Weekly Newsletter

The DRC launch is live. The more telling detail is what Airtel's CEO said immediately after: the rest of the rollout depends on country-by-country regulatory approvals across thirteen other markets.

The detail that matters here isn't the $2.1 billion. It's the footnote: Africa's last four unicorns — Moove, Tyme, Moniepoint, MNT-Halan — are all Endeavor companies.

Two takes in, the same tension sharpens: a company selling African governments on homegrown defence systems is now confirmed to be opening a London office justified partly by access to talent it can't find — or won't recruit — at home.

The N2 billion capital requirement for exchanges grabs the headlines. But the retail investment limits in this proposal may do more damage to Nigeria's crypto market than anything aimed at operators.

Cell C now hosts an estimated 80–85% of South Africa's MVNO market — meaning most of the country's virtual mobile operators run on its network. That's a dominant position. But the more interesting detail is who those virtual operators are:…

South Africa produces roughly 70% of the world's platinum and 38% of its manganese — two materials central to the infrastructure powering the global AI build-out. Not one African country has signed the US agreement designed to govern…

Knight Frank's $10–20 billion projection is striking. But the real engine underneath it isn't cloud growth or AI hype — it's a single regulatory deadline.

SpaceX is asking ICASA to rewrite the rule. Amazon just hired someone who already had the licence.

An 86% reduction in CPU and database load isn't a marketing figure — it's the difference between a platform that buckles under demand and one that can keep processing when a market like Ghana has a peak payment day.

Seven million UnionPay cards are already in circulation across Africa. Standard Bank just gave 900 merchants across nine markets a way to accept them online — in local currency, dollars, or both.

The funding gap is the number that deserves the most attention here. Nigeria's government has secured roughly $900 million in commitments from the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the EBRD toward a project that needs $2 billion…

Transsion shipped 29.2 million smartphones in a single quarter — fourth in the world, faster-growing than anyone above it. That is not a niche emerging-market story. That is a global consumer technology business.

The mechanism here isn't a tax break or a licence requirement — it's a purchase order. Nigeria is essentially promising to be cloud providers' biggest customer if they build their servers on Nigerian soil first.

NIGCOMSAT's existing satellite was launched in 2011 and, by the agency's own admission last year, only 7% of its broadband capacity was actually being used. That's the uncomfortable baseline behind today's announcement.

Offering East African governments an equity stake — not just a supply contract or a tax deal — is a genuinely different move.

South Africa spent years trying to build a Wireless Open Access Network — a government-mandated wholesale broadband layer that would let smaller providers ride shared infrastructure instead of each building their own. It never materialised.