Facebook Arrives in Tanzania

"You know Facebook?" a 21-year-old Tanzanian accounting student named Noel asked me. We were sitting on a couple of plastic chairs last night outside a tiny, concrete local store selling individually packaged shampoo packets, detergent and Cokes for about 10 to 30 cents a piece in a northern part of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was getting late. The geckos and mosquitoes were starting to appear and a group of children chased the neighborhood goats down a nearby dirt road. Noel wanted to stay in touch after our lengthy conversation about the upcoming national elections. "Yes, of course." Thirty minutes after I left, a friend request popped into my inbox. Slowly, it's coming here. You might be in a local shop, and in the midst of a Bongo Flavor song, your ears might pick out the word Facebook from a string of Swahili on the radio. Tanzania has 163,340 Facebook users, up by 12,740 from a month ago, according to our Global Monitor report. 0.facebook.com, the low-bandwidth version of the site designed for feature phones in developing countries, has yet to make its debut here. But I hear it's coming shortly. Even so, there are plenty of obstacles that Facebook has to overcome to become as pervasive as it is in other parts of the world. While there is an explosion of mobile devices and services across the continent and promising pockets of innovation in the region like the Nairobi's iHub, a Google-supported hacker space, many people lack basic familiarity with computers and the web even in the richest and most privileged parts of the capital. The cost of Internet access here is prohibitive at roughly 60 cents per hour at a local cafe. So regular access is beyond the reach of many Tanzanians who have a $500 GDP per capita according to the World Bank. Getting Online If you have freely surfed the Internet for the past 15 years and grew up with a computer in your house, it's easy to take for granted how much we intuitively know about sign-up flows and web services. You know how to type, or at least you know the basic layout of a keyboard. You might even know shortcuts. You're comfortable with multiple tabs. You have read news online. You can name a couple great websites off the top of your head. You've used a computer that's newer than five years old. You've always had electricity. If you haven't had these things, signing up for Facebook is a lot harder than you think. After learning that I'm American, about a half-dozen people here asked me to help them make profiles or pages after repeatedly trying and giving up. (Like e-mail, the social network is an aspirational product here. People want to be recognized and acknowledged just as much as they do anywhere else in the world.) It's not quantitative, but going through the sign-up flow with several Tanzanians has been an interesting way of looking at Facebook's unique challenges in these markets. For one, public education here is neglected by the Tanzanian government. There isn't government support for computer or IT training, so even in the nation's capital, there are plenty of teenagers who have maybe surfed the web once or twice in their lives. Many people don't understand the concept of hyperlinks, let alone the news feed. Plus Facebook as a product has grown increasingly complex over the last 5 years An 18-year-old secondary student I helped create a Facebook profile for, who lives a five-minute drive from the mansions of two former Tanzanian presidents, only got his first e-mail address on Yahoo three weeks ago. He had tried to sign up for Facebook last month but he didn't get past the initial sign-up page and there was no way for him to upload photos since he didn't have a camera or phone. None of his classmates or friends were online. "I have e-mail, but I have no one to e-mail," he said. Hunt-and-peck typing was unfamiliar, since he only started going to school four years ago after living on the streets of Dar es Salaam for several years as a teen. He literally searched for every key. Facebook's auto-complete for "likes" and "interests" made the process a lot faster. All but one of the people I've helped make websites or Facebook profiles for has an e-mail password of "123456" or "12345678." The one exception used his first name followed by the number 9 as his password. "It might be a good idea to choose a password that's harder to guess," I suggested. "No! Easy to remember!" protested one Dar es Salaam-based businessman and lobbyist. Others are so new to e-mail that if I'm lucky Facebook's contact importer will pull in a single person. In one particularly creepy instance when I was helping a hotel bellboy make a profile, the importer recommended a Chinese guest staying at the hotel who was coincidentally sitting a few feet away. The Mobile Opportunity Facebook is trying to get around many of these hurdles by targeting cellphone owners as mobile broadband is much more accessible and affordable than fixed-line Internet here. Virtually all adults have cellphones and they're just as obsessively glued to them as I am to my iPhone in San Francisco. There are about 19.5 million mobile subscriptions in a country with 42 million people. But the range of mobile devices in East Africa is even more intimidating than it is in the U.S. There is everything from top-of-the-line Blackberries that are passed along by family and friends living in other countries to Nokia smartphones with resistive touchscreens to basic feature phones that are barely functioning and are nearly a decade old. Through informally asking, people have told me they spend anywhere from $10 to 60 on their phones each month. The country's communications regulatory body says the average revenue per user every month is about $5.87 there. In fact, it's not uncommon to find people who carry two or three phones because the carriers, which are just as ruthlessly profiteering and frustrating as they are in the United States, charge exorbitant rates to call between networks. Three or four dollars worth of phone credit can disappear in a few minutes if you call from one network to another. There are phones here that simultaneously support more than one SIM card, allowing consumers the switch between networks seamlessly, but they're not too common. So Facebook has a big opportunity to be a communications bridge between customers of different networks. Not only that, each of the carriers is launching its own mobile banking service, modeled after the success of Vodafone and Safaricom's M-PESA in Kenya. But these mobile money services don't interface with each other, hindering the success of the overall ecosystem. Again, this represents another opportunity much farther down the line for a product like Facebook's virtual currency, Credits. So, provided Facebook can design a mobile experience with the understanding that millions of its newest users have never really known the web or even desktop computing, there are big opportunities in the offing.

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Facebook Arrives in Tanzania

Kim-Mai Cutler

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Kim-Mai Cutler