Thursday, February 16, 2012

Village uses Twitter as tool for improving life

Twitter is enjoying big growth across Africa, with Kenya second in usage on the continent

 Chief Francis Kariuki, left, is shown a gap in a fence that thieves escaped through, by village elder Peter Ndungu, right, in the village of Lanet Umoja, Kenya. Kariuki's latest attempt to improve village life is by using the micro-blogging site Twitter to send a receive information about crime and other local matter.
LANET UMOJA, Kenya — When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher's home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.

"My wife and I were terrified," said teacher Michael Kimotho. "But the alarm raised by the chief helped."

The tweet from Francis Kariuki was only his latest attempt to improve village life by using the micro-blogging site Twitter. Kariuki regularly sends out tweets about missing children and farm animals, showing that the power of social media has reached even into a dusty African village. Lanet Umoja is 100 miles west of the capital, Nairobi.

"There is a brown and white sheep which has gone missing with a nylon rope around its neck and it belongs to Mwangi's father," he tweeted recently in the Swahili language. The sheep was soon recovered.  Read more: NYDailyNews.com

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