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Estimating
the number of Facebook users in Zimbabwe
Technology Zimbabwe
February 08, 2012
View this article on the Technology Zimbabwe website
There has been
a lot of curiosity about Zimbabwe's Facebook population lately.
Unfortunately Facebook doesn't provide Zimbabwe's Facebook
stats because of, well, you guessed it, we're a bad people.
Or at least the targeted US sanctions say some leaders here are.
We've
been curious too and have written to Facebook a couple of times.
No response. We've also written to Socialbakers, the company
known for Facebook stats but they too don't have anything.
Their final answer after some exchanges (some not so good) was:
I discussed
this situation with our development department. The reason why Zimbabwe
is not in our statistics is that Facebook API does not pull data
for it. (As I mentioned in previous email). This "issue"
is the main reason that caused this situation and unfortunately
we are not in a position to influence it. We can only reach data
that is pulled out of Facebook API.
I hope you
understand this complicated situation and we apologize for inconveniences
caused.
We've
even tried getting mad about it. Didn't help. Creating our
own social networks definitely will, but before we all move over
to Sha, Facebook is a reality we have to deal with. Zimbos love
it!
So anyway, the
curiosity increased after we posted the Google Plus stats two days
ago. Now instead of waiting for Zuckerberg to un-target Zim, or
wait for some of our politicians to become more likeable people
to the US, we thought we would just take figures from other African
countries, average them and use the data to estimate to Zimbabwe's
stats. Rough estimate at best. Why not?
We used data
from the top 10 list of African countries with the most internet
penetration in Africa. Zimbabwe is number 10 on that list. The others
are Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Algeria, Sudan, Kenya,
Tunisia and Uganda. Of the 9, Sudan is apparently also has US issues
so, effectively we were left with 8 countries, the following:
Average
Facebook Users as % of Internet Users (Africa's top 8 net
users)
| |
Internet
Users
(Jun 2011) |
Facebook
Users
(Dec 2011) |
FB
Users
% Internet Users |
| Nigeria |
43,982,200 |
4,369,740 |
10% |
| Egypt |
20,136,000 |
9,391,580 |
47% |
| Morocco |
13,213,000 |
4,075,500 |
31% |
| South Africa |
6,800,000 |
4.822,820 |
71% |
| Algeria |
4,700,000 |
2,835,740 |
60% |
| Kenya |
3,995,500 |
1,298,560 |
33% |
| Tunisia |
3,600,000 |
2,799,260 |
78% |
| Uganda |
3,200,000 |
346,980 |
11% |
Average
FB percentage 42%
As you can see
the average number Facebook users as a percentage of internet users
in the 8 countries is 42%.
The percentage
of Internet users that are on Facebook for each country was a bit
unpredictable. Facebook is clearly not as popular everywhere as
we thought. It's clearly not very popular in Nigeria and Uganda
where Facebook users are only 10% and 11% of the total number of
internet users respectively. Compare that with Kenya's 33%
or South Africa's 71%
Anyway, we conservatively
(very) estimate the number of internet users in Zimbabwe to be 2.5
million. So: Econet says it has at least 2.1 million internet users
and that's 37% of its subscribers (well, SIM cards) using
the internet. Now if we assume that both NetOne and Telecel have
at least 20% of their subscribers (1.86m and 1.46m respectively)
on mobile broadband, that's an additional 600,000 people on
the internet in Zimbabwe. And because we need to be as conservative
as possible, let's just assume that subscribers using fixed
and mobile (WiMax) internet from the 14 internet access providers
also have internet from either of the 3 mobile providers above.
Let's not count them and leave our total number of users at
2.7 million. But there's the multiple SIM card issue as well.
Let's knock off 200,000 from our total to take care of the
overlaps and remain with just 2.5m.
Now let's
apply our 42% Africa average to that figure. That give us some 1.06
million Zimbabweans on Facebook.
I'd say
there's definitely more, but I'd have no data to back
this except that I know Zimbos love Facebook.
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