DW Signs Partnership With Mxit To Expand Social Media Reach In Africa

DW's Crossroads Generation is being offered as in-app content on Mxit – a South African mobile social network with millions of monthly active users.

Deutsche Welle (DW) has added to its portfolio of innovative partners in Africa with Mxit – one of the largest mobile social networks on the continent. DW and Mxit worked together to develop an app for Crossroads Generation, which makes the educational audio content available to users throughout Africa. Users with any Internet-enabled mobile phone can listen to the program for free after adding "crossroadsgen" as a contact in their Mxit account.

Crossroads Generation is an educational radio novella designed to help Africa's youth deal with everyday challenges in a fun and easy way. Listeners learn about real-life issues like drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and domestic abuse.

"The new deal with Mxit will ensure that we reach our target audience in Africa even better," says Petra Schneider, Director of Distribution at DW. "We can definitely imagine expanding the partnership in the near future to include online and audio content in several African languages, as well as video content in English."

Ben Carl Havemann, Marketing and Communications Manager of Mxit, called Crossroads Generation app as a format featured by the platform "especially valuable for our core target group."

With nearly 5 million users in South Africa alone, Mxit is particularly popular among young people and rivals heavyweights like Facebook. The majority of Mxit users are located in South Africa, and other key markets include India, Nigeria and Indonesia.

Mxit compresses digital content to make it accessible on all types of handsets and over all types of networks – something that is especially important in Africa, where network speeds have remained slow in many places. Mxit users can engage in private chats, group chats, play games or read news, and most of the content is free.

Crossroads Generation is broadcast on DW radio in Amharic, English, French, Hausa, Kiswahili and Portuguese and rebroadcast by 260 DW partner stations in Africa. It is being offered initially on Mxit in English.