Suggestions to support device brands in African markets

I appreciate the thankless job you developers do building a privacy-friendly Android OS for smartphones.
I spend a lot of my residency in West African countries. Unfortunately, most of the smartphones easily obtainable in that market are non-popular brands like Infinix, Tecno, itel, vivo. These are also fairly affordable devices, hence their popularity in this third world region.
But none of these brands are supported by iodéOS or its upstream, LineageOS.
The third world is being consumed by Google and Apple’s surveillance and data abuse because the governments don’t care to protect its citizens (e.g. EU’s GDPR), the States might benefit from it and the people are too poor and ignorant to even care.
commonly supported Pixel, Oneplus and Samsung S series is too pricey for some Android lovers and brands like Sony and Fairphone have to be bought online and imported since they’re not locally common devices.
If possible could /e/ developers consider supporting maybe a few devices from these locally popular brands? It could also help any future activism on privacy on this front if an activist could point out that their local device can be flashed with a privacy friendly OS.

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/OS the deGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

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Out of curiosity, do you have a list of those rare phones?

I think the best bet is on GSIs, even if Mediatek (or Unisoc) have a more spotty history of support, there are Infinix, Tecno and itel devices.

See the ride-hand side of the treble wiki or this aggregated list.

If you find a working GSI there’s a high probability a (future / to be released) /e/OS GSI will work.

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They are not rare in africa, brands listed are every where !
So if you type on a search engine: cosmos Madagascar you will find them for example. There are others cases like Philips smartphones are rebranded itel phones. All are cheap chinese phones …