TMCnet Feature

If only Little Bo Peep had a Twitter (News - Alert) account.

Chief Francis Kariuki, who oversees a western Kenyan village, regularly tweets about missing children and farm animals. He points out that, on one occasion, a lost brown and white sheep that he tweeted about was quickly recovered.

Finding lost sheep, however, isn’t the only way that Kariuki has fought crime with Twitter. When a group of thugs tried to invade the home of a village teacher, Kariuki sent out a tweet that urged residents of the village to hurry to the house. The thugs fled as the villagers descended on the property.

Kariuki’s examples underscore how extensively social media is taking hold, even in Africa. South African residents are the top users of Twitter, but Kenya comes in second. Arab news network Al-Jazeera interviewed members of Al-Shahab, Islamic rebels who are using Twitter in an effort to depose the current Somalian government. One example of Al-Shahab’s tweets: “@alykhansatchu To free our people from the ignominy of invasion &live according to the Laws of Shari'ah (Qur'an) It's our prerogative right!”

In Egypt and Tunisia, during the Arab Spring uprisings last year, Twitter was used to announce the locations and times of protest gatherings. Governments either blocked the use of Twitter or tried to shut down social networks, so Google (News - Alert) created a process that allowed rebels to send tweets via SMS. African bloggers are urging citizens to take advantage of mobile devices and social media for both citizen journalism and the reporting of election irregularities.

According to The Guardian, the average age of tweeters in Africa is between 20 and 29, while the average age for worldwide tweeters is 39. Many Africans are even using Twitter in countries like Angola, Cameroon, Sudan and Ethiopia. Four of five polled say that they use Twitter to stay in touch with their friends. More than half of the 11.5 million tweets analyzed by The Guardian came from mobile devices.

Chief Kariuki‘s Twitter account was set up by local IT expert Njoha Gathua. “Twitter is good to broadcast messages to the mass. It is good for the chief and his assistants to pass messages to their people,” Gathua explained to the Kenya London News.

Twitter has helped to change the chief’s village from a no-go zone to a crime-free haven. That’s not only good news for the chief; it’s also good news for the sheep.