“People say I look way younger and talk way younger than my age,” grins Churchill Nanje, sitting behind his desk in jeans and a T-shirt, in the small town of Buea, south-west Cameroon. Aged 30, the software engineer can hardly be classified as old, and looks like he should still be at university. Nanje is the founder of Njorku, one of Africa’s biggest job search engines.
“Basically we are like a Google search engine for jobs in Africa,” he explains. Unlike other sites, Njorku does not host the jobs – it searches the internet for them, meaning it can be used anywhere on the continent. “Recently we saw a lot of traffic from Sudan, like 500 users daily. I don’t even know how they got to us.”
In the five years since Nanje set up the site in his bedroom in Buea, Njorku has served more than 2 million unique users across 11 African countries. His story exemplifies the optimism surrounding Africa’s digital economy at present.