Weekly Newsletter

Public markets have now spoken three times on this deal: $10 billion, then $7 billion on paper, and today an actual share price that makes it real.

The credibility gap was closing. The engineering contract was signed, the sovereign equity structured, the groundbreaking date fixed.

Crossing $2 billion a full month earlier than 2025 is a real improvement. But Africa: The Big Deal's own data shows 269 startups raised meaningful money this year, down from 332 at the same point last year.

HabariPay built its own switch — the infrastructure that routes money between accounts — and quietly connected 12 to 13 Nigerian banks and major fintech companies to it.

OnePurze's 20-country rollout looks bold on a launch flyer. But the source material reveals a specific structural gap: for its five West African BCEAO-zone markets — Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Benin — OnePurze admits it has no…

281 licensed lenders sounds like a regulator finally in control of its market.

Nigeria already built the infrastructure for tech companies to go public. The NGX has a Growth Board, a Technology Board, and the Startup Act even has listing provisions baked in. Yet not a single VC-backed startup has tested any of it.

A planned IPO is easy to announce. What's harder is showing up to debt markets and borrowing against your own loan book at scale — because sophisticated bond investors, who awarded MNT-Halan an A- credit rating across three tranches, don't…

Back in July, Ghana's regulator added a 40% pricing premium to MTN's 5G bid — precisely to stop the company that already holds most of the country's mobile internet connections from buying dominance in the next network generation too.

The shift to debt in African fintech isn't a sign the ecosystem is maturing evenly — it's a sign the gap is widening.

Justice Pokanu's ruling lands on one precise idea: putting behavioural tracking inside your terms of service doesn't make it necessary to run the service.

155,397 fibre cuts in two months — roughly 2,500 severed lines every single day — means Nigeria's mobile operators are constantly rerouting, retrying, and patching. That costs money, and that cost lands on users.

Kenya runs $209 million a month through card terminals — and almost every one of those transactions routes through Visa or Mastercard's international infrastructure, paying fees and ceding data for a purely domestic purchase.

Okra built genuinely impressive technology — a financial data infrastructure play in Nigeria that attracted real attention. What killed it, TLCOM now argues, wasn't the founding team. It was the market: too few buyers willing to pay, too…

The agents who built Kenya's financial inclusion story are now being displaced by the very behaviour they trained.

Twenty thousand merchants onboarded across the Gulf in roughly eight months — that's the number sitting behind this raise.

The live demo was impressive. But the thing that actually moves 40 million people is not the app — it's the 31 March 2028 deadline on the green ID book.

South Africa's watchdog has done something specific: it has made IHS operationally independent of MTN and locked in equal pricing for every rival operator — on paper, permanently.

Replit didn't just hire two founders — it shipped a native feature built on Atta's engine within weeks of the deal closing. That's a product acquisition, not a talent grab.

Novitske's sharpest observation isn't about phones or payment apps — it's that African startups are already building on Chinese AI models like Alibaba's Qwen because they're cheaper and more accessible than American alternatives.

The WOAN reservation is gone — but the statement withdrawing it is careful to say what remains: rural coverage obligations, wholesale capacity requirements, a ban on any single operator hoarding the spectrum.

Dr Rakiya Yusuf's question at last week's TechCabal brunch cuts to the bone: if a bank moves its primary database to Nigeria but keeps its backup offshore, has anything actually changed?

Equipment costs eat 60–70% of any solar project's budget. That's the number that explains why thousands of African solar installers, staring at genuine customer demand, simply can't scale — traditional lenders won't finance gear before…

Until now, MTN could argue these cases were procedural — and technically, it was right. A motion-to-dismiss ruling doesn't find guilt; it just decides whether a claim is worth hearing.

Selling prepaid airtime and data doesn't sound like a bank's core job. But Capitec's value-added services arm — airtime, electricity, money transfers, mobile connectivity — now generates nearly as much profit as the personal banking…

Two weeks ago, Wave — francophone Africa's most-used payments app — was conspicuously absent from BCEAO's lists. Today it's on the 175-participant roll, having connected to PI-SPI on the last possible day.

MTN and Airtel together hold roughly 86 percent of Nigeria's mobile market. A new licence for STN doesn't move that number — not yet, possibly not for years.

The barrier stopping most African asset managers and pension funds from touching digital assets has never really been belief — it's been the absence of somewhere safe and regulated to put them.

The bottleneck in M-Pesa merchant payments was never trust or reach — it was the sequence: find the Till Number, type it, enter the amount, wait for a prompt, enter a PIN. Five steps to pay for lunch.