{"id":4429,"date":"2022-01-20T10:36:12","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T09:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/20\/facebooks-second-life-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-tech-company-in-africa\/"},"modified":"2022-01-20T10:36:12","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T09:36:12","slug":"facebooks-second-life-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-tech-company-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/20\/facebooks-second-life-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-tech-company-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook\u2019s second life: the unstoppable rise of the tech company in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Western users may be logging off, but across the continent of Africa, the social media company is indispensable for everything from running a business to sourcing vaccines. How has it become so inescapable?<\/p>\n

Badri Ibrahim is a Sudanese comic artist and the founder of the Abbas Comics empire. His strips are quirky and irreverent, poking fun at the Sudanese military and encouraging civic activism. One recurrent character is a hapless but wise cat called Ghadanfar, a sort of Garfield meets Snoopy protagonist, who finds himself on the wrong end of misunderstandings with neighbourhood felines and humans. It is all rendered in colloquial dialect and is dry, funny and often poignant. So popular has the comic become that Ibrahim is regularly commissioned to do private work, rendering Ghadanfar in different guises \u2013 as a bashful groom on a wedding invitation card, for example.<\/p>\n

The majority of this work comes through Facebook, where his comics have about 19,000 followers. \u201cI ran the page for about a year,\u201d Ibrahim says. By then, it had become its own <\/strong>community, and now he does not need to spend much time maintaining it. During the launch period, Ibrahim spent a lot of time \u201cposting regularly and engaging with comments\u201d and also \u201csending the page to everyone I know\u201d. Freelance work came through those comments. \u201cPeople and businesses would send me a message through the page, looking for an artist. Sometimes they ask for one of my comic characters to use for a product.\u201d He can\u2019t imagine how he would have launched his artistic career without Facebook.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nWestern users may be logging off, but across the continent of Africa, the social media company is indispensable for everything from running a business to sourcing vaccines. How has it become so inescapable?
\nBadri Ibrahim is a Sudanese comic artist and the founder of the Abbas Comics empire. His strips are quirky and irreverent, poking fun at the Sudanese military and encouraging civic activism. One recurrent character is a hapless but wise cat called Ghadanfar, a sort of Garfield meets Snoopy protagonist, who finds himself on the wrong end of misunderstandings with neighbourhood felines and humans. It is all rendered in colloquial dialect and is dry, funny and often poignant. So popular has the comic become that Ibrahim is regularly commissioned to do private work, rendering Ghadanfar in different guises \u2013 as a bashful groom on a wedding invitation card, for example.
\nThe majority of this work comes through Facebook, where his comics have about 19,000 followers. \u201cI ran the page for about a year,\u201d Ibrahim says. By then, it had become its own community, and now he does not need to spend much time maintaining it. During the launch period, Ibrahim spent a lot of time \u201cposting regularly and engaging with comments\u201d and also \u201csending the page to everyone I know\u201d. Freelance work came through those comments. \u201cPeople and businesses would send me a message through the page, looking for an artist. Sometimes they ask for one of my comic characters to use for a product.\u201d He can\u2019t imagine how he would have launched his artistic career without Facebook. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Western users may be logging off, but across the continent of Africa, the social media company is indispensable for everything from running a business to sourcing vaccines. How has it become so inescapable? Badri Ibrahim is a Sudanese comic artist and the founder of the Abbas Comics empire. His strips are quirky and irreverent, poking …<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s second life: the unstoppable rise of the tech company in Africa<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}