Weekly Newsletter

For most of 2026, Nigeria's official benchmark rate sat at 26.5%. Banks ignored it. The rate they actually used to price loans and deposits was around 22% — the standing deposit facility rate — because that reflected what money actually…

Ten hubs, 12 million people, 2,200 health facilities — the scale is real. But the mechanism behind it deserves as much attention as the numbers.

The NGX hitting 250,000 points is genuinely significant — institutions repositioning ahead of Nigeria's FTSE Russell reclassification, banks recapitalising, oil and gas stocks up 126% year to date. The market momentum is structural, not…

Kenya's regulator banned gambling ads from Opera Mini's browser bookmarks in 2024 — and that single ruling killed the economics of the entire advertising subsidiary, Phoneserve Technologies, which had been providing free data to 13.5…

The $35 million is the headline. But the number that explains it is 20,000 — the merchants Paymob onboarded across the Gulf in roughly eight months after securing a single licence from the UAE's central bank in January 2025.

Bank Zero got to profitability with 275,000 direct customers — a number that would make most banking investors nervous — because it built its own core banking system from scratch for under R300 million ($17 million). Its CEO says a…

The most consequential sentence in Kenya's draft National Payment System Bill, 2026, is tucked away almost as an afterthought: the Central Bank of Kenya "shall make regulations to give effect to this section."

Seven major CBN interventions in eighteen months — frozen accounts, onboarding bans, crypto restrictions — were framed as Nigeria fixing its anti-money laundering gaps to exit the FATF grey list. Nigeria exited in October 2025. Then the…

The Central Bank of Kenya's draft bill sets KES 250 million — roughly $1.93 million — as the capital floor for electronic money issuers. And critically, borrowed money doesn't count: no shareholder loans, no convertible notes, nothing that…

A Lagos High Court just ruled that when you grant an app access to your phonebook, you cannot legally consent on behalf of everyone in it. The people whose numbers get uploaded, stored, and searched never agreed to any of it — and under…

The first payment licence Algeria has ever issued went to Djezzy — a company the Algerian state fully owns.

Yesterday's take covered the mechanism. Today's detail worth noting is simpler: this deal is being called replicable, and that claim deserves scrutiny.

The CBN's data localisation order has a January 2027 deadline. Nigeria's data centres, it turns out, have enough physical capacity to absorb the load.

A surgeon in Ogun State removing a cancerous kidney from a patient 500 kilometres away in Abuja, guided through Starlink, is genuinely extraordinary.

Luno's acquisition of GTXN isn't really about crypto. It's about the correspondent banking chain — the two or three intermediary banks every cross-border transfer in Africa hops through, each one adding a delay, a conversion fee and its…

Reaching one million home internet subscribers sounds like a ceiling. It's actually a floor — and the competition has noticed.

Alibaba's Qwen models are cheaper and more available than US alternatives — so African startups are building on them. That's a rational choice today.

Nearly $2 billion raised sounds healthy. But two deals — Spiro's $270 million and Moove's $250 million — account for more than a quarter of that total on their own.

50MHz of prime radio frequencies — the kind that push mobile signals deep into buildings and out into rural areas — have been sitting unassigned in South Africa since 2020, held in reserve for a wholesale network that never got built.

Kenya spent one day in New York arguing Africa should negotiate AI as a single bloc — common terms, shared compute, collective leverage. The next day, Nairobi signed its own bilateral declaration with Anthropic.

The AI in this story is real, but it may not be the point.

Every large infrastructure announcement comes with a credibility gap — the gap between what's declared on a stage and what actually breaks ground.

Three documented exits in a matter of months — Beltone's 3.5x from Egyptian proptech, Eos Capital's 4.4x from Namibia, and now Five35's 3.5x from Complete Farmer — is not a coincidence. It's a dataset.

Binance's reported $100 million into Circle is less a vote of confidence in ZARU than a wager that institutional money will finally do what it has been promising to do in African foreign exchange for years: actually settle there.

No dish, no specialist kit — just a compatible phone pointed at the sky. That's the genuinely striking thing about what Airtel and Starlink have built in Uganda: the infrastructure problem is largely solved.

The $300 million Nigeria DRE Fund now has its UNGA moment. NSIA, Africa50, and SEforALL on the same stage, 'commercial launch' declared, Mission 300 invoked.