Last fall, Facebook announced an office opened in Lagos, Nigeria, which would provide the company with a hub in the region and the first office on the continent with a team of engineers. We have now discovered one of the first products from this office: an education-oriented mobile app called Sabee, which means “to know” in Nigerian pidgin. The app aims to connect learners and teachers in online communities in order to make educational offers more accessible.
The app was briefly released on Google Play by NPE Team, Facebook’s internal R&D group, which has typically focused on new social experiences in areas such as dating, audio, music, video, messaging and more.
While the insights from the NPE team’s apps sometimes influence broader Facebook efforts, the group has yet to develop an app that has grown into a stand-alone Facebook product. Many of his previous apps have also shut down, including (a little bit sad), the online zine creator e.g. video app Hobbi, calling app CatchUp, Friend-Finder Bump, podcast community app Venue and a few others.
However, Sabee represents a new direction for the NPE team as it is not about building another social experiment.
Instead, Sabee is tied to Facebook’s broader strategy of focusing more on the African continent, starting with Nigeria. This is a strategic move, informed by Data this suggests that by 2030, a larger majority of the world’s population will be living in urban centers, and much of it will be in the African continent and throughout the Middle East. By 2100 the population is Africa probably tripled, with Nigeria being the second most populous country in the world after China.
Credit: Facebook NPE team
To connect these regions to the internet, Facebook has partnered with telecommunications companies on 2Africa, a submarine cable project that aims to serve the over 1 billion people in Africa and the Middle East who are still offline. These aren’t altruistic investments, of course – Facebook knows its future growth will come from these demographics.
Facebook confirmed its plans for Sabee to ProWellTech after we discovered it and determined that it was still a small test for now.
“There are 50 million learners in Nigeria but only 2 million educators,” said Emeka Okafor, Facebook Product Lead. “With this little early test, we hope to understand how we can help educators build communities that make education accessible to all. We look forward to learning with our early testers and deciding what to do from there. “
Credit: Facebook NPE team
The inequality between learners and educators in Nigeria has a huge impact on women and girls, which is another focus for Sabee and the efforts of the NPE team across the region. The company also wants to explore how to better serve groups that are often left behind by technology. On that front, Sabee is working to create an experience that works with low connectivity like 2G.
We know the app is currently in early alpha testing with fewer than 100 testers under NDA agreements with Facebook. It’s currently not available to anyone outside of this group, but the company hopes to scale Sabee to the next level before the end of the year.
There is no way to sign up for a Sabee waiting list, and the app is no longer public on Google Play. It was available for such a short time that it was never placed on any charts, the app store intelligence company Sensor Tower confirmed.
We should note that “Sabee” and “Sabi / Sabis” have different, less polite meanings in different languages according to the Urban Dictionary. However, the team has no plans to change the name for the time being as it makes sense in the Nigerian market that the app is targeted at.
