Jebena The habesha diaspora dating app

Jebena is an online dating app for Ethiopians and Eritreans focusing on the diaspora. Launched in April 2020, Jebena has been seeing pretty good growth. The platform currently has more than 26,000 users and has made over 60,000 matches. These numbers are very interesting and spark curiosity on how an app this young has managed to get successful this fast. Jebena is founded by a few software engineers in partnership with Selam Central, a social media platform with over 65 thousand followers on Instagram only.

It is fair to assume SelamCenteral has helped Jebena get its users, but I do not think this is the only reason. I have been using Jebena for about a month now. The app has a very clean user interface, the experience is very good and it is more or less completely stable. These things are very important if you want to keep the users you gained and it’s safe to say the team behind Jebena has understood this perfectly.

We went through the app on both android and iOS and it was more or less perfect except for a few small bugs here and there. Another main thing we noticed was something related to user experience. We expect most of Jebena’s user base has some sort of experience with other dating apps like Tinder. It would have been great if the developers used some gestures like swiping right and left on the iOS app that would’ve helped users that have previous experience with other dating apps.

I have noticed that the Jebena team is focusing on the habesha diaspora community. This is a great thing as one of their goals is "to build a safe mingling and dating platform for Ethiopians and Eritreans, especially the ones in the diaspora." But I think they also need to turn their focus to the local market as platforms like Jebena are very rare and the community here is also starting to need platforms like Jebena as its lifestyle is continuously evolving.