Content made in Africa! In the fairly recent past we have covered Afrigator and myScoop, both of which are African (blog) content aggregators.

This time, we take a look at Maneno, a content (blog) platform built with African content in mind. Maneno is actually a swahili word meaning “words“. We asked the people behind Maneno one simple question: What is Maneno? and Why Maneno? (Okay, maybe two questions). Here’s their answer:

Maneno is a blogging platform solution for people writing from Africa and for content about Africa.

It is Open Source and runs on PHP & MySQL. As we work towards our full Open Source release of the platform, we are using the system to power the blogs running at the portal www.maneno.org. These blogs exist in subdomain form (ex. blog.maneno.org) or as fully-hosted blogs such as wanjiku.co.ke, africamp.com, or subsaharska.com.

What sets Maneno apart from other systems is that it focuses on helping develop and promote African content. It’s being built to be lightweight, intuitive, and multi-lingual while at the same time full-featured and a powerful Content Management System. For those who choose to host a blog on our system they also benefit from the fact that we heavily promote the content on maneno.org and various social media, so that new bloggers aren’t just writing somewhere remotely in the vast expanse internet.

We were initially funded with a small amount of private seed money, but our long term plan includes deploying a number of systems this year that will allow us to move towards being a self-sustainable company that isn’t solely dependent on grants or sponsorships. These systems will facilitate the development of more online content from Africa, specifically targeting more content in local African languages. Once more of this starts to happen, it will open up the African internet markets to the levels experienced elsewhere in the world.