Social Innovation: African Chief Using Twitter to Improve Village Life
An African chief, Francis Kariuki, is using 21st century social innovation to help resolve problems and maintain order in his Kenyan village. He is on Twitter, the social media platform, and is a great example of how the digital world has gone beyond urban towns and cities to reach previously what were considered distant corners of the earth.
Chief Francis Kariuki, or @Chiefkariuki, as he's known on Twitter tweets daily to support his community and has embraced social innovation via social media. His 140-character messages are missions from helping to find missing children and/or farm animals to organising village life and even thwarting local thieves. In one example, criminals were caught raiding a school teacher's home at 4 AM—that is until Kariuki whipped out his phone and intervened via Twitter. The Chief received a phone tip about the incident, and then he sent a tweet in real time that mobilised the village to gather outside the teacher's house and scare the robbers away. In another incident, Chief Kariuki used Twitter to organise a rescue operation after a man fell into a pit.
Kariuki lives 160 miles west of Kenya's capital Nairobi; this modern-day Chief has just over 400 followers. In fact, through social innovation, his tweets reach thousands of the area's 28,000 residents, as many of his neighbours are subsistence farmers, who access his tweets via forwarded text messages or a third-party mobile application that works without a smartphone. Chief Kariuki says, "Twitter has helped save time and money. I no longer have to write letters or print posters which take time to distribute and are expensive." He believes his Twitter activity has helped decrease the crime rate to virtually nil in recent weeks, compared to prior reports of daily thefts.
Click here to continue reading and comment
Sangeeta Haindl is a staff writer for Justmeans on Social Enterprise. When not writing for Justmeans, Sangeeta wears her other hat as a PR professional. Over the years, she has worked with high-profile organizations within the public, not-for-profit and corporate sectors; and won awards from her industry. She now runs her own UK consultancy: Serendipity PR & Media.
