read African blogs, is still small Afrigator represents the beginnings of a new trend. Where African Path and AfricanLoft pay homage to their blogging roots, Afrigator IS the voice of the African blogosphere.

AllAfrica
I can’t leave AllAfrica out of this mix. They have been part of this transformation, and on the forefront of news coverage in Africa for a long time, specifically they aggregate the newspapers from all over the continent. That’s no small task! They have the best connections in this space, I hope that they continue to innovate so that they remain relevant.

Muti
The last piece of the puzzle is a community-based approach to African news. Muti allows anyone who finds an interesting tid-bit of news on Africa to provide a link to it in one centralized place. It’s a filter for “interesting” for both bloggers and news readers alike.

In Summary
I’m excited about the way technologists are stepping up to solve the information gap in Africa. I’m even more interested in seeing how these different entities will evolve through this year. Knowing most of them personally, and knowing the amount of hard work and time they spend on their websites, I’m convinced that continued growth is in order.

[Update: if you feel that I missed a particular site, especially if it's not in English, please let me know. I am burdened with a language barrier called French, so many times those great Francophone websites are missed by me.]

Fahamu and Tactical Tech have joined forces to put on a Mobile Advocacy Workshop in Nairobi. I had the chance to attend the afternoon sessions today, and will be taking part in the Mobile Toolkit Workgroup tomorrow.

The first 3 days were taken up with examples and stories of how mobile technology is being used as an effective tool within NGO’s that have a focus on human rights and social advocacy. A typical question at these sessions would be, ” What do you need to make your work with mobiles more effective?”

A few of the answers:

• Access to service reports (SMS)
• User-friendly software
• Tables with the list of providers that are able to send messages to other providers
• Alternative power (solar power, charging and energy saving techniques)
• A glossary of the technical jargon
• Text-to-voice techniques
• Mobile-to-blog techniques

Tomorrow, just the tech guys will remain and we will discuss what tools and information will be included in the “Mobile Toolkit” so that future programs will have a starting point to reference for their projects. The first three days of hearing what is being done, and what is needed, is critical if a toolkit is to be developed that is both useful and informative. A typical question here would be, “What is the toolkit going to look like?”

A few of the answers:

• It should have a web presence
• It should be a package with a clear guide on how to use it and a navigation system with links to other users
• It should include CDs
• A book (multi language)
• It should be downloadable

While here I’ve had a chance to meet two blog/email acquaintances too, Sokari Ekine of Black Looks and Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net. They’re both experts in their fields, and it’s been great getting to know them on a face-to-face level. Sokari works at Fahamu and has been a social activist for quite some time. She has a particular focus on women’s rights, as can be seen on her blog. Ken Banks is a technologist who developed Frontline SMS, the system used to monitor the Nigerian elections amongst others.

Last week’s interview with the creators of the newest African blog aggregators, “An African Aggregator Roundtable Discussion“, has created quite a discussion on the idea of pan-Africanism online. The comment area has been very active with some pertinent questions being asked and a thought line that should be continued. I wanted to highlight that conversation and invite more people to it.

Is it possible for a website (or web application/platform) become relevant to Africans throughout Africa?

This thought is further stratified when questions of language and intent are brought into the equation, but in short, I think the answer is, “yes”. However, a site can not be relevant Africa-wide if the creator does not realize that everyone is “African” and yet no one is “African”.

One commenter, Concerned African, writes:

Are these aggregators putting politics (pan africanism) before user experience (which would perhaps favour one language one country/region) and it seems as if these aggregators are trying to “catch all” users within Africa because there is not sufficient internet users on the continent. Is this the case?

Specifically in the West, we like to lump everyone together in this large continent as “African”. However, people around Africa see themselves as from a specific country. Just as someone from India doesn’t want to be labeled an “Asian”, so too do Africans want to be recognized and part of a specific country’s community.

So, a platform that serves everyone around Africa is possible, however it needs to have intentional country-specific focus. This could mean that language and local “ownership” are necessary.

Is language too big of a barrier to overcome?
One of the primary thoughts, best articulated by Nino, revolved around the complications that language presents. This resonated particularly loudly with me, since one of his comments linked to 5 other African community websites, of which I had only known 2 of. The fact is, if it’s not English, I only hear about it through someone else emailing or commenting about it – that’s a problem.

Others countries are french-speaking or arabic-speaking, and the fact that the langage isn’t english is a huge barrier. There a many moroccan initiatives, or ivorian, or senegalese, or cameroonian ones and it will be less present in anglophon (or south african) aggregator. You know, only Nigeria and Ghana are anglophon outside southern and eastern africa. all others are quite french-speaking.

Final Thoughts
These are some really interesting thoughts and even more interesting commentary. In the end, we’ll be able to see it proved out through the creators of the websites, web communities and platforms.

Last week I had a chance to sit down and have a conference call (Skype chat) with the technology brains behind the latest buzz in the African blogosphere: The Aggregators.

Justin Hartman (Afrigator), Vincent Maher (Amatomu), Neville Newey (Muti) and Matthew Buckland (Amatomu) got together for a half hour to discuss their creations. Having that much brain power pointed in my direction left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but they were all nice enough chaps and didn’t make me feel like a complete tech-peasant, for which I thank them.

Bullet-point takeaways:

• Neville points out that Muti is actually not an aggregator (I apologize)
• Amatomu is positioning itself for the greater non-blogging readership, not just the bloggers
• Afrigator has a plan to grow through a mobile phone strategy
• Justin coins the term “Afrosphere” to describe the African blogosphere
• There is a need to be wary of South African domination of platforms
• Amatomu plans to grow outside of South Africa regionally
• Everyone aggrees that broadband connectivity is hugely important for future growth

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Ethan Zuckerman is the 5th in the African Digerati series of interviews. Honestly, I’m amazed with what Ethan has done with technology and what he continues to do – so much of which directly benefits Africans. His line-up of web projects is simply amazing. What isn’t mentioned here is that he founded Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps, that creates real tangible technology change on the African continent. He’s also on my “required reading” list of African bloggers.

Blog and/or website:
Theere’s a few of them. My personal blog is “My Heart’s in Accra”. I’m deeply involved with BlogAfrica and Global Voices, and I’m the chairman of the non-profit that runs Worldchanging.com.

What do you do:
Heh. I take great pride in the fact that I’ve never had a job… which is to say, I try to work on projects that are so much fun to work on that they don’t feel like work. These days, I work on a wide range of projects that focus on technology in developing nations, and my compensation is sometimes monetary, sometimes less tangible. Over a dozen years ago, I would have told you I was a “software architect” – I helped build Tripod.com, one of the first webhosting sites. Nowadays, my job title at Global Voices is “co-founder and big geek”, and my responsibilities include management, fundraising and oversight of our technical architecture.

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