Weekly Newsletter

MTN already holds the float, already has 70 million active mobile money users, already processes $330 billion in transactions every half-year. The case for lending from its own balance sheet rather than sharing the margin with partner…

360,000 homes a year is an impressive number. But South Africa has roughly 4.5 million homes connected to high-speed internet today, against a stated potential of 15 million. The gap isn't mainly capital — it's been affordability in…

A joint venture can be wound down. A separately incorporated holding company with its own capital structure is much harder to undo.

A 30% selldown condition sounds like a footnote. It isn't.

The EBRD crossing into sub-Saharan African venture for the first time was yesterday's point. Today's question is whether it moves.

Eighty-four deals, $11.4 billion — that sounds like a maturing market finding its shape.

The headline is the reclassification. The substance is what nearly killed it.

The EGP 319m scandal at Global Paradigm wasn't a rogue operator going off-script. It was the logical endpoint of a market racing for borrowers faster than rules could catch them.

Moniepoint spent £1.2 million setting up in the UK, dropped another $2.5 million acquiring a regulated payments licence, then watched transaction volume grow 70% — and still walked away.

500 fibre cuts a week. $1.1 billion to spend. And a CEO pointing out that Airtel and its rivals are literally burying cable in the same ground at the same time.

A R4 billion freeze is striking. Two separate courts refusing to lift it is something else entirely.

MTN's CEO Ralph Mupita put it as plainly as anyone can: "we can't put any money in, and we can't take any money out." That has been true since 2018. It is now about to get significantly worse.

Faking two experts' CVs to win a $98,000 Somalia contract is embarrassing. Receiving ten written reminders from the World Bank and still refusing to hand over your accounting records — that's the part that should alarm anyone who cares…

African governments pushing for data sovereignty — keeping citizens' data stored and governed locally, not on foreign servers under foreign law — has mostly been framed as a headache for big cloud providers.

Spectranet took over a decade to build a base of 111,000 subscribers. Starlink matched it in roughly three years — and is closing the remaining gap of 12,742 at more than double Spectranet's current growth rate.

Stratos Lab and its partners have deployed frontier Nvidia B300 GPUs — chips so tightly controlled that Taiwanese authorities are still running export-compliance checks as they leave the factory — into a data centre north of Johannesburg.…

The SEC's own source says it plainly: this capital threshold isn't designed around what Nigerian crypto exchanges actually earn. It's designed around what the SEC wants the industry to look like when the dust settles.

The African Union's new credit rating body launching in Mauritius on 5 October would matter enormously if it works. African governments genuinely do pay more to borrow than their underlying finances often justify, and a credible…

MTN Nigeria's mobile money business has been underperforming — revenue fell 7.2% in the first half of 2026 even as wallet numbers grew, largely because Nigeria's central bank forced it to suspend its lending services.

Moving from government approval to signed contract with credible builders — Thales and IAI — is a real step forward. The ecosystem should register it.

Hugging Face is where African AI builders go to grab models, share datasets and skip the cost of building from scratch. It has stayed useful precisely because no single company controlled it.

The deadline itself is the mechanism. Kenya's compliance cut-off doesn't wait for a regulator to act — it lets time do the work, quietly sorting who stays from who can't.