The African leapfrog...

in #africa7 years ago

Africa leapfrogs with technology, this is a well established fact.

For example many of Africa's smart phone users have never owned a PC or a laptop.

We may soon witness not only an African technological leapfrog but a financial one as well.

Traffic is starting to be spread throughout Africa's major centers with some very large blue dots in major cities.

The Steemit user base in West Africa is expanding most rapidly, similar to what we saw in the initial phases of the viral growth in South Korea.

If we zoom into West Africa we see that this traffic is mostly coming from the English speaking countries in West Africa; Nigeria and Ghana.

The cities being, in descending order, Lagos, Abuja and Accra.

Lagos has jumped to 5th place worldwide, from 20 or so a couple of weeks ago (ignoring the "not set").

That is roughly equivalent to 80% of the traffic out of New York over a comparative period.

This hints strongly at going viral there as well.

This has very interesting implications.

Many of these users will not have had bitcoin before. STEEM will be their first cryptocurrency.

This is not unique, since Steemit is introducing many people to cryptocurrency.

What is unique is that many of the STEEM account holders will be people that have never previously had a bank account.

A technological and financial leapfrog indeed, similar to what happened in Kenya with mpesa, except this is crypto and feeless.

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Wow - Lagos at #5! I would never have guessed. Thanks for the stats - very interesting

Very true @gavvet, here is the first steem-lagos meetup yesterday that i hosted and it was the best, many people asking us what we are up to and what the steemit logo means, many promised to come but only 9-made it. So our target is to get about 250,000 to 500,000 users before 2018......God Help me and the all of us!

With your permission, here is the post about the meetup.

oh wow look at this! you need to connect with @xpency He is my Africa Team Steemit representative and i helped him and @tj4real make a 1000 anbd a 2000 post backa few weeeks agO! it sucks bnecause i helped them make like a 2400 post about signing up nigerians at his school (200 person lecture) to steemit and then price iof steem went from like $2.80 diown to $1 and it seemed like all that money he made was cut in half or more

but he STILl recieved teh SAME amountof steem, the amount he made WILl go back upo as soon as steem goes back yto $3!

uit jjust sucks when you make all that steem and the price goes down and it makes you want to sell

but i promise if yoU DONt seell you will end up making SO much money

u cant afford NOT to turn $1000 into $10,000 when price of steem hgoes from $1 to $10

We can totaly upgrade africa with steemit!

yess LEAPFROG like china did with its induystrial revolution

yes u can SKLIP all the hard parts of industrialization and u can go IMMEIDTALy to blocklchain utopia~!

steemit will give EVERYlast unemployed person in africa a JOB!

And All of Africa gets a new African reserve Currency! both Bitcoin AND steem!

i am so excited go look at #africa or http://www.steemit.com/trending/Africa and u can see how much growth there is in Africa steemit category! that #Africa hashtag is huge and we can show anyone in africa who gets online and joins steemit that they will be REWARDED

i wish to connect but they stay in different cities......

Good article,am in Kenya and there are merchants who are exchanging bitcoin to Kenya Shillings..https://localbitcoins.com/places/11450020/nairobi-kenya/

hey am KENYAN too kindly follow me @darkqueen

follow me too @darkqueen lets make Kenya proud!

I wonder if leapfrogging technology is an advantage or disadvantage when adopting new technology? Does the use of the old technology give you familiarity or do we become old dogs trying to learn a new trick? It will be interesting to watch. Thanks for posting.

This is very good new, and interesting, it will be nice if steem could be accepted as payment in a place like Nigeria, which could well happen if enough people obtain it to put presure on business.

business is very informal there so not so much pressure would be required, since the business owner is also a user.

Thus they can just transfer from one account to the next - great

This is exactly how m-pesa started

The stats are impressive, people who never own a PC nor they have ever used one are now owning smartphones and using platforms such as Steemit. This is indeed a technological leapfrog. I wonder how people are going to understand what actually a cryptocurrency is and how to transfer it to their national currency.

I hope there are Steem users who are guiding these newbies into the world of cryptocurrencies.

The hope is that they eventually wont have to transfer into their national currencies as steem becomes widely used.

This is huge. Steem and Steemit can change a lot of lives in developing countries. I've really enjoyed getting to know some Nigerian Steemit members lately. I agree that Steem could become a default currency in many parts of Africa and the world. We need to support this growth.

And congrats to the Indonesians, Australians, and always the Koreans. Incredible growth there, too!

This is AWESOME! Love it!
I´m Norwegian but have lived in Kenya for some years and do business with people in East Africa now.

This could really become a game changer for many people.

I can totally see this one. It reminds me of communications, Africa basically bypassed traditional phone lines and went straight to mobiles. So i can see them leapfrogging in other areas.

very good news!!