Canva goes hyper-local in SA

South Africa attracts a steady flow of global tech activity, thanks to remaining a major entry point for global technology companies operating on the African continent. Yet, only a handful of companies arrive with a strategy shaped for the country’s realities.

Design platform Canva is taking that route on its own terms. The creative software company, with 240-million monthly users globally, has based its South African launch on local language, imagery and behaviour. More than that, it has placed hyper-local relevance at the centre of its African ambitions.

Canva serves 28-million paid users, has produced more than 40-billion designs globally and is used inside 95% of the Fortune 500. Its annualised revenue sits at US$3.5-billion. Companies operating at that level seldom tailor their approach for individual markets.

“Canva’s mission is to empower the world to design, and we mean the whole world,” said Duncan Clark, Canva’s head of Europe, Middle East and Africa, speaking to Gadget during the company’s South African launch in Johannesburg this week. “There are 77-million designs made by people in South Africa every year.”

Asked if there was an epiphany that made him realise South Africa should be a key market, he said it happened when he read a startling statistic.

“Within 25 years, by 2050, 40% of the world’s school children will be in Africa. We think a lot about education and a lot about school students being the next generation. I thought that stat was extraordinary. And so that was the trigger for me to say, ‘Come on, let’s do this’.”

A number of South African universities already use Canva in classrooms, creating a pipeline of students who enter the workplace with design fluency built into their habits. The same pattern emerges in companies across the region.

“Often we have thousands of users inside a company before we have a formal relationship with them.”

Six South African languages are being built into the platform at launch – isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi and Afrikaans – with others planned. Language provides the base, although South Africa’s cultural landscape signals a far broader set of expectations.

How does a platform used heavily by individuals, businesses and educators reflect the visual cues and contextual details that shape how people communicate in different parts of the continent?

“When we think about localisation at Canva, we do not only mean translating the interface, we mean the elements that people can add to their designs,” says Clark.
“Breakfast in South Africa means something very different, potentially, to breakfast in Argentina.”

Dr Mzamo Masito, Canva’s Africa expansion lead, has an emphatic answer.

“That’s a very important question, because other than language, the next phase is, how do we make sure that we have design templates, illustrations, photography that is really truly South African. And not just truly South African, but that is truly KZN, truly Limpopo?

“We realise that one of the best ways to do that is to grow the community and then have what we call Canva creators who not only create for fun, but they can also monetise their designs, and they can get paid a royalty fee for their designs.

“If they are in KZN, and they’re in deep rural KZN, they can design deep rural, culturally relevant, traditionally relevant designs that we can then ingest into the country. And the more we grow the community, the more you are able to make the design truly, truly hyper-local.

“There’s another program within Canva called Canva edu creators. Teachers can design curriculum-based relevant content, but they can also earn passive income through their designs.”

Visual content feeds the same strategy.

“We have partnership where we’ve run a photography competition where we allow a photographer to shoot whatever they want to shoot in their area, so that we can get more hyper-local visuals,” says Masito.

Localisation extends further into payment behaviour, which influences adoption in any mass-market platform.  He points out that South Africa is not truly a credit-card market, but mostly using debit-card and mobile payments. Canva already supports M-Pesa in East Africa and plans to introduce equivalents for South Africa, along with shorter billing cycles suited to local consumer habits.

All of these insights feed into the platform’s underlying strategy for Africa.

“My aim actually is, you must be sitting in some township, and one day it’s hyper-local for that place,” says Masito.

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.