Recently i was going through my Whatsapp group messages when i landed on a hinted topic about social bundle packs that arouse my concern . I think i must have spent two or more days thinking about what should be the right topic for my today’s discussion and perhaps i came up with this rude title blame me less because i have hurting reasons that i feel are hurting the techie community as well . Nevertheless as i always say everybody is entitled to his or her opinions , Uganda is a free country (i know the “togikwatako “people are resisting this now) .However to put all that in a nut shell, i don’t remember when the giant Telecom companies woke up one day and
announced their latest product as social bundle pack. That must have been cool, frankly i would have liked it by then (though i feel it sucks now).
When i started my first blog in 2015 i thought blogging was such a cool opportunity for me to express my personal opinions to the rest of the world . In 2016 during my form 6 I started up my first commercial blog gossipmill.org a news and celebrity gossip portal to perhaps tap into the juicy benifits that came from blogging i was perhaps ignorant of the experiences that lied a head of me.I remember in 2016 i met my first business partner Davis who was a huge social media influencer by then in fact the best i have known in Uganda so far. Together we started our first blog gossipmil.org and some other couple of blogs like wolokoso.com , themillug.com and many others to tap into the juicy market of blogging just like we had seen from our friends in Kenya and in Nigeria. Nigeria followed by Kenya perhaps has the biggest number of bloggers in Africa.
The beauty about blogging industry is if you have the traffic you are the king because that’s where the money lies. Davis was the founder of the largest Facebook group in Africa (Love poems) and an admin in all other biggest Facebook groups of Africa. We used this opportunity as Ugandans with no jobs or hustling to make ends meet and start sharing our blog posts in these groups. We did this for close to a year and we were getting huge traffic between 30k-50k visitors daily on each of our different sites. However shockingly this was true about our site stats, out of the 1M traffic we got on the sites monthly 60% were Kenyans, 20% Nigerians and 15% Ugandans. This was very shocking. I asked Davis why he thinks Ugandans aren’t visiting our sites and he was quick enough to respond with a phrase “Social pack”. No doubt Kenya and Nigeria are the biggest countries to embrace technology in Africa .
I always remember thinking to myself, if God gave me a chance to choose which country i should have been born from in Africa it would no doubt be Kenya. Technology in Kenya is embraced like in the USA because it’s government sees a huge potential in investing in the young technology enthusiasts who are innovating products that are scaling up across Africa. No doubt facebook, andela, paypal all have branches in Kenya. Simply because Kenya is not a social pack freak? But any way what do Ugandans have to loose? Recently i came across a cool mobile application called YoRoommate and i was eager to check it out but to make it worse when i recommended it to my friend he was quick enough to give a short and precise reason why he couldn’t use it “social pack”. No wonder this is now an excuse for Ugandans not to try out new technologies. You can never no the opportunities you are missing out friend unless you stopped using that social pack. Do you think Uganda like the rest of the world are rapidly embracing technology in this information age , my answer is no. Many young technology innovators have faced it rough to scale their brilliant products across Uganda simply because of social pack bundles .The government should look at serving people internet at lower tariffs and then perhaps start supporting our brilliant products that aren’t scaling . Recently i visited google play store to estimate the number of downloads olx has in Uganda compared to that in Kenya i was shocked with my findings . It’s only in Uganda were you find 100k downloads for such a cool mobile app compared to the 1 million downloads in Kenya .This is perhaps evident that no matter how brilliant your app product is Ugandans won’t embrace it because they don’t have internet access. Every year Makerere and other universities graduate over 50000 students to go and meet the 1million youth who are looking for jobs in Uganda yet there are over a million opportunities online but of course social pack. I think it’s time our government considers the tech community’s plight and remove social packs if they think we need to advance towards the information age and lower the internet bundle tariffs and invest more in internet for all other than supporting our ambitious products which won’t scale due to social pack bundles and internet costs and for my fellow Ugandans you won’t know the opportunities you are missing unless you are part of the 15% Ugandans. Am happy that you who has read this is part of the 15% Ugandans. Congratulations.