How can social enterpreneurs harness the reach of Face Book to bring social change?

The current biggest non-mail client product in Africa is Facebook. Smaller countries where it was barely visible, now have significant numbers of users. It could be the number one or number two site in every African country.

Facebook has three objectives for the platform and these cover its development in Africa. Firstly, it wants to acquire more users. Secondly, it wants to monetize this use by attracting advertising: for example, it already has agents in African countries selling its online advertising space to ad agencies and clients. Thirdly, it wants to have developers write more services for the platform. For example, the latter already includes what it calls Social Widgets like the Top articles shared by friends button on CNN.com.

Facebook has at the moment about 500 million active monthly users, of which half use it from a mobile phone. Its research shows that the latter group of users are twice as engaged in terms of use as the PC users. As Christian Hernandez sees it: “We know mobile is an important tool to drive engagement and in developing countries we start with mobile.”

Now let’s go to the numbers from Facebook and think to yourself, “How can social entrepreneurs harness the reach of Face Book to bring social change in Africa? How can African investors also monetize social media such as Face Book? How can African developers and entrepreneurs use tools like social widgets and APIs to create local products and services based on Facebook?”

These are the top 20 African countries in terms of Face Book usage:

1. Egypt – 6.58 million
2. South Africa – 3.8 million
3. Morocco – 3.2 million
4. Nigeria – 2.9 million
5. Tunisia – 2.35 million
6. Algeria – 1.39 million
7. Kenya – 1.03 million
8. Ghana – 906,540
9. Senegal – 447,840
10. Cameroon – 355,860
11. Uganda – 280,600
12. Tanzania – 259,120
13. Mauritius – 254,680
14. Angola – 184,660
15. Madagascar – 151,100
16. Ethiopia – 146,020
17. Namibia – 127,260
18. Zambia – 117,520
19. Botswana – 112,180
20. Mozambique – 105,820

What are your thoughts?