This Kenyan company has created Africa’s first video conferencing app

Original Story Published by: Ama Nunoo, www.face2faceafrica.com
Photo Source: The Star

Many businesses have been shut and schools are still not in session in many countries due to the novel coronavirus. The current happening has made a Kenyan gaming tech start-up create Africa’s first video conferencing platform that has a better call quality.

The free to join conferencing system, Gumzo, meaning “chatting” in Swahili costs only $1 for the users who host meetings that has an unlimited number of participants in a call, which is more affordable than other platforms out there now, VOA reported.

Usiku Games used just eight weeks to create their own video-conferencing platform although the company’s primary goal was to make video games for the African market a few months prior to COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic.

The Nairobi-based company was also affected by the pandemic and only a few people reported to work in the office. It was during that time that Usiku’s programmers and coders raced to develop their own video conferencing app.

Usiku’s CEO, Jay Shapiro, said Gumzo is better suited for Africa because it can be used on different devices, which is very important for a continent that many people are using earlier versions of smartphones.

“Africa is a mobile phone first continent and so you have to have a platform that works on mobile devices [that are] older, less memory and so that’s why we built a download app that is web-based and is accessible on all smart phones or PC or tablets to try and reach as many people as we can,” he said.