Plan a funeral, call out corruption or start a business – tough jobs all now made easier by a generation of tech-savvy Africans tackling local problems beyond the grasp of Big Tech.
It was frustration that pushed Tanzanian engineer Maxence Melo to launch an anonymous, online whistleblowing platform after his appeals to media to investigate an array of questionable mega-project contracts were met with silence.
His JamiiForums website launched in 2006, unmasking the murky money trails of Africa’s rich and powerful, and now has more than 3 million visitors daily.
It is just one of dozens of African digital platforms that innovators say are doing what tech giants cannot – designing bespoke solutions for domestic needs.
“Local is king, we know what local solutions we need for our own contexts,” Melo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by video from his office in Dar es Salaam.
Despite challenges such as scarce
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