Maneno http://www.maneno.org is a blogging platform designed for people writing from Sub-Saharan Africa. The names means 'words' in Swahili and focuses on being low latency/filesize to make it fast to load on low bandwidth connections. Additionally it focuses on being a self-contained, heavily multilingual system.

The core of the system was envisioned after a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008 by two of the founders. They realized that while trying to write articles from the country via VSAT connections, the connection speeds proved incredibly slow and discouraging for not only them, but anyone striving to pursue citizen journalism endeavors. Additionally it was shown that the language spheres of Africa had nearly no crossover between one another. Taking these issues in to account and coming to the conclusion that no current blogging system adequately addressed them, this entirely new platform for blogging was created to serve the African blogging community in order for it to grow and foster cross-communication between those writing in different languages and from different countries in Africa.

Currently Maneno is available in Bambara, English, Spanish, French, Fula, Swahili, Lingala, Portuguese, and Zulu. The available languages cover all of the lingua franca languages of Africa as well as a selection of large local African languages that are gradually being added to. The site works in allowing a user to be able to view and interact with the site in any one of the languages available for the interface as well as being able to translate articles and sections of the site via a crowdsourcing method.