Weekly Newsletter

The headline number — $1.4 billion raised in six months — looks like stability returning. But the same money went to 42% fewer deals than last year.

The headline is that Morocco ended a bank monopoly on card payments. The deeper thing is a single number buried in the central bank's July decision: a 0.15 per cent interchange cap for small neighbourhood shops, the hanouts that run…

€270 million is a headline number. But the mechanism underneath it is what actually matters for the continent.

The $1.5bn headline is real. But the report quietly names the actual problem: most African climate startups aren't failing because their technology doesn't work. Solar panels, battery systems, carbon tools — all proven. What's missing is…

Airtel Money hit $1.36 billion in revenue last year — up 36 percent in a single year, across 54 million customers.

That RWF 20 ceiling — less than one US cent — isn't just cheap. It's a near-total price collapse: Bank of Kigali customers who were paying up to RWF 5,000 per transfer now pay 250 times less for the same move.

The Bank of Ghana didn't pull Zeepay's licence for a paperwork failure. It pulled it because Zeepay was issuing electronic money — real wallets, real balances — without holding the actual cash to back them.

Uber is paying $16.9 billion partly to enter food delivery markets in Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt — countries where it already runs cars but never launched its Eats product.

The ITU formalising this warning doesn't change the hardware reality — there is still one repair ship, the wait is still measured in weeks, the permitting delays still double repair times even when a ship arrives.

Signing contracts for six times more power in the first half of 2026 than in the same period last year is not a marketing number — it means real companies are committing real money to keep servers running in Uganda, the DRC, Côte d'Ivoire.

More than half of Africa's 74 tracked accelerators were inactive by 2025. That number sounds like a market correction. It's actually a confession.

Koko Networks raised over $100 million, put clean cooking fuel into 1.5 million Kenyan homes, and employed 700 people. It died because a government ministry didn't issue a single letter.

Rebrands often signal a company running from what it built. This one is different.

South Africa's 30% local ownership rule has kept Starlink out for two years. Amazon simply walked around it — not by fighting the rule, but by letting Herotel hold the licence entirely.

Angola is selling 15 per cent of Unitel, its biggest telecoms company, and the offer closes July 24. The problem is that half the company was seized by presidential decree in 2022 — and the former owners are still fighting that seizure in…

Diamond Trust Bank argued its systems worked perfectly — every transaction had the right PIN entered. The court wasn't interested.

Rose Muturi didn't just run Branch Kenya — she was there when Branch used a microfinance bank licence to transform from a lending app into a full neobank.

The constitutional argument is real, but the sharpest detail isn't about Parliament — it's about forfeiture.

Safaricom's jump to 54.17% in its Ethiopian operation isn't a permanent grab — it's a temporary accounting of who wrote the cheque this round.

A $29 million facility to buy and ship tower equipment sounds procedural. But the specific mechanism Standard Bank chose matters: a documentary credit guarantees that Helios Towers' suppliers get paid the moment goods ship, before a single…

Stakpak raised $500,000, kept its engineers in Cairo, and got acquired by a $9.3 billion company. That is a real outcome on a genuinely small budget.

The real-time tracker gets the headlines, but the provision that actually matters is smaller and sharper: any dollars a Bureau de Change buys from Nigeria's official market and doesn't sell within 24 hours must be returned.

Canal+ isn't just running MultiChoice now — it's restructuring it around a Paris-facing logic.

The number that should stop everyone cold: vandalism alone caused more than 54,000 of Nigeria's fibre cuts in just two months. Ten-year prison sentences are already on the books under the national infrastructure protection law. The cutting…

252 licensed lenders sounds like a mature market. The number that actually matters is 800 — that's how many firms applied since 2022, meaning more than half are still waiting, still operating in a grey zone, or gone.

Nine out of every ten naira Interswitch earns still comes from Nigeria — after two decades of operating across the continent.

The reason agritech in Africa struggles to attract private money isn't that investors don't care about farmers — it's that smallholder agriculture looks too unpredictable to back commercially.