We understand that is the general international perception of Africa, and we are happy to be the first project to prove this perception wrong. Before starting, we looked into this issue since it would be pointless if there was a marginal smartphone use in Africa or if the software required a level of skill beyond a normal smartphone user.

We actually found that there are currently almost 300 million smartphone users in Africa, with a projection of 930 million users by 2021. This means that currently there are more smartphone users in Africa than in the United States of America for example (230 million), though the type of smartphone being used is vastly different.

It's one thing to have many potential users, but the other side of your question is how easy it is to use. This is ultimately what made us change our approach from a traditional PoW cryptocurrency to a PoS/DAG hybrid, since PoW would develop mining facilities, and would create a distinction between users and miners. We put a great effort into ensuring that each user is a node in itself, and that the node operation runs in the background of the app, accessible to advanced users but not a requirement for normal day-to-day use.

Considering also that the average smartphone in Africa has less internet connectivity speed, processing power, and disk space, than the average U.S.A. smartphone, this created some interesting design limitations. This is part of the reason why we have included in our roadmap to create desktop wallets to be run as full nodes so as to decrease the load required in the smartphone apps. Also, while we haven't added it as an official roadmap target, we have brainstormed about a future use case of incorporating SMS service on top of Afri, so that users can send Afri to each other via text message in traditional cellphone networks, and the user's Afri app does the PoS and relays the information to other full nodes.

Lastly, we tackle this question through the GUI, the design choices, the starting available languages, and the bounty system for languages. The more African languages we can provide at the start and in the first few months the easier it will be for our target user to use the app. As you might know, however, there are many languages in Africa, so we expect some translations to take some months or even years before being ready to be added to the app and desktop wallets.