Will Mutua at Afrinnovator writes an interesting article on how to design websites for the African market and supports it with some facts on the ground. Looking at the examples of the most successful websites in Kenya and Nigeria, Will comes down with the following nuggets when it comes to designing for the African market:

• First to market:
  Bottom line: If you are offering a great service, and customers catch on and engage with your service, it is unlikely that they’ll jump ship when someone else comes by who’s offering exactly what you are offering with a better looking skin on it.
• User Experience Design trumps Graphic Design:
  You may not want to hold up the product because of the graphic design side of things but user experience is everything. If you’re going to spend time on design, spend as much of it as you can on getting aspects of user experience and user interaction just right.
• Mobile Web Rules in Africa Design Specifically for it:
  […]It would be wise to invest in creating a custom site for mobile, or making your website mobile friendly. As far as web design for mobile goes, the cardinal principle is to minimize. Minimize on the number of graphics you have, minimize on the number of actions a user needs to do or number of pages it takes to accomplish a task.

Great advice very in tune with my own experience so far. Read the whole article here and you should also be a frequent reader of the Afrinnovator website.