Facebook targeting Nigerian learners with educational app Sabee.
From Facebook office in Lagos, Nigeria the first products to come out of this office: a mobile application aimed at education called Sabee, which means “to know” in Nigerian Pidgin. The app aims to connect learners and teachers in online communities to make educational opportunities more accessible.
The app was briefly published on Google Play by the NPE Team, Facebook’s internal research and development group, which typically focuses on new social experiences in areas such as dating, audio, music, video, messaging and more.
While NPE Team apps sometimes inform about wider efforts on Facebook, the group has not yet created an app to become a standalone Facebook product. Many of its earlier applications are also excluded, including (somewhat unfortunately) the online creator of zine, e.g. The Hobbi video app, the CatchUp app to call, Bump to find friends, the community app for podcasts and more.
However, Sabee represents a new direction for the NPE team, as it is not about building another social experiment.
Instead, Sabee is committed to Facebook’s larger strategy to focus more on serving the African continent, starting with Nigeria. This is a strategic move, informed by data showing that the majority of the world’s population will be in urban centers by 2030, and much of it will be on the African continent and in the Middle East. By 2100, Africa’s population is expected to triple, making Nigeria the world’s second most populous country after China.
We understand that the app currently is in early alpha testing with less than 100 testers who have an NDA agreement with Facebook. It’s not currently available to anyone outside that group, but the company hopes to scale Sabee to the next stage before the end of the year.
There is no way to sign up to a Sabee waiting list and the app is no longer published on Google Play. It was so short that it never was available in the charts attached app store business intelligence Sensor Tower us.