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Google Africa Blog: the Official Blog for Sub-Saharan Africa
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| Source: | Google-Africa |
| Date added: | 2008-07-31 |
Google in Sub-Saharan Africa: News, Stories and Thoughts. Both in French and English.
The Google
We're pleased to launch our official blog for Sub-Saharan* Africa.We believe that the Internet is a transformational force for societies. And it's making us all much more powerful as individuals, regardless of whether one is in New York, Stockholm, Bujumbura, Ouagadougou, or Cape Town. Regardless of background, education, social status, gender, age or economic situation, online access to information enables people to create opportunities for themselves. Seeing a student in a cybercafe doing his research using a search engine, a businessman chatting with a colleague abroad with instant messaging, or a young woman posting her photos to a social networking site - it's clear the extent to which academic, business and social life is fundamentally changing all over Africa.
Google's aim is to democratize access to the world's information. But clearly we (along with other companies) face significant challenges in Africa in making the Internet available to as many people as possible. How do we help the hundreds of millions of people who are illiterate? How do we make the world's information available in African languages (about 2000 languages are spoken on this continent)? How do we support online access for people who live in rural environments without electricity? How do we make African content more widely available - not only in Africa, but around the world? How can we get more people connected, and make access faster and cheaper? These are some of the questions we've been asking ourselves.
Over the past few months, we have significantly ramped up our work in Sub-Saharan Africa: we now have offices in Nairobi and Johannesburg, and are looking to hire many more people all over the continent just as fast as we can find them (see our job openings). We have an iGoogle gadget competition going with computer science students in East Africa; we've launched Google Maps data for Kenya. And then there is the work that individual Googlers - some African, some from elsewhere - are doing on the ground in conjunction with technology entrepreneurs, software developers, universities, and the ICT and NGO communities.
In addition to this blog, we are also announcing the Google Africa community discussion forum, on topics related to our products and activities in Africa and the Internet in Africa in general. We will be regularly reading the postings on this list and product managers and engineers may participate in the discussions as appropriate, making it an excellent way to discuss a broad range of topics. This forum is open for all, and we encourage anyone interested to join it.
*The region includes these countries and territories: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Dem. Rep. of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.