Facebook celebrated the achievements and products of its growing African developer and partner ecosystem at its annual F8 developer conference held in San Jose, California, recently.
African developers shared the stage with Facebook and developers from around the world, showcasing innovative products and services they have created for their local communities and the global market.
F8 hosts more than 4000 people in person and hundreds of thousands of people watching via Facebook Live for two days of new products, tools, interactive demos and speakers to help developers build, grow and monetise their apps.
This year, Facebook brought F8 to developers around the world through F8 Meetups hosted with tech hubs around the world. In Africa, it hosted F8 Meetups in Nairobi, Lagos, and Cape Town, where participants watched live streams of the sessions in San Francisco.
SPEAKING AT THE EVENT WAS Emeka Afigbo, Facebook’s Head of Platform Partnerships for the Middle East and Africa, IN HIS WORDS, ;We’re partnering with many African developers to launch products that not only meet the needs of their local markets, but which are also ready for the world stage,” ACCORDING TO HIM, “Events like F8 are a perfect opportunity for THE COMPANY to talk about how THEY will work with partners to do more with our platforms. As importantly, they are a forum for us to get feedback from our ecosystem and to showcase our partners’ work to the world.”
African developers who featured in F8 sessions include the following:
THE CONFERENCE WAS ALSO AN OPPORTUNITY FOR Facebook TO announce a new program for developers all over the world to connect, learn, and collaborate with other local developers. Developer Circles is a community-driven program that’s free to join and open to any developer.
Each Developer Circle is led by members of the local community who act as leads for the circle, organising events offline and managing a local online Facebook community. Developer Circles are forums to share knowledge, collaborate, build new ideas and learn about the latest technologies from Facebook and other industry leaders. Lagos, Nigeria was the first place that Facebook piloted this global progam and Innocent Amadi, one of the community leads for the Lagos Circle was featured at the Keynote.
