Kenyan-based Online Platform Set to Expand

By Ben Omondi

Majibu.com, started four years ago as a platform to enable people share experiences and learn from each other’s experiences, is a website that is targeted at people looking for solutions to common-day life problems.

According to David Mugo, majibu.com’s founder, the franchising model would lead to the establishment of new sub-domains like “majibu.tz”; “majibu.ug” or “majibu.rw” or specific domains through which “majibu.com” can then be routed while the technical issues are handled by “majibu.com” head offices in Kenya.

“We began from Kenya but want to bring onboard other countries that already have an online community to boost up majibu.com’s 6,000 members. Membership to the site is done after signing up but responses or answers to questions can be posted by both members and non-members,” said Mugo, a web consultant and blogger.

The move to franchise and have ‘majibu.com’ in other countries is also meant to help drive traffic to the site as the franchise takers and firms would be able to free up part of their customer care resources as the questions and answers (Q&A) sent to the firm can be handled by other people who are not part of the firm but with the relevant knowledge and experience on the issues, according to Mugo.

To date, about 16,400 questions have been posted onto ‘majibu.com,’ generating a total of 69,714 answers or responses. As it looks to grow its user base beyond borders, the site targets to have solved 500,000 questions from all aspects of life by end of 2011.

According to alexa.com, a web information firm which provides information about websites including top sites, internet traffic statistics and metrics, “majibu.com” is currently ranked 725,905 out of over a billion sites globally in terms of traffic and comes in at position 1,323 for Kenya-based websites.

Majibu.com was set up a system to assist people of all levels of life to share experiences and knowledge via the web – both mobile and PC – as well as SMS which is set to go live in February 2011.

“Majibu is a Swahili word meaning answers. We spend half of our lives searching for answers to various things in life and there is literally no unique problem, each problem you face has been faced by someone else before and someone still will,” writes David Mugo on the “majibu.com” home page.

The site, initially called DearKenya.com, was therefore established to enable people share and learn from each other's experiences.

Currently, majibu.com’s only other rival in the online Q&A sites space is the recently launched Google Baraza (Swahili for “council”). But the two platforms differ in that there is no anonymity for Google Baraza and the fact that Google Baraza is limited to “gmail” email holders. Majibu.com is also set to allow users post and answer questions via SMS through a toll-free service from February 2011.

Majibu.com overall vision is to create a stream series of Q & A sites localized in different African languages with a common domain, search and knowledge base for common issues. It will also be formulated to handle support issues in corporate application by providing plug-ins for support systems to build a community knowledge base in different localities.

Majibu.com scored another feat when it was recently chosen as one of the 8 winning ideas in the “ideation” competition during at the Nokia Open Innovation Africa Summit in Kenya, a development that would see its founder, David Mugo, act as Nokia consultant and helping to turn the other ideas and concepts into viable projects and businesses. 

The recognition of majibu.com by Nokia is further testimony to Kenya’s emerging talent in content and applications development and follows last year’s selection of another Kenya-based IT firm, Virtual City, as the overall winner in Nokia’s global developer competition.

Other tools and platforms that have also emerged from the local developer community include Iborian - which is ‘Nairobi’ spelt backwards and which hopes to rival online social networking site “facebook” - and “irozho.com,” an online search engine meant to take the competition to Google’s doorstep.