The success of online people searches in any country depends on the level of internet usage in that country and the laws regarding public and private information. When looking at a place like you can find people online but with lots of challenges.
Lets us look at some things that you need to know about using to identify the person behind a phone number. Unlike in most countries, things like birth records, medical records and other public records are not open to the public for viewing. They are not even available online. If you want to search for someone based on these records you would have to go the local government offices of wherever you are interested in searching.
What is available are the white page directories for most of the countries in Africa. So you can access the white pages of any country you want to search through and use them to search. That is as about as close as you will come to using a people finder in Africa. One place that I know that specializes in international white pages is numberway.com. You can look them up to see if they have the ones that you want.
The only country that stands out is South Africa. You will find a couple of people finders that are capable of tracing people in this country. Otherwise when it comes to using a people finder in Africa, your best bet would be to try searching using the social networks. You might also be able to find people finders for specific countries in Africa but few that are able to cover the whole entire continent.
The first place that I would mention among the top people finder websites is abika.com. In fact abika.com is no longer considered as a site it is referred to as a people search engine. That should give you some idea of the amount of information that it carries. You can carry out phone number and address searches from here. You can search for people through public records and other online directories. Other finders that I would list alongside abika.com are zabasearch.com and wink.com. You will more or less find the same information from these ones.
There is also the issue of mobile phone number searches which are not covered by the popular sites. Yet cell phone number searches are one of the most requested searches on the net. If you want to look up mobile numbers you can use places like nonpublished.com and cellphonedirectory.com.