The podcasting market is growing rapidly across Africa, especially amongst its Gen Z population. Afripods, an all-in-one podcast platform, is trying to accelerate that growth. The platform is geared toward African creators and audiences and offers editing, hosting, and monetization tools for podcasters and also serves as a player and podcast discovery tool for audiences.
Founded in 2017, Afripods currently offers Pan-African content in over 50 different languages. Last month, the platform announced it had partnered with over 110 broadcast radio stations to convert their programs to podcast form. Known as “broadcast-to-podcast” or B2P, the company says that African audiences are more familiar with the idea of on-demand radio and sees it as a promising area for growth.
This has a couple of great things going for it, that also help make it uniquely African:
- Support, and filtering, of around 50 different languages, means users can also find podcasts in their own native tongue.
- It is focussed on Africa, and Africa has traditionally preserved much of its history and customs through audio storytelling. This makes audio podcasting ideal for this purpose. It allows people to tell their own stories – anyone can be a storyteller.
- Parts of Africa have no Internet access, and again podcasting is ideal for downloading where there is Internet, and being perfectly usable where there in no Internet.
- It is easily accessible, and podcast hosting is free. Podcast editing can be done inside the app.
- It not only helps preserve African culture, but also makes it accessible globally.
- There’s a lot of opportunity for collaboration among the countries and the cultures.
Awareness is probably their biggest challenge (and same for podcasting and RSS in general). Once people know about it, and how they can use it, it will often be very well used. What I love best about podcasts, are you get to choose when and where you listen, and also that you can be busy with many other activities and listen to a podcast at the same time.
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