This post is an update of October 2011′s list of African leaders with a Facebook presence. The numbers and a couple of links have been adjusted. Stats from July 2010, December 2010, March 2011, and June 2011 are still available.

As always, the challenge is determining what share of fans of these pages are diasporans. A solid number of nations – most notably Liberia, Senegal, and Gabon – have seen extraordinary Facebook fan page growth in the past 4 months. Pages for leaders in these nations have shown 144%, 110%, and 92% growth rates, respectively, in the number of fans. Abdoulaye Wade’s fans have grown tremendously in advance of this month’s presidential elections. Cameroon’s Paul Biya witnessed similar interest on his Facebook page last year during the election season (his page has grown by 18% since). Other updates for February 2012 include:

• Burkina Faso: Blaise Comparoré has a very official-looking page, even if it may not be official.
• Rwanda: The widely-popular unofficial page for Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is gone – it boasted nearly 20,000 fans. Perhaps this was a move by leadership to reduce confusion?
• Zambia: We found the official page for Zambia’s Rupiah Banda.
• Gabon: Ali Bongo’s page continues to grow by huge margins after becoming official less than a year ago.
• Egypt: Added community page for Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, although there is limited social interest around him.
• Madagascar: Added community page for Andry Rajoelina.
• DRC: The “official page” for Joseph Kabila, with previously 4,000 fans, has been removed. A profile with that many still exists however.
• Chad: One of the two public profiles for Idriss Deby has been removed.

Growth trends & countries of interest:

• Median fan growth rate: 10% over 4.5 months (was 15% for 4 months from June-October 2011 and 23% for 3 months from March-June 2011)
• Given a consistent page, only the leaders of DRC and Seychelles lost fans over the time period.
• Fan count growth of leader pages with greater than 10,000 fans has slowed substantially since last October. Growth is positive, but is only in the 5-10% range: Algeria 14% (was 17%), Ghana 8% (was 10%), Kenya 4% (was 5%), Morocco 2% (was 5%), Nigeria 7% (was 13%), Tanzania 9% (was 8%), Zimbabwe 3% (was 3%).
• Less than 5% growth in Benin, Guinea, Mauritania, Somalia. Benin, and Guinea also were in this range last year.
• The page for Libya’s Col. Gaddafi grew by another 23%
• Mauritania still only has 4 fans of the community page for Ba Mamadou Mbaré. Guinea-Bissau is not much better with 14 fans for Malam Bacai Sanha.
• Solid (40%) growth in Angola, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali.
• Ethiopia’s fan base has doubled from 700 to 1,400 since June 2011 suggesting either a growing interest in politics by diasporans or a domestic adoption of Facebook.
• In order of sheer fan base there is no change in order: Nigeria (699k), Kenya (98k), Morocco (86k), Zimbabwe (67k), Tanzania (35k)

The list as of February 25, 2012:

 

Country	President (or other title)	Facebook Page Type (hyperlinked)	# of Likes	% Change since October 2011 (4.5 months)
Algeria	Abdelaziz Bouteflika	Official Page	23071	14%
Angola	Jose Dos Santos	Community Page	3067	40%
Benin	Thomas Yayi Boni	Official Page	6577	4%
Botswana	Seretse Khama Ian Khama	Unofficial Page	8237	25%
Burkina Faso	Blaise Compaoré	Unofficial Page	10167	8%
Burundi	Pierre Nkurunziza	Community Page	355	13%
Cameroon	Biya Paul	Official Page	11393	18%
Cape Verde	Pedro Pires	Community Page	958	10%
Central African Republic	Francois Bozize Yangouvonda	Personal Profile?	191	7%
Chad	Lt Gen. Idriss Deby	Public Profile 2	612	16%
Comoros	Ahmed Abdallah Sambi	Community Page	82	9%
Congo, Republic of	Denis Sassou-Nguesso	Official Page | Private Profile	7254 / 1244	10% / -2%
Congo, Democratic Republic of	Joseph Kabila	Private Profile	4003	-4%
Cote d’Ivoire	Alassane Ouattara	Unofficial Page	16132	9%
Djibouti	Ismail Omar Guelleh	Unofficial Page?	4626	7%
Egypt	Mohamed Hussein Tantawi	Community Page	286	n/a
Equatorial Guinea	Brig. Gen. (ret) Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo	Community Page	98	27%
Eritrea	Isaias Afeworki	Unofficial Page	7658	5%
Ethiopia	Meles Zenawi (PM)	Community Page	1435	38%
Gabon	Ali Bongo Ondimba	Official Page	13023	92%
The Gambia	Yahya Jammeh	Unofficial Page	6241	7%
Ghana	John Evans Atta-Mills	Unofficial Page	21782	8%
Guinea	Sékouba Konaté	Unofficial Page	3702	2%
Guinea-Bissau	Malam Bacai Sanha	Community Page	14	27%
Kenya	Mwai Kibaki	Unofficial Page	97765	4%
Lesotho	King Letsie III (King)	Unofficial Page	5303	6%
Liberia	Ellen Sirleaf Johnson	Community Page	2698	144%
Libya	Col. Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi	Unofficial Page	9199	27%
Madagascar	Andry Rajoelina	Community Page	484	n/a
Malawi	Bingu wa Mutharika	Community Page	269	37%
Mali	Amadou Toumani Toure	Unofficial Page	322	46%
Mauritania	Ba Mamadou Mbaré	Community Page	4	0%
Mauritius	Sir Anerood Jugnauth	Unofficial Page	860	8%
Morocco	King Mohamed VI (King)	Unofficial Page	86353	2%
Mozambique	Armando Emilio Guebuza	Official Page?	4044	15%
Namibia	Hifikepunye Pohamba	Community Page	714	20%
Niger	Salou Djibo (Head of Military Junta)	Unofficial Page	1380	5%
Nigeria	Dr. Goodluck Jonathan	Official Page	699073	7%
Rwanda	Paul Kagame	Community Page	2184	n/a
Sao Tome & Principe	Fradique De Menezes	Community Page	14	17%
Senegal	Abdoulaye Wade	Unofficial Page | Community Page	1882 / 1263	107% / 115%
Seychelles	James Michel	Public Profile	4750	-2%
Sierra Leone	Ernest Bai Koroma	Community Page	1448	13%
Somalia	Sharif Ahmed	Unofficial Page	3594	4%
South Africa	Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma	Community Page	5411	37%
South Sudan	Salva Kiir Mayardit	Community Page	910	21%
Sudan	Omar Hassan al-Bashir	Community Page	158	14%
Swaziland	King Msati III (King)	Community Page	76	15%
Tanzania	Jakaya Kikwete	Official Page	34727	9%
Togo	Faure Gnassingbe	“Fan Club”	4684	6%
Tunisia	Fouad Mebazaa	Unofficial Page	46	18%
Uganda	Lt. Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni	Unofficial Page / Profile	7085 / 1332	10% / -1%
Zambia	Rupiah Banda	Official Page?	3332	n/a
Zimbabwe	Robert Gabriel Mugabe	Community Page	7962	48%
Zimbabwe	Morgan Tsvangirai (PM)	Official Page	67190	3%

 

The above table lists all top African heads of state (usually President) and provides a link to the one or two most popular Facebook pages, groups, or profiles for a given leader. The final column shows how many users are interested in the particular leader. Loose definitions of the page-types:

• Official page: A page run by the actual leader.
• Public profile: A presidential account with a public wall and information about the leader.
• Private profile: An seemingly real account without a public wall or information about the leader.
• Unofficial page: A user-created page that serves as the leader.
• Group: A user-created group dedicated to a leader.
• Community page: A placeholder courtesy of Wikipedia for cases when no user-generated page exists.

I was part of a recent USAID After Hours Seminar Series (even though this particular one was a breakfast event) sponsored by the Microenterprise Development office on the topic “Viewing Value Chain and Household Finance From a Demand Perspective.”

The discussion was led by Geoffrey Chalmers, a senior technical advisor at ACDI/VOCA and Jason Agar, Director of Kadale Consultants Limited who joined from the UK. The speakers identified among others challenges to the value chain financing from a demand side perspective. These include ‘side-selling’ which acts as disruption for agricultural value chains; enterprises and households facing production, price and market risks; the difficulties involved in obtaining finance for fixed asset; farmers losing value through forced early sale; exploitative power relations between producers and buyers; and weak working capital and cashflow within the value chain.

The speakers cited a case from Malawi where they identified governance structure – open (market based) vs. closed (directed) as one of the causes of side-selling and recommended “hungry season payments” to help farmers meet household demands for food, school fees at times of low income inflow. In Nicaragua, they observed that supervision of the harvesting process and provision of additional services by the union cooperatives and local microfinance institution (MFI) to the farmers could help reduce the side-selling.

So what is Side-Selling in the context of the agricultural value chain financing?

One of the features of the value chain approach to agriculture is the contractual arrangements between firms such as microfinance institution (MFI) and the farmers or producers. Farmers under contract are provided with inputs, training, technical assistance, credit, and other services as well as having a guaranteed market for their produce. These farmers are expected to sell their produce to the financing firm with guaranteed, and most of the time pre-determined price.

But at harvest time when the prices of the produce are higher in the external market compared to the pre-determined price with the financing firm, farmers have an incentive to sell to the spot market instead of selling to the firm that financed them. This practice is known as side-selling or diversion. Side-selling may take forms such as diverting inputs from firms to non-contracted crops; by not adhering to the production schedule agreed upon with the firm; by directly side-selling the produce to other buyers; or by failing to deliver the agreed volume and quality on time.

The root cause of side-selling in Ag Value Chain may be “communication”

So could the challenge with side-selling have anything to do with communication between the actors? If yes, how can the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) help in reducing side selling?

Information asymmetry between two parties in contract such as farmers and MFIs where one party has more or better information than the other could be the root cause for side-selling in agricultural value chains. In this case there is an information gap between the two parties, where farmers have less access to information and poor knowledge of the entire process assumed that there is imbalance of power in transactions and therefore resort to such practices as side-selling.

My personal experience with side-selling, a practice which was referred to as “Diversion” in the cotton industry in Ghana far back in the early 2000, confirms the communication challenge. The cotton sector in Ghana at the time was with little regulation leading to poor or lack of communication among the cotton companies as well as between the companies and the farmers. Farmers took advantage of the situation to defraud the companies through some of the practices associated with side-selling described above.

ICTs and Communication in the Ag Value Chain

ICTs are “communication tools” that are enabling access to information by rural farmers located in remote communities. These tools are facilitating activities associated with access to inputs by producers, the actual productions process by farmers, marketing and processing by retailers, and monitoring and evaluation of the transaction by the financiers and other donors. Integrating ICTs into the production, marketing, and M&E components of the value chain will ensure rapid flow of information between the stakeholders which will minimize misunderstandings, and allow for risk management, and provide higher levels of transparency.

Creating better communication environment between farmers, input suppliers, and buyers and also among the MFIs or sponsoring companies could reduce side-selling. Specifically, ICTs can be used in some of the following ways to reduce side-selling:

• a) E-vouchers are excellent and more trusted systems for better transactions between farmers and input suppliers and can be integrated into the Ag VC,
• b) Field staffs of MFIs and other firms could integrate ICT solutions into their production processes for precision agriculture that help farmers increase their production thereby minimizing side-selling,
• c) iPad/iPhone applications are widely used now for data gathering and for making policy decisions,
• d) ICTs could be used to gather accurate demographic information about farmers, their farm sizes, produce information on the field before harvest,
• e) Specific traceability applications are being used to monitor produce from the field through to the final destination of consumption thereby minimizing fraud,
• f) Market information systems are now available even in remote communities to get farmers informed of the global market as well as the local market,
• g) With fast data gathering, ICTs can allow farmers to be paid faster to reduce the side-selling for other “urgent” needs,
• h) ICTs can facilitate automated processes at the collection centers to minimize damage of perishable goods and increase the value of the produce for farmers,
• i) Using ICTs to make farmers aware of the dangers and repercussions with side-selling due to improved and accurate data with the MFIs might help reduce side-selling,
• j) ICTs are collaboration tools and could be used to facilitate collaboration among the sponsoring firms and ensure smooth flow of information among them to prevent destructive competition among them. Such competition among MFIs and sponsoring firms enables producers to rob one company for another.

ICTs are not the magic wand to the side-selling challenge with the financing of agricultural value chain. They are technological tools that can be used to catalyze the social processes by the stakeholders to help address the challenge.

Visit here for detailed information and resources on this event and future events by Microlinks.

Worldreader, a market-oriented, not-for-profit NGO, is making subsidized e-readers available in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and already seeing improvements in literacy rates.  That’s just one of the many positive results that Dr. Jonathan Wareham, a member of Worldreader’s board of directors and Vice Dean and professor of Information Systems at ESADE – Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain, discussed last week during a presentation at the World Bank headquarters here in Washington, DC.

Dr. Wareham and others at Worldreader are concerned about the growing book famine in Africa.  According to a World Bank study conducted in 19 sub-Saharan African countries, only one of those countries, Botswana, “had anything close to adequate book provision in schools”.  Using e-reader technology which can hold more books than most school libraries have in such countries — and with no added distribution costs — Worldreader has launched several pilot studies in schools in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda.  As of now, over 75,000 e-books have been distributed wirelessly to over 750 students.

The pilot study in Ghana, called iREAD, which received financial and research support from USAID, compared the rise in literacy rates over the course of one year for three groups of students: a group given e-readers without training on how to use the devices, another that was given out-of-classroom pedagogical interventions, and a control group without e-readers.  Literacy scores for students with e-readers and no training improved 12.9% vs 8.1% of the control group, and students with e-readers and additional training improved 15.7% vs 8.1% of the control group.

Results from the study have proven the efficacy of the technology with the programs to support it and Worldreader plans to expand the Uganda initiative by doubling the number of students with e-readers within the next year.  Besides improving student literacy scores, the project team also expects to see improvements in adult literacy rates since many of the students share the devices with their families and communities.

Unlike device-based projects such as the One Laptop Per Child program, Worldreader doesn’t produce its own e-reader — so far, it only distributes Amazon’s Kindle.  Dr. Wareham describes Worldreader as device agnostic.  “There’s no real need to be publicly aligned with either Apple, or with Amazon, or with Android — it doesn’t matter.  What matters is bringing literature into the classrooms and as the devices converge and the prices drop, there will be more options to choose from.”

Also unlike most device-based projects, Worldreader invests manpower and on-the-ground support to ensure project sustainability.  With the approval and support of government officials and the Ministry of Education in each country, the project so far works with teachers, students, and community leaders to provide training on how to use the the devices and make certain that the technology is fully understood and valued.  Though high breakage rates and incidents of theft remain a concern for project implementation, Worldreader believes that providing more training on how to care for the devices, building relationships within each community to promote the device’s educational value, and discouraging theft will help to lower these rates.

Worldreader is looking to build on the success of the pilot studies by partnering with other organizations to expand to an estimated total of 10 projects in 2012.  Dr. Wareham said that scaling remains to be a major challenge for the project but plans are underway to provide organizations with what he termed “Worldreader-in-a-box” — kits that will enable training programs to be developed where Worldreader project implementers are not able to go.  In addition, the organization is working to expand an ePub platform that allows local authors’ works to be published and accessed on e-readers, creating opportunities for local authors and offering literary works that can help to foster national identity.