The future will be built in Africa, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in Nigeria, before travelling to Kenya, the “world leader” in mobile money, on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, a surprise trip which has propelled Africa’s entrepreneurial spirit into the news.
“It’s inspiring to see how engineers here are using mobile money to build businesses and help their community,” Zuckerberg said after visiting Nairobi’s iHub, the most famous of Africa’s innovation hubs.
He also popped into the office of BRCK, a remarkable internet connectivity device that has since morphed into a clever education system for the developing world. Both have been co-founded by Erik Hersman – who is also the co-founder of Ushahidi, the real-time reporting tool created during the violence following Kenya’s disputed 2008 elections and is considered – along with M-Pesa – as one of Kenya’s greatest tech success stories.
“Just landed in Nairobi! I’m here to meet with entrepreneurs and developers, and to learn about mobile money – where Kenya is the world leader,” Zuckerberg told his 78-million followers on Facebook. Kenya has 5.3-million Facebook users, many of whom access the social network via mobile.
The future will be built in Africa, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in Nigeria, before travelling to Kenya, the “world leader” in mobile money, on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, a surprise trip which has propelled Africa’s entrepreneurial spirit into the news.
“It’s inspiring to see how engineers here are using mobile money to build businesses and help their community,” Zuckerberg said after visiting Nairobi’s iHub, the most famous of Africa’s innovation hubs.
He also popped into the office of BRCK, a remarkable internet connectivity device that has since morphed into a clever education system for the developing world. Both have been co-founded by Erik Hersman – who is also the co-founder of Ushahidi, the real-time reporting tool created during the violence following Kenya’s disputed 2008 elections and is considered – along with M-Pesa – as one of Kenya’s greatest tech success stories.
“Just landed in Nairobi! I’m here to meet with entrepreneurs and developers, and to learn about mobile money – where Kenya is the world leader,” Zuckerberg told his 78-million followers on Facebook. Kenya has 5.3-million Facebook users, many of whom access the social network via mobile.
As of the first quarter of 2016, Nigeria’s monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook had grown to 16-million (from 15-million) which is a 6.67% increase, according to figures released by Facebook in June. Kenya has 5.3-million (up from 4.3-million or 18.6%). Just less than half of these figures in Nigeria are daily active users (DAU), and just less in Nigeria.
Underlying the mobile nature of the market, about 90% of South Africa’s monthly users are on mobile, and 95% of daily users. Some 8-million people use Facebook daily in South Africa, or 62%. Some 14-million South Africans use Facebook every month, an 16.6% increase in the year since it last released figures in June 2015.
When she visited South Africa last year after the opening of the first office in Africa in June, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, told me: “This is one of the places where our next billion users are coming from. It would be a massive missed opportunity. Africa matters,” she added.
At the time, Facebook said it had 120-million active users, of which 80% (or 96-million) overall use their mobile phones. These figures, from June 2015, were the last full set of numbers for the continent that Facebook released. They were a 20% increase from the previous batch released in September 2014.
Facebook provides free access to a stripped down version of the social network that is better suited to feature phones with poor internet connectivity, called Free Basics. A remarkable South African organisation, run by Gustav Praekelt, is a key provider in these.
Culled from Forbes.com
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