‘Local is king’: Africa’s online platforms take on Silicon Valley

Maxence Melo, founder of JamiiForums, listens to his colleagues during a meeting at their office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. — Thomson Reuters Foundation

DURBAN/CAIRO: 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.