Airtel Spots App Localization Opportunity in Malawi

We talk a lot on this blog about the need to localize content for the African market; mobile phone company Airtel have recently announced they are partnering with an App store developer to bring more of such content to Malawi.

Airtel Malawi has made an agreement with neXva, who provide white labelled app stores, to help empower local app developers in Malawi through monetizing their content and providing useful solutions to mobile users.

“We want to bring locally relevant mobile applications to our customers and also continue to drive local application development by empowering talented app developers in Malawi. Also Airtel prepaid customer can buy a premium app directly with airtime.

“We selected neXva for this strategic alliance because of their robust technology offering and the unique advantage they offer local app developers to monetize their content. We realize that localization is key to the success of Airtel’s App store in Malawi.” Charles Kamoto, Chief Commercial Officer of Airtel Malawi.

According to Brian J. Friedman, founder and CEO of neXva, “Bringing neXva’s app store platform to Malawi is a great opportunity for neXva and deploying our app store platform along with a highly curated selection of content will, for the first time, bring relevant, localized apps to Airtel Malawi subscribers.

“Localized content combined with our direct connection to the Airtel Africa markets brings a unique opportunity for local and international developers and content providers to monetize their content through neXva’s operator billing interface that enables Airtel customers to purchase apps using their airtime”.

It will be interesting to see what language or languages the content appears in. According to statistics Chichewa is the most used language in Malawi (approx. 57%). Although there are many others, their relatively small numbers might preclude their inclusion in the App store. These languages may rely on the actual App developers themselves to translate and localize their content for specific language audiences.