Weekly Newsletter

Airtel Money's EBITDA margin just fell nearly four percentage points — not because the business weakened, but because Airtel renegotiated the internal charges the fintech pays its parent for access to distribution networks, mobile…

Eight years to reach one million customers selling solar kits. Six more years to reach ten million — but only after M-KOPA switched the product to smartphones.

The swing from a Sh2.47 billion loss to Sh102.5 million profit in a single year sounds dramatic. It isn't, quite — it's the delayed payoff of a structural decision made back in 2020, when Safaricom and Vodacom bought the M-Pesa brand…

What's easy to miss in the size of this raise is what it actually represents structurally: this is the first time Dangote Refinery has ever let external investors onto its share register.

The executive order settles the question of intent. Nigeria is no longer trying to push crypto out; it is trying to bring it inside a supervised system.

The continent sits on vast reserves of the minerals that go into EV batteries — lithium, cobalt, manganese — yet almost all of the manufacturing value has flowed to Asian factories. Africa digs it up; someone else adds the margin.

Five hundred thousand dollars in pre-seed funding. Acquired by a company worth $9.3 billion. By any measure, that is a remarkable return on a remarkably small bet.

R200 billion in annual throughput, 176,000 active traders, 79,000 payment devices — these are not startup numbers. They are the numbers of a platform that already runs a meaningful slice of South Africa's township and rural economy.

A South African bank buying a 66% controlling stake in one of Kenya's largest lenders for $794 million isn't just a big number. It's a signal that serious cross-border capital is now moving between African institutions, not just flowing in…

Early-stage funding fell from $25 million to $9 million in a single year. That's not a dip — that's a near-collapse at the exact moment the ecosystem most needs new companies forming.

The industry's own legal community is saying the quiet part out loud: with general elections roughly six months away, any future administration can quietly shelve this order without passing a single line through the Senate.

$210 billion in annual transactions flowing through 54 million customers — Airtel Money has clearly earned a standalone valuation.

Egypt actually raised more total funding than Nigeria in H1 2026 — $327 million to Nigeria's $254 million. Nigeria's headline 'lead' is an equity-only story.

ECOWAS has been announcing the ECO for over two decades. The 2027 date is the latest in a line of targets that have quietly passed.

The satellite licence gets the attention. But the more consequential piece is a US$170 million US Export-Import Bank-financed contract for a sovereign data centre, a government digitisation platform and smart border surveillance — all…

FNB, Absa and Nedbank joining a 140-company consortium — alongside Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock — to build a dollar stablecoin designed for AI agents to pay each other automatically isn't a crypto story. It's a bet on what commerce looks…

304 post offices across a country larger than Western Europe isn't a distribution network — it's a starting point. The real unlock here is subtler: Poste Finance isn't trying to sign up 100 million individuals one by one. It's onboarding…

MTN holds roughly four in every five mobile internet connections in Ghana. Letting it bid for 5G spectrum on the same terms as smaller rivals would almost certainly hand it the same dominance in the next network generation too.

Digital lenders in Nigeria now know the FCCPC — the country's consumer protection body — has the power to set the rules they operate by. Fines up to ₦100 million, director disqualifications, possible suspension. That was in doubt for…

ExpressRoute Metro does one specific thing: it routes a single cloud connection through two separate physical locations in the same city simultaneously. If one fails, the other carries the load. Until now, no African city offered that.

Beating fintech to become Africa's biggest funded sector sounds like a turning point — and in one sense it is.

A twelve-fold spike in digital wallet balances — from ₦5.4 billion to ₦65.4 billion — sits in First Bank's 2025 annual report with no name, no partner, no explanation. Then in a single quarter it's gone.

Eighty percent of Africa's consumer spending — think Coca-Cola, Heineken, Unilever — moves through small, fragmented physical shops that no algorithm can reliably see from the outside.

The National Bank of Ethiopia just banned self-custody — the act of keeping cryptocurrency in your own wallet, secured by a password only you know.

Voice was Ethio Telecom's biggest earner for over a hundred years. Data just overtook it — 31% of revenue against voice's 23.5%.

Medium-sized Nigerian businesses are being onboarded right now, with smaller ones following in 2027. Every invoice they issue will travel instantly to the Nigeria Revenue Service, carrying a unique reference number that lets the authority…

Most competition law asks one question: does this company own the market? Kenya's new Bill asks a different one — can this platform make your business unviable if you leave it?

Technology-neutral regulation sounds almost too sensible to argue with. Let a network provider use satellites, fibre, or mobile towers — whatever works — without a separate licence for each. That flexibility is genuinely valuable when you…

Zeepay wasn't the app on anyone's phone. It was the hidden layer that made the money arrive.

South Africa's plan to turn every SIM into a verified digital identity sounds transformative — and the underlying logic is real. SIM penetration is near-universal in ways that government ID offices never were.

Fewer than 2% of Africa's languages are meaningfully supported by modern AI — Tijani's own figure, and the problem ATLAS says it exists to fix.

When companies use algorithms to set prices in real time, there's no smoking-gun email between executives — just software reacting to software, coordination without conversation.

A licensing framework for crypto exchanges sounds like the obvious next step after years of enforcement-first policy in Kenya.

The source material here is just a headline and a summary — no actual provisions, no capital thresholds, no licence categories, nothing concrete to dig into.