Kwadu.com, the new Ghanaian community

With the growing impact of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and others, a couple of young Ghanaians living in the US have identified the need for Ghanaians to have a site built specifically to aid them in connecting with other Ghanaians around the globe. They began brainstorming on ways to make that a reality and ended up developing Kwadu.com as a result.

Kwadu is essentially about Ghanaians building connections and sharing experiences with each other. It’s a social-networking service directed at Ghanaians both at home and abroad that will allow them to build upon common cultural background. Users can sign up for a free account at Kwadu.com to connect, update, and share their world with family, friends, loved ones, and even new people.

The site is already gaining momentum and the team is continually working to ensure that users can have a bug-free and safe environment to work, play, and connect with. Kwadu isn’t intended to be a competitor with Facebook. There are certainly some similarities and the service provided by Kwadu is rather intended to complement Facebook by proving an alternative site that is highly target towards Ghanaians.
The team explains the name Kwadu as: “Kwadu means banana in Twi. When we started developing the prototype website, we were looking for a name that was easy to recognize, spell, and remember. Similar to Apple’s brand name, we thought that Kwadu would fit the bill”

According to them, there have been a lot of Ghanaian social networks in the past few years that appear on the scene and quickly fade. “Kwadu isn’t going to be one of them. We’ve developed a long-term strategy of servicing the social-networking needs of Ghanaians, and we believe that users will see that. Additionally, we’ve got a strong development team that is committed to making this service one that Ghanaians regularly use. “

To combat the regular fake online profiles used in scamming unsuspecting people and other inappropriate contents, Kwadu.com has implemented to a three-pronged approach to safeguard members. This includes:  initial barriers and security measures for people who are signing up for example: Captchas, strong password requirements, email confirmations, etc; a “Report” button that will allow Kwadu users to report suspicious activity and behavior from users; also, the Kwadu team monitors the site for any irregular behavior from suspicious users. Users violating our rules of conduct are banned and blacklisted from the site.