I hold conversations very frequently with friends about local digital content in Kenya/ Africa, and how we do not produce enough of it. Today, thinking about it, we produce just enough local digital content, we just do not store enough of it locally to have any influence, and we don’t even know it.
What this essentially means is, a lot of the content that we produce in Kenya and Africa is stored where we cannot reuse it for our development. Local digital content is basically content that is developed locally and that can be locally re-used to benefit the locals. What we are doing is locally developing international content. According to a research by Portland Communications and Tweetminster on How Africa Tweets, there are 11.5 Million geo located tweets and about 2,476,800 of Kenyans are on twitter are faithfully developing information that is stored on servers that we cannot manipulate to identify trends and visuals that can be used for local development.
Attacks on us providing content for external use aside, even those who have the capacity to use the locally developed content for business gain are not doing it. Being a step ahead especially in customer numbers has made local businesses so complacent that they are not thinking of reusing data to their competitive advantage. We have had cases of advertising to the wrong audience, making decisions to act at the wrong time and this is all because have been trained to act on gut feeling and not business intelligence.
There is a lot of information in the country, stored away in servers and computers and databases and on cloud hosts and this storage facilities have become dead end graves where we are dumping data but not exhuming it to do any further forensics on it to get further information. Profiling users in order to carry out targeted marketing, profiling business areas so as to conduct targeted product selling etc, this is all information that sits in our data stores and until we put analytical minds behind it so as to influence our decision making, we will keep making the same decisions expecting different results..