The last few months has seen activity with several notable entries into the online classifieds space:

N-SOKO – Done by the Nation Media Group (which unfortunately is rather graphics/flash heavy and thus mobile unfriendly). The fact that they already have a sizeable online audience makes many sellers flock there.
Kenyan Craiglist – It remains to be seen if the classifieds model that has worked so well in the west will work in Kenya (and developing Africa) where perceptions and mind sets are quite different.

There’s several other online classifieds. Try performing a random search on google for ‘Kenya Online Classifieds’.

One of the more recent entrants to the fray is MADUQA

MADUQA is a service that lets you to advertise your products and services; and also place buy requests online for FREE. Maduqa hopes to have surfers meet, sell, buy, chat, discuss and review products at maduqa.

It is generally a well done website though I have not tried it via a cell phone. With online classifieds however, the greatest challenge will be the generation of traffic to the website. This is where a site like N-SOKO has a sizeable advantage over maduqa.com.

Mobile & Classifieds

I think the eventual leaders in this space will achieve this by specifically developing a mobile version of their online classifieds – this is Africa and there’s more and more people going online with their cell phones than with computers.

Moses Kemibaro also did  a post on n-soko & craigslist.