Yes it’s happening. Africans are creating their own IT solutions and using them. Anansi Web Browser should be one of the first web browser developed by an African for Africa. Is he re-inventing the wheel?
Raindolf Owusu is a 22 year old Computer Science student in Accra, Ghana but has done much more than his peers. He is the creator of Anansi Web Browser which has already over 1,000 users since it launched in December 2011.
With the abundance of web browsers, why did he come up with another one? “The reason why I came up with the Web Browser was the fact that I wanted a web browser that could be the Hub for so many things like music that we did not need to stream online. I created a web browser that had offline features like the web camera that you could take a picture and save it on your pc and also share it online and the format for saving it is very web friendly (gif, png) and also I embedded a download manager that would speed up the downloads of your files and more,” he said to HumanIPO. His reason for putting these offline features was because the PC internet for Africa is unstable.
Web browser development is a globally competitive sector with big players like Mozilla and Chrome dominating the scene. Raindolf has seen his share of competition. “The downloads are not impressive since everyone is using web browser’s like Chrome and Mozilla,” he explains. But he is not giving up. “I hope if i find a vibrant team to join me we could build Anansi Browser to be the next big thing,” he asserts.
