Notice: [this is a peer to peer reviewed draft post]
This article will serve as an introduction to clarify some of the problems Sakawaka intends to solve as a community driven platform. Sakawaka is a non profit organisation driven by community members known as the Digital African Tribe(DAT). The inspiration to launch an independent platform built and run by Africans came from the recent global events. There's a need for an independent unbiased platform to promote and nurture perspectives and opinions from African communities arround the world. The application will be built using open source technology available under MIT or BSD license.
We are living in a digital era where most services are offered on the web. Banking, insurance, commercial, real estate, education and many other services require a presence on the web. For competitive reasons, most companies can not survive without that. Accessing these services, is mostly done through search engines, social media platforms and word of mouth. For a practical example, let's assume that a user located in Nigeria is looking for an online banking service. He/she chooses to use Google to search for an online banking service. The user will get foreign results first and maybe among the last organic results, a local Nigerian bank will show up. This kind of content filtering promotes foreign entities, opinions and ideologies that create a new form of digital indoctrination.
In most sectors, local African communities around the world heavily depend on other communities. We spend most of our energy and time creating value for other communities that might in return have little or no reciprocal benefits to our communities.The ideal scenario is to have services and busnesses centered around our values, traditions and beliefs. An ecosystem that creates employments, educates our children and much more. We should not be focused on how much value we can accumulate, but rather on how much value we can create to support the growth of our communities. By consuming, supporting and promoting each other, we create value for ourselves and become less dependent on foreign aid. Having multiple digital platforms like Sakawaka is therefore a must to restore the balance and flow of services in our local communities.
Diversity is an asset that should be conserved and our communities around the world understand that. Africans have always been pioneers in conserving our traditions and that's why we keep on inspiring and leading the rest of the world, through art, music, sports etc. In most African cultures, life is not solely about competition and accumulating value. It's mostly about collaboration and expressing the uniqueness of self. That's the foundation onto which Sakawaka is built, a collective and collaborative spirit to reignite our fundamental way of life in the digital era. A form of digital tribe that will be the backbone to our modern lifestyle. A platform created around these values will have a positive impact for our communities and generations to come.
Popular global web platforms in use today were created and modelled around a specific audience. Most of these platforms claim that they offer services to a global audience, but that's not the case. Most global tech companies limit their services to individuals in certain countries and specific communities using technics like "shadow banning". Some companies will even go an extra mile to block traffic coming from third world countries. This kind of behaviours towards certain communities and individuals is extremely difficult to detect by end users.
Discrimination is on the rise once again, a different kind of discrimination that most people are not aware of. Some companies have created algorithms that are smart enough to detect the skin colour of a user and deny them access to services. For example, there is a popular bed and breakfast company that had a similar algorithm that rejected all passports with a dark skin upon registration. This is just the beginning, in the future it will be extremely difficult to detect such discrimination. Companies will create and model their algorithms to include or excludes certain individuals automatically. The only viable solution is to have multiple reliable platforms, so that users can have multiple choices. It's time to build and to have a diverse marketplace , whereby we control and run our own platforms.
African languages are disappearing at a higher rate because people do not use them and there is no incentive to conserve them. As practical example; most operating systems like windows and Mac do not ship with a single African language included. In contrast, all European official languages were included. Once again, most applications and operating system were designed a modeled around a specific user base. Thus Africans communities have to learn and adapt foreign languages so that they don't get excluded. In most cases children will automatically assume, that their native language is useless. The Sakawaka community has a plan to create a custom Linux distro (operating system) that will translate custom applications to solve the language barrier issue.
Sakawaka is non profits organisation, that will be run by contributions from individuals like you. Our mission is to provide valuables services and give a voice to local communities. We will learn, grow and curve our platform to adapt and serve our communities. Our profound wisdom and aspirations to become sovereign autonomous communities will lead the way forward. You can join our digital tribe and contribute as much as you can in your spare time. We need bloggers, translators, developers, designers, promoters etc.
For more information join our discussion forum here.