Weekly Newsletter

M-KOPA's product margins have halved. The gross profit from selling handsets and motorbikes fell to $57.9 million last year, while interest income from financing those same purchases generated $145 million after losses — more than twice as…

The story everyone told about Koko's collapse was simple: the Kenyan government blocked the carbon credit letters, the subsidy model broke, 700 people lost their jobs.

The hardest number in this data isn't the near-zero returns. It's the 21 acquisitions with undisclosed prices.

The $7 billion valuation is real. The 36% revenue growth is real. The $213 billion in payments processed is real.

Months after closing a $250 million raise at a $2.1 billion valuation, Moove is leaving Nigeria — the city, Lagos, where it started with 76 cars in 2020.

The CBN forced Airtel Money to sell its Nigerian stake — the vehicle through which it runs SmartCash — back to the local telecom subsidiary for $3 million, weeks before a $7 billion London listing.

Three-quarters of all mobile money transactions in West Africa are now free by law. That's the BCEAO's own figure — 75 per cent of transfers fall under the 8,000 CFA franc daily threshold where providers can charge nothing.

J.P. Morgan announcing a merchant bank in Nigeria is a genuine signal — not hype. This is the world's largest bank by assets choosing to plant a licensed, operational presence in Lagos, not a representative office, not a holding company.

The number that should stop every investor in their tracks: $123 million raised, $1.6 million recovered. That's not a startup that ran out of luck — that's capital that essentially evaporated.

The prior barrier wasn't the model — it was the cost of adapting one. Western foundation models tokenise African languages so inefficiently that running them for Hausa or Yorùbá burns through money most local startups simply don't have.

FNB's customers can buy Bitcoin from as little as R10, but they can't move it anywhere — no withdrawals to a personal wallet, no transfers to another exchange, no bringing in coins they already own.

The most honest thing said at AfCRA's launch came from a former Nigerian vice president: it can't just be a nationalistic agency.

MNT-Halan arrives at Cairo's exchange with a loan book approaching $1 billion and 1.9 million active borrowers — this isn't a startup asking the market to believe in a vision.

OPay, Moniepoint, Kuda, PalmPay and Paga didn't just get a status upgrade — they got elevated to national microfinance bank status, meaning the CBN officially recognises them as country-wide operators. That sounds like a formality. It…

Kenya and Uganda approving cross-border access to the Dangote IPO sounds like a genuine pan-African capital markets moment — ordinary people across East Africa buying into Nigeria's biggest-ever listing.

Over 90% of internet traffic between Europe and Asia runs through a strait less than 32 kilometres wide. When that gap becomes a warzone, there is no switching to another sea cable — they all pass through the same narrow water.

Frehiwot Tamru didn't just run Ethio Telecom — she built Telebirr into a platform with 60 million users and scaled 4G to cover most of a country of 130 million people. Now she writes the policy that governs competitors trying to do the…

Doubling the e-money wallet limit to 4 million FCFA — roughly $6,900 — is a real unlock. Across eight francophone West African countries at once, it means a small trader or a mid-sized merchant can actually hold and move meaningful money…

The headline number is $300 million. The actual capital committed so far is $25 million — the World Bank's opening injection, roughly 8% of the target.

MTN paying $202 million was never really in doubt — the company has the cash, the existing spectrum, and a $1.1 billion investment pledge already in motion.

The IMF's figure is striking: Nigeria alone accounts for roughly 60% of Sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows since 2019. That's not adoption — that's concentration, and it tells you something specific.

Telecel was always the fragile piece in Ghana's 5G story — the smaller, part state-owned challenger that the whole competitive structure depended on to keep MTN honest.

Infinite Partners raised R2.8 billion entirely from South African pensions, insurers and banks — no foreign development finance, no overseas anchor. That's the real story.

The headline is real: 58 startups, $583 million, the best quarter of 2026. Two consecutive years of growth would mean something genuine after the funding collapse that bottomed out at $1.12 billion in 2024.