When Craig Newmark started his “email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area“ in 1995, he probably never thought that his hobby would grow to become one of the “busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust.“

The Craiglist Network- a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements and forums on various topics, has local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide – community moderated, and largely free.

Of the 50 countries featured on Craiglist however, only 2 are from the continent of Africa- none from West-Africa !!

For a continent the size of Africa- the 2nd largest in the world, having an estimated population of 975,330,899 and 54,171,500 Internet Users, you can’t help but ask why?

Nigeria, for instance, has an estimated population of 140 million- 10 million of whom are Internet users according to Internet World Stats;

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Nigeria’s Very Own Craiglist

Oluwaseun Osewa, the founder of Nairaland.com (arguably Nigeria’s most used Forum), recently stepped in to fill the vacuum (if you will) and provide a service which caters for “a need that Craigslist hasn’t seen”, with the introduction of Nairalist.com

Nairalist.com is a free local classified advertising service that supports the listing of personals, vacancies, cars, flats, products for sale & services in any of the 37 states of Nigeria. The site was built from the scratch using Python by Seun Osewa (the Nairaland Boss) and was launched on the 7th of January and has been featured once on Hacker News.

The site features categories which include Jobs, Dating, Housing, Vehicles, For Sale, and Services, and had 1660 non-spam adverts and about 290,000  page views as at February 7 2009.

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One of the first things you notice about the site is the speed at which pages load. The minimal graphics no doubt had to a lot to do with this- a definitely well thought-out move, seeing as majority of Nigerians rely on Dial-Up connections for Internet access. Nairalist now only needs to gather as much momentum as possible, and the sky would be the limit.

With regards to increasing traffic to the site, Mr. Osewa’s Nairalist would surely rely heavily on his Nairaland Forum which currently has a membership of 292, 262, and a purported average traffic of 10,000 unique visitors monthly- a feat he would no doubt be hoping to replicate with Nairalist.

The site has already seen an influx of listings ranging from personals to job openings, and the future definitely looks bright for Nairalist, especially as it targets a country where majority of the populace  love “new toys”.

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