A couple of blog posts ago we mentioned how mobile phone and internet technology was benefiting African nations and that Twitter is enjoying big growth across Africa. It turns out that South Africans use Twitter the most, but Kenya is second in usage on the continent. This week a story about twitter and missing sheep came to our attention from the Houston Chronicle of all things!
A small village called Lanet Umoja, near Nakuru in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya was hailed as successfully using twitter to help the community’s security. The local administrative chief received a call in the middle of the night from a local whose house was being burgled. The chief sent out a message on Twitter and within minutes residents in this tiny rural village gathered outside the home, and the thieves fled.
The tweet from Francis Kariuki was only his latest attempt to improve village life by using the micro-blogging site Twitter. The Chief often sends out tweets about missing children and farm animals: “There is a brown and white sheep which has gone missing with a nylon rope around its neck and it belongs to Mwangi’s father,” he tweeted recently in the Swahili language. The sheep was soon recovered.
Kariuki’s official Twitter page shows 300 followers, but village Chief estimates that thousands of the 28,000 residents in his area receive the messages he sends out directly and indirectly. Most of his local constituents are poor subsistence farmers, and cannot afford to buy smart phones, but they can access tweets through a third-party mobile phone technology. Others forward the tweets via text messages. Kariuki has also able to bring down the crime rate in Lanet Umoja from near-daily reports of break-ins to no such crimes in recent weeks. Kariuki said he intends to use Twitter to promote peace as Kenya prepares to hold another presidential election in the next year, it’s first since the terrible 2007-08 post-election troubles.
Kariuki said that when he was first appointed the administrative chief of Lanet Umoja he asked himself how he could tackle the region’s problems. First was solving the region’s poor communication infrastructure. He said he is currently setting guidelines to help him sift through the information he gets so that he does not send out incorrect tweets. “Information is power, but information can also be destructive. What we are trying to minimize is destructive information,” Kariuki said.
The research by Kenya-based technology firm Portland Communications and Tweetminster found that over the last three months of 2011, Kenyans produced nearly 2.5 million tweets. More than 80 percent of those polled in that research said they mainly used Twitter for communicating with friends, 68 percent said they use it to monitor news. It is proving to be a most useful tool, even in the most unlikely of places.
