Africa's developer community, those who are focused on the rise of mobile startups, is growing and the widespread integration of mobile technologies and platform continues to offer startup ventures immediate opportunity.

This is according to Emeka Afigbo, Strategic Products Partnerships Manager at Facebook who said mobile applications and wider access to the Net has enabled startups to gain early reach into a growing market.

Afigbo participated in this year's AfricaCom conference hosted in Cape Town this week, specifically to champion the value of Facebook's FbStart, established to support mobile startups.

The company used the AfricaCom event to host the continent's first FbStart workshop for developers and showcase the Express WiFi programme.

Express WiFi has been designed to empower local entrepreneurs with internet access. "Working with local internet service providers or mobile operators, they're able to use software provided by Facebook to connect their communities," according to Facebook.

The programme is currently live at 150 locations in five countries across two continents.

In Africa, Facebook already has partners in Tanzania, Nigeria, and South Africa, with more deployments planned soon, including Ghana.

"This is a sustainable approach to bringing connectivity to underserved communities in countries across Africa – it is a business model that will grow itself because it empowers entrepreneurs to serve their communities," says Chris Daniels, VP of Internet.org at Facebook.

Mobile users

The social network says there are 80 million monthly active users (MAUs) in Sub-Saharan Africa, 36 million of whom engage on mobile.

In Nigeria there are 17 million MAUs and almost 90% of these users engage on mobile, and in South Africa the MAU figure is 14 million, 90% of whom are on mobile and 74% of users connect to Facebook solely through a mobile device.

With mobility gaining in popularity for startups and their developers, another challenge has been- and continues to be content.

Afigbo says for a while many of the solutions developed have been 'copycat' solutions, mimicking what has already been introduced into markets - and there is now a deeper realisation among those in Africa's developer ecosystem of the need to "build to meet the needs of the audiences in your region."

"Local content is very important. There isn't enough of it on the internet... in the same way developers have realised the need to build for the needs of audiences, there is a more concerted effort to get this content... there is AfriNolly for example, one of our partners in Nigeria. There is Nollywood content that people already consuming, and bringing this content onto mobile," he says.

As to the role of Facebook and content regulation, the social network has recently been in the headlines over speculation around whether 'fake news' contributed to the result of the US elections, and its role in curbing the spread of this type of information.

An excerpt from a post by Mark Zuckerberg read, "After the election, many people are asking whether fake news contributed to the result, and what our responsibility is to prevent fake news from spreading. These are very important questions and I care deeply about getting them right. I want to do my best to explain what we know here. Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other. That said, we don't want any hoaxes on Facebook. Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news."

Afigbo said Zuckerberg's recent trip to Kenya and Nigeria demonstrated his eagerness to learn from these markets, and from startups in particular, and means the continent's developer ecosystem's voice has captured interest.

The word 'validation' is being heard more frequently within this community, says Afigbo.