Beginning on January 1st Ivorian artist and student O’Plerou Grebet start posting an Africa related emoji every day till the end of the year on Instagram. Grebet taught himself how to create emojis after getting fed up of seeing just poverty images of Africa. He wanted to depict the beauty in the everyday lives of African people.

“My idea was to create emojis so Africans can have emojis they relate to.”

In December 2018, he incorporated all 365 emojis from his project into an app which he titled ‘Zouzoukwa.’ which means “image” in the Bete language spoken in Ivory Coast.