At its just concluded annual F8 developer conference, Facebook announced that it had partnered with several African developers to launch products globally. Facebook, with its global reach and scale has decided to include African developers in its beta testing programme for the launch of new global products in order to increases its presence on the continent.
This year’s F8 conference played host to more than 2,600 people while hundreds of thousands of people watched via Facebook Live for two days of speeches and new products, tools and interactive demo announcements. In addition, this year, Facebook also brought F8 to developers around the world through F8 Meetups hosted with tech hubs around the world. Africa hosted F8 Meetups in Cape Town, Lagos, Morocco and Nairobi, where participants watched the sessions live and learnt several ways to build and monetize their apps.
While speaking about Facebook reason for partnering with African developers, Strategic Product Partnerships Manager at Facebook. Emeka Afigbo said “We believe that local entrepreneurs and developers will be the ones to meet the needs of their immediate community, and we are working with developers to know how we can support them in doing so. We are listening to our developer partners in Africa, and the strong showing for F8 is a reflection of our commitment to doing more with our partners across the continent to help them build products and businesses.”
African developers who partnered with Facebook to launch products at F8 include Afrinolly (Entertainment, Nigeria), GumTree South Africa (Classifieds, South Africa), Zikoko (Entertainment, Nigeria), Jobberman (Jobs, Nigeria/Ghana), The Net (Entertainment, Nigeria) and My Music (Media, Nigeria).
Two developer teams from Malawi won a developer challenge supported by mobile operator TNM Malawi and Facebook, and were featured on F8’s international stage.
