Crowdsourcing in Africa

Crowdsourcing has in recent years really taken off around the world in many ways. The basic idea is to maximize or take advantage of the masses to solve a large problem. The perfect example of this is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is contributed to literally by individuals all around the world and now has over 10 million articles in the encyclopedia.

We went in search of interesting crowdsourcing projects in Africa and found a few:

IdeaBounty (South Africa): IdeaBounty is a crowdsourcing platform that offers clients (brands, corporations) a chance to crowdsource for innovative ideas to a huge number of registered users on the site.

IdeaBounty has managed to get a good number of big brands using it’s platform including BMW, RedBull, First National Bank and Unilever.

The video below highlights a campaign done by FNB on IdeaBounty:

Idea Bounty Interview with FNB’s Andy Hadfield – For more amazing video clips, click here

Ushahidi (Kenya/Africa/Global):  This is probably the most widely known crowdsourcing project from Africa. The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Nathan Eagle‘s txteagle (Kenya): txteagle is a service that enables mobile phone subscribers to earn money and accumulate savings by completing simple micro-tasks for large corporate clients. Originally conceived as a mechanism to compensate rural Kenyan nurses, txteagle is now on track to becoming one of Africa’s largest employers.

IS Labs (South Africa): IS Labs is a leanding internet services provider in South Africa. IS Labs provides a platform for individuals to submit their ideas on how to improve the internet in South Africa. The ideas are rated, discussed and reviewed. The best ideas receive support from IS Labs and are developed. The result – improved internet.

Standard Bank (South Africa): The South African bank is taking a similar approach to getting the best ideas to improve their services.

Do you know any more crowdsourcing projects in Africa? Share them with us on the comments section below. (especially from west and northern Africa)