African mobile access is rapidly increasing, with West African households having four devices on average. Banke Alawaye, Head of International Business at the Praekelt Foundation not surprisingly explains that everything they do is based on a mobile first approach.
Speaking at Mobile West Africa 2015 , Alawaye explains as part of the Wikipedia Zero offering they wanted to give the millions of people without access to the mobile web, to a text based version of Wikipedia. Through an innovative integration of the Wikipedia API and Vumi, Praekelt Foundation were able to allow users to search the Wikipedia platform using USSD. The first, zero-rated implementation of this rolled out in Kenya in 2013 in partnership with Airtel.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi5NL7gfhBI&w=560&h=315]
