africa-excellence

name	africa-excellence
description	Canonical Africa-realistic excellence layer. Owns the low-bandwidth, mobile-money, USSD-aware, multilingual, country-trust, and cultural-pattern standards that every African-market site is built and reviewed against. Global defaults are the floor; this skill raises the ceiling for Africa.

Africa Excellence

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

Use when

• 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.

Do not use when

• 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.

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.

Required 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.

Quality standards

• 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.

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.

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.

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.