africa-excellence

name	africa-excellence
description	Use when a website must work credibly in African markets across constrained bandwidth, mobile-first use, mobile money, USSD-aware journeys, local languages, trust, and cultural context; use deploy for release execution.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Africa Excellence

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Apply Africa-realistic product and delivery constraints without flattening diverse markets into stereotypes.

Use When

• Users face expensive or unstable data
• mobile money or USSD shapes conversion
• local trust, address, language, or device conditions affect the experience.

Do Not Use When

• Use as a substitute for country and audience research, or for deployment execution owned by deploy.

Required Inputs

Artefact	Source or provider	Required?	Purpose	If absent
Target countries, audience evidence, device and network profile, payment channels, language plan, and trust requirements	Research, analytics, client operations, and project brief	yes	Calibrate patterns to a real market	Stop when the market is described only as 'Africa' without country evidence

Workflow

1. Name countries, audiences, evidence, and constraints
2. Choose bandwidth, device, payment, language, trust, and offline-continuity patterns
3. Integrate requirements into content, design, commerce, and measurement
4. Stop on stereotype or unverified infrastructure claims, recover through research or qualified assumptions, then test on the agreed constrained profile.

Outputs

Artefact	Consumer	Acceptance condition
Africa excellence requirements and acceptance matrix	Website-builder, design-system, commerce, and deploy	Each market constraint maps to an implementation owner and observable test

Evidence Produced

Evidence	Consumer	Acceptance condition
Country evidence register and constrained-profile results	Product and release owners	Sources are locatable and unavailable tests are marked not assessed

Capability Contract

Read and search are required. Planning is read-only by default; implementation and network tests require authority. Live payments, USSD sessions, user contact, spending, and publication require explicit permission.

Degraded Mode

Without device, network, payment, or country evidence, return the narrowest qualified risk matrix, mark those checks not assessed, and do not generalise a pass across Africa.

Decision Rules

Choice	Action	Failure or risk avoided
Save-Data or constrained 3G is material	Serve a lighter media and motion path	Exclusion through data cost
Mobile money is a primary payment rail	Design explicit pending, failed, reversed, and receipt states	Payment ambiguity

Quality Standards

• Name the market and evidence; meet the repository's Africa-calibrated performance budget; support payment, language, trust, and recovery states relevant to the chosen country.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating Africa as one market. Fix: name countries, segments, and evidence.
• Adding flags and patterns as cultural localisation. Fix: adapt language, trust, payment, and service reality.
• Assuming continuous broadband. Fix: test constrained profiles and Save-Data behaviour.
• Showing mobile-money success only. Fix: cover pending, failed, reversed, duplicate, and receipt states.
• Certifying a country without local evidence. Fix: mark it unassessed and commission research or testing.

Worked Example

For Uganda, test the 350 KB target on the agreed 3G profile, expose MTN MoMo and Airtel Money pending/reversal states, and label any untested USSD handoff rather than claiming nationwide readiness.

References

• Website Skills authoring standard

Preserved Domain Use Guidance

• Any project for an African client, regardless of which African market.
• Any project whose primary audience uses African mobile-money rails, 3G networks, African languages, or lives in an African trust ecosystem.
• When reviewing a built site against Africa-calibrated standards before launch.
• When auditing a site that was built against global defaults and needs an Africa-specific upgrade.

Preserved Domain Exclusions

• The project's primary audience is not in an African market and will not encounter African mobile-money, USSD, or language contexts. Use sector-strategies and design-system defaults instead.
• Working on infrastructure that is shared globally and Africa calibration is already applied (the Phase 10 3G performance profile is an example — that is owned by deploy/references/africa-calibration.md and does not need duplication here).

Core contract

Every site in scope is built and reviewed against six standards owned by this skill:

1. Low-bandwidth performance — beyond the global defaults; AVIF first, font-subsetting per language, aggressive critical-CSS, Save-Data honouring. See references/low-bandwidth-patterns.md.
2. Mobile-money UX — if the site takes money, it meets the regional mobile-money provider patterns (M-Pesa, MoMo, Airtel Money, Orange Money, Wave, Flutterwave, Paystack) and formats currency without ambiguity. See references/mobile-money-ux.md.
3. USSD-aware design — where a feature has a USSD counterpart for feature-phone users, the web flow parallels and respects the USSD flow. See references/ussd-aware-design.md.
4. Multilingual depth — beyond "English + French"; Kiswahili, Luganda, Amharic, Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu, Twi, Wolof, Arabic, and Tifinagh are treated as first-class when the market requires. See references/african-language-pack.md.
5. Country-specific trust signals — regulator badges, association memberships, payment provider badges, and local certifications per market. See references/africa-trust-signals.md.
6. Cultural patterns — hierarchy of testimonials, family/community framing, photography conventions, and market-specific formality vs warmth. See references/cultural-patterns.md.

Preserved Domain Workflow

1. Classify the market. Identify the primary country and any secondary markets. Record in the strategy brief.
2. Apply the six standards to the design-system, page-build, SEO, and deploy work. Each reference states how the standard flows into the respective build skill.
3. Review against references at visual-QA and design-quality-score time. The rubric's category 6 (trust-signal placement) and category 7 (section originality) take their Africa-specific instantiation from this skill.
4. Verify at launch on a real throttled 3G device or emulated profile in at least one African market on a local mobile-money provider rail (where payments are in scope).
5. Document variance. Where a client requires deviation from an Africa-excellence pattern (e.g. a global SaaS targeting African enterprise buyers who use cards, not mobile money), record the deviation in a decision entry.

Preserved Domain Inputs

• Primary and secondary African markets.
• Payment rails in scope.
• Primary and secondary languages.
• Feature-phone relevance (does a USSD counterpart exist?).
• Client's sector and regulatory posture.

Preserved Domain Quality Guidance

• 3G-throttled profile loads the primary route under the 350 KB budget and LCP ≤ 2.5 s. The Phase 10 performance gate enforces this; this skill raises the bar where the gate permits.
• AVIF is the first image format; WebP the fallback; JPEG only when forced.
• Critical CSS is inlined; all other CSS is lazy.
• Fonts are subsetted per language actually shipped on the site.
• Currency formatting uses the ISO-4217 code (UGX, KES, NGN, GHS, ZAR, RWF, TZS, XOF, XAF) with no leading-zero ambiguity.
• Mobile-money UX surfaces provider choice before payment prompt and handles STK push, USSD prompt, and manual paybill flows distinctly.
• Trust badges are real and current; regulator badges link to the regulator.
• Testimonials prefer community framing where the market responds to community over individual testimony.

Preserved Domain Anti-Patterns

• Using global SaaS visual defaults (purple-to-blue gradient, diverse-office-stock photos) for African clients. These fail the design-quality rubric's originality category.
• Shipping a mobile-money-enabled flow that only covers one provider when the market has several large providers.
• Assuming "English" is sufficient language coverage in markets where the buyer or end-user primarily operates in another language at home or at work.
• Ignoring feature-phone users in markets where smartphone penetration is < 70%. The site may not reach them, but the flow should not break when a feature-phone user is on the call with a smartphone user.
• Copy-pasting a Kenyan-market site into a Ugandan-market site without revisiting trust signals and currency.
• Applying a Lagos cultural-tone template to a Kampala build or vice versa without verification.

Preserved Domain Outputs

• Every primary template reviewed against the six references before launch.
• A recorded Africa-excellence audit line in the project's launch log.
• A decision entry for any deviation from the references.
• Inputs to the design-quality-score rubric categories 6 and 7 (trust-signal placement, section originality) that reflect the market.

Preserved Domain References

• references/low-bandwidth-patterns.md — performance patterns beyond the global defaults.
• references/mobile-money-ux.md — regional mobile-money providers, STK push / USSD / manual flows, reconciliation UX, currency formatting.
• references/ussd-aware-design.md — when and how the web flow must respect a USSD counterpart.
• references/african-language-pack.md — the 10 first-class African languages: font support, expansion ratios, RTL rules.
• references/africa-trust-signals.md — regulator, association, payment-provider, and cultural trust signals per market.
• references/cultural-patterns.md — testimony hierarchy, photography conventions, formality vs warmth by market.

Notes

• This skill composes with sector-strategies (sector rules) and design-system (visual tokens), not instead of them. Global defaults still apply; this skill adds and sometimes overrides.
• The Phase 10 performance gate and this skill share a heritage but have different scopes: the gate enforces a numeric threshold; this skill defines pattern practice.
• The benchmark library (Phase 12) will include at least one site per major African sub-region against this skill.