Techcabal21's Posts
Nairaland Forum › Techcabal21's Profile › Techcabal21's Posts
 Career › Digital Nomads: The Pastor Turned Tech Bro by techcabal21(op): 11:17am On Mar 26, 2022 |
“Even if I have the call of God, it doesn’t mean I can’t have a career. I shouldn’t have to rely on church offerings to survive. Here’s where people have a problem with pastors: they believe that most pastors wait for tithes or offerings. But that’s not me.” When Jay*, a pastor-turned-data-scientist, was in his final year as a computer engineering student at the Oduduwa University in Osun state, Nigeria, he decided his final year project would focus on e-voting in Nigeria. “But that topic wasn’t approved,” he says. The reason, Jay says, was that the lecturers in charge, at the time, knew nothing about the applications of tech. “They told me to be realistic. This was 2018, mind you, but they said that tech wasn’t that important in the country, and that I should research something else. I can’t remember what I finally wrote about, but I know it had nothing to do with tech and its potential impact on our society.” If the impact of tech on voting would not be important in 2018, the year before Africa’s most populous country conducted its last general elections, when would it ever be? For Jay, this event pushed him towards putting his degree to good use and becoming an all-round tech bro. He doesn’t think his lecturers meant any harm, but he believes their lack of knowledge on the impact of tech will have damning consequences on the students they teach. Although he’d been studying computer engineering, Jay already had a first love: ministering. Born to a Muslim mother and Christian father, he believes he’s been ordained by God to preach the gospel. “My father died early, so I had to live with my paternal grandmother, and that’s where I got introduced to the word.” From his university days, Jay had been working as a minister, teaching the bible under his own ministry. His only worry was how to make an income independent of the church’s income. “I knew I had to have a career outside ministering. The problem most people have with pastors is that a lot of us depend on the church’s income. I didn’t want that.” So, during his National Youth Service—a mandatory 1–year programme all Nigerians must participate in, in service of their country—Jay branched out into tech. He developed design skills and worked as a graphics designer for 17 months before moving to another company to work as a user interface designer. Months later, in 2020, Jay landed a hybrid role working as a data annotator for a US-based company that uses artificial intelligence to measure consumer needs. If you’re wondering what a data annotator does, you’re right to wonder. It’s an unsung profession. “As a data annotator, my job is to collect and label data that the AIs will use to forecast how consumers will react to e-commerce products,” Jay explains. “For example, we take the iPhone 13 and try to figure out its impact on users in the next few years.” Think of data annotation as teaching or training a computer. Focus on AI increased significantly this decade with $77 billion getting invested in the sector, a 113% increase from 2020’s $36 billion investment. In Africa, though, investment in the AI sector is low, accounting for only 3% of total startup investments. It’s no surprise then that data annotators, whose work primarily focus on AI, are scarce on the continent. “We haven’t really hacked the importance of AI on the continent, and that’s why there aren’t many data annotators. Whenever I tell people about my job, there’s a bit of scepticism and doubt. There are always questions about what I do, even from top professionals in the field.” On his experience with the job, Jay says he enjoys the process and hopes more Africans would get into the field. If there’s any complaint he has, though, it’s the pay gap between him and his non-Nigerian colleagues working for the same company. In the Nigerian context, the job pays fairly well, with Jay getting ₦250,000 ($600)/month plus benefits, including pension, HMO, and a work laptop. The benefits are the same with the company’s non-Nigerian employees, except for one big difference. “I know some of my US colleagues earn about ₦2.5 million per month, even though we’re doing the same job for the company.” Even with the pay disparity, Jay is still pretty comfortable with his job. “It’s better than nothing, and it helps me provide for my family without having to depend on the church’s income.” In addition to his design, product, and data annotation skills, he’s also learning software engineering to help him become an all-round tech bro. “I’m not just doing this for me,” he says. “In the same way I’m teaching the word, I also want to teach tech, and that’s why I’m learning these skills.” In the near future, he hopes to bring more people to the altar of tech and preach to them the good news of how much tech can improve their lives. *Name has been changed to protect the owner’s identity. Source Read more Digital Nomad stories here
|
| Career › Digital Nomads: The Nigerians Escaping Ukraine’s War by techcabal21(op): 10:06pm On Mar 23, 2022 |
Kemi “At first, we were laughing. Isn’t that the Nigerian thing to do? Use humour to mask fear?” When we speak to Kemi*, a fourth-year medical student from Nigeria, she is in an apartment in Hungary with her friends, all of whom had spent 5 days fleeing Ukraine. “It’s funny because, a few years ago, I was on the other side of the border.” As an international student, Kemi’s journey to Europe started in 2015 when she landed in Russia to start medical school. Before Russia, she was one of the medical students at the Houdegbe North American University (HNAUB) in Benin Republic who spent years under the deceit of an unaccredited faculty. “I was in my fourth year when we realised HNAUB was duping people. I was called back home and my mother had already handled the transition process to Russia.” Although she had to start all over again in Russia, Kemi found the schooling environment better than what she’d experienced in Benin. “We had cadavers to work on, and most of it was practical. In Benin, they just lectured us, and we never got any real experience, even when we got to higher classes.” By her third year, Kemi and other international students in Russia were told they would have to learn Russian because the remainder of their course would be taught entirely in Russian. “It was impossible,” she says. “We were learning by speaking, by repeating what our lecturers said to us. To learn a new language, coupled with our course, was impossible. To make it worse, they said we couldn’t transfer to another school abroad while in Russia.” The alternative given to them was to leave Russia and apply for new student visas from their home countries. Fortunately, someone was able to help them process admissions into a university in Kyiv, and that’s how Kemi found herself in Ukraine in 2018. “Ukraine was different from Russia,” Kemi says. “The schools weren’t as hands-on as Russian schools were, but they were just as good. The environment also came with an added advantage: the opportunity to do business.” Ukraine is one of many countries where intakes with student visas aren’t allowed to work formally without work permits. It’s difficult to get employers to hire English-speaking students for everyday jobs. “It’s not like America where you can get jobs flipping burgers at McDonald’s; there are no jobs like that here,” Kemi says. Students, all of whom are given temporary residence permits, can work unofficially or do small businesses by registering as private entrepreneurs. Ukraine is home to 76,000 international students, and about 19,000 are of African descent. This number keeps growing by the year for a number of reasons. Life in Ukraine is quite cheap, with most students able to survive on less than $200 per month or $2,500 per year, a 300% difference from the US where most international students would require an average of $10,000 per year to live. University acceptance rates are also higher, and students find it easier to transfer from Ukraine to other western countries. According to Kemi, who owns a catering business, she used to make as much as $1,000 a month with a hectic schedule. It was enough for her to pay her off-campus rent, afford other necessities, and still have some change left for flexing. But with the onset of the war, she lost everything. They first heard the sirens at 3 AM on the 24th. When they went outside, Kemi and her friends found the streets of Kyiv full of people who were rushing in and out of department stores stocking up on supplies. “We bought whatever we could,”Kemi says. On the second night, they tried to stay in a bunker close to home but returned home when the bunker turned out to be chilly. “On the third morning, the tremors woke us up. Everything rattled and the whole building shook. We didn’t even think twice, we packed our documents, a few other things, and left.” With her friends, Kemi went to the train station where they met hundreds of people waiting for the trains to come. Armed soldiers announced to the crowd that only women and children would be allowed in—no men. “What we didn’t know was that by ‘women and children’ they meant European women and children’. We had to fight to get to the trains, and even when we got on, we were pushed off them.” That first day passed and Kemi and her friends couldn’t get on any of the 2 trains that stopped in Kyiv. They tried to opt for road transport, but the cab drivers were charging $1,600 for trips that would normally cost $50. “We couldn’t afford that, so we went back, and on the second day, we were finally able to get on a train leaving Kyiv.” There was no space to sit or squat on the train, so they stood for 7 hours near the door, from where they were blasted with minus-0° winds. “The second train station at Lviv was no better. At least in Kyiv, we could see that the trains were full. At Lviv, there were spaces on the trains, and they only let Ukrainian women and men on. We had to fight again till we were able to get another train to Uzhhorod where we stayed for 2 nights before we left for Hungary.” While they found Uzhhorod quiet and peaceful compared to Kyiv, their stay was cut short when Ukrainian soldiers burst into their hotel room on the second night, questioned them, and searched through their phones for photos of Ukrainian soldiers. “We wanted to stay there but it was obvious we weren’t welcome,” Kemi says. They left for the Hungarian border where they were asked if they would apply for refugee status or for temporary residence permits. “Refugees status means going back to Nigeria, and no one wants that. The authorities would take our passports, too, and the only pro is the free accommodation and feeding.” They opted for the 30-day residence permit instead and they’ve been fending for themselves since then. Akam Akam, a Nigerian aerospace engineer living in Ukraine, was woken by bomb blasts around 5 AM and he felt his building vibrating. He looked out through the window to see what was happening and saw hundreds of people trying to escape the bombings that were occurring simultaneously. Akan recalls that he could only pack the belongings that he could carry and get to the next available shelter even though he didn’t know which building could be hit next. When we speak with Akam, he’s fled to Slovakia, leaving behind a flourishing life and career in Ukraine. Despite the difficulty he faced in moving away from the war by train—a relatively safer means of transportation—he was able to get to Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia. The train station was crowded with families trying to board a train from Kharkiv to Lviv, a Ukrainian city that is just 50 miles from the border of Poland—the safest place, to be at the time—as it allowed citizens to move to Poland, a NATO country; and attacks on it due to its proximity to the Polish border carries serious repercussions for Russia. Since the war started, Akam has been in constant communication via phone lines and WhatsApp with his family, but he shields them from any graphic or controversial information about the war to prevent them from being more worried than they already are. “You can’t tell them that they’re dropping bombs in front of you.” I filter what I share with them.” While Akam wasn’t able to get to Lviv, he was fortunate enough to get a train to Uzhhorod, a city 2 kilometres away from Slovakia. But, due to the crowds on the roads, he had to walk for 30 minutes. Upon getting to Uzhhorod, it took him 12 hours to finally cross the border into Slovakia. Akam arrived in Ukraine as a student empty-handed, but with bags of dreams and heightened hopes for his future, and when he started acquiring properties in this foreign land, he felt fulfilled. Over the years, he got a good-paying job, attained job security and peace of mind that allowed him to comfortably take care of himself and support his family back in Nigeria. Devastated and filled with hurtful memories, Akam does not go into the details of how much he has lost. “You wake up one morning to find that all the things you have spent years acquiring are gone.” Fortune For Fortune, Russia’s invasion wasn’t cause for alarm; he’d had some experience with the Ukrainian crisis. In 2014, during Russia’s first invasion to recover Crimea, Fortune’s brother was living in Luhansk, the heart of the war in Donbas, which claimed over 13,000 lives, 3,000 civilians included. “When my mom asked if he wanted to return home, my brother said yes,” Fortune says. “He was able to buy a ticket and get on the next flight home as his city was being bombed.” A year later, in 2015, Fortune packed up his bags and left Nigeria for Ukraine. Before the war, there were about 19,000 international students of African descent studying medicine in the east European country, and while some, like Kemi, think highly of Ukraine’s educational system, Fortune’s stethoscope hears something different. “To be fair, I haven’t gone to any other universities, but the one in Ternopil isn’t that great.” According to Fortune, the lecturers are flaky, and if students really want to succeed, they can’t depend solely on lecturers or their lectures. “But I’m done now,” Fortune says. “I finished last year, and I was going to leave Ukraine this year. This war just speeds things up.” While Fortune’s brother was able to leave Luhansk easily, Fortune’s own journey out of Ternopil took 2 weeks of careful planning and deliberation. “The situation is different from 2014. You can’t get out that easily.” A day after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy instituted martial law and grounded commercial flights. The reason isn’t so far-fetched. In 2014, a Russian missile shot into a commercial flight passing through Ukrainian airspace, killing 283 passengers on board. Ukraine doesn’t want a repeat on its land, so people like Fortune who want to go home have to find other means. “I waited,” Fortune says. “On the first day, everything was a bit calm. People were running around in the streets buying provisions, and my friends, and I joined them. But when the warning sirens came the second day, and we started to feel tremors, people panicked and started to leave in droves.” But Fortune declined to join his friends when they left. “It didn’t make sense at the time,” he says. His patience paid off when some of his friends returned from the Polish border days after. “I know people who were at the border for days, freezing their asses off trying to get out. I know some who were beaten and pushed,” Fortune recalls. To him, it’s not all racism though. “Yes, they didn’t want black people to cross through first—that’s no surprise. But I also think there were too many people at those borders; everyone was on edge. They got the worst of it, the ones who tried to leave in that first week; they saw the worst of everything.” Two weeks after the invasion, almost all the black students had left Ternopil, and only Fortune and his friends were left. “When we went out, people glared at us as if to say, ‘Why are these ones still here?’ That’s when we knew it was time to leave.” He packed a suitcase, left most of his belongings behind, and hightailed it to the Hungarian border where French volunteers were helping African students fill out applications for refugee status and living permits. What’s next? What’s next for Fortune is writing the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MBCN) qualifying exams in Nigeria, and then finding a way to get to the UK. “Before all this,” he says. “I was already applying for visas to leave Ukraine for the UK where my brother is.” Kemi’s journey is not so certain. “We’re still not sure of what’s going to happen to all of us. They say we can transfer to Hungarian schools, but it’s not certain yet. I’d still prefer to finish in Ukraine, though.” She hopes that the war will end before her 30-day permit is up so that she can return to her apartment in Ukraine where most of her belongings are. When we ask Akam about his next steps, no response comes. *Name has been changed to protect the owner’s identity Source
|
| Nairaland General › She Built Her Natural Wig Business Online And Now Has Customers 70 Countries by techcabal21(op): 8:06pm On Mar 23, 2022 |
My Life In Tech is telling the stories of Africans making a difference in the world of tech. As our interview drew to a close I asked her what dreams and goals she had. “Essentially, I just want to be happy…” This was how she began her answer. The other part of her answer that stuck with me was her plan to sell natural hair wigs to “black women everywhere.” With her business Natural Girl Wigs, she now ships to black women in over 65 countries. We talk about growing up in Lagos and falling in love with her hair. Her story takes us from building a community on social media to later growing a successful tech-enabled business with that same community. Her name is Oluremi Martins-Areola and this is her life in tech. It’s all about hair. Black hair. “I’ve always had a very interesting view of my hair.” Many Nigerian millennials remember where they were when Agbani Darego won the Miss World Pageant in 2001. I remember a lot of rejoicing on my street when the announcer said “Miss Nigeria.” For Oluremi, the pageant was one thing to be excited about but Darego’s iconic hairdo would be the thing with the lasting influence. “My father would indulge me during the weekends and take me to go do the Agbani Darego style,” she said. By Monday she had to return to whatever hairstyle her secondary school had assigned. But for those weekends, Oluremi’s hair could do whatever she wanted it to. She went on to study history and diplomatic studies at the University of Lagos but for her, deciding on what to study was not something she had bothered about too much. “It was actually never about what I was going to study. I always knew that school would be a stepping stone to whatever I wanted to achieve. I felt I was going to go into some type of media or doing a business that had an impact so I felt like it was okay to do anything in school.” While at the university, she became active on social media and started learning about digital marketing through online courses. This would help her land a job as a social media manager for a consulting firm right out of school. She changed jobs a few times before finally working at Image Boosters, a digital agency where she would begin to form the idea for her business. “It was a personal awakening for me because I had this beautiful natural hair and anytime I wanted to buy wigs or protective styles it was always these European or Indian weaves.” Oluremi’s business started with an Instagram page where she built a community of black women who wanted to care for their hair but also get access to wigs made just for them. “I thought, why shouldn’t I have wigs that look like my natural hair…” She soon began selling wigs sometime in 2018 and eventually left her job after six months of running the Instagram account. Looking back on her decision to leave paid employment and face her business full time, Oluremi tells me it was tough. She had just gotten a promotion that came with more money and deciding to leave at that time felt scary. But by the end of her first year, she had made revenue of up to six figures in dollars – and she hadn’t even set up her website yet. Her dream of reaching black women around the world was slowly starting to take shape. Building Natural Girl Wigs Before the pandemic, Oluremi already ran a remote workforce. Save for the actual making of the wigs, there was no need for her staff to be physically present for anything. She counts this as one of the reasons the pandemic didn’t disrupt her business too much. Natural Girl Wigs is currently in its third year. After making impressive sales in the first year, it became important for the company to have its own solutions available on a website and not just a social media account. The business now caters to black hair in different ways. Of its features, The Hair Quiz stands out. With the quiz, customers are able to answer questions about their hair and are provided with recommendations on hair care and products. The website also provides hair tutorials and content tailored to black hair. One of the toughest parts of running an e-commerce business anywhere in the world today has to be logistics. To ease the strain of shipping to one of her biggest markets – the U.S. – Oluremi had to start manufacturing the wigs in the U.S. as well. “Logistics is a serious challenge we’ve faced. We currently work with a third party entity that handles delivery for us.” With Natural Girl Wigs now delivering to countries all over the world, Oluremi points out how a community was key to growing. “The theme for the initial Instagram page was just me posting things around beauty and lifestyle to a great community of people that would be interested in the product I was going to launch.” The community has continued to grow and Natural Girl Wigs currently has close to 60,000 email subscribers. Looking to the future For Oluremi, the future for Natural Girl Wigs involves scaling manufacturing. A lot of the materials being used are currently being imported from China and other countries. “When I was doing my research, I realised that most of the manufacturers of hair are Chinese or Asian and a future I would like to explore is one where I have a factory where we make hair from scratch in Africa.” Away from work, there are a few things Oluremi enjoys: hanging out with her husband, going to restaurants, attending events in Lagos. She hopes to continue to do these things that make her happy. She would also like to help people realise the paths to their own goals and dreams. Whether through her Instagram videos on growing your business or any other medium she may use soon, Oluremi is keen on letting people know that it’s never too late to go for the things they want because as she puts it, “whenever you wake up is your morning.” Source
|
| Science/Technology › Peace Ojemeh’s Haze Monkey Finds A Home In The $80 Billion NFT Industry by techcabal21(op): 7:36pm On Mar 22, 2022 |
“Holy f*ck.” That was what Beeple tweeted when “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days”, his non-fungible Token (NFT) art and the first purely digital work of art ever offered by a major auction house, was bought for $69 million at Christie’s in March last year. This event didn’t only make Beeple the third richest artist in the world, it ushered in the beginning of a new era for the art world. While Beeple’s was the most expensive JPEG NFT format, profile-pic NFT (PPF)—NFTs that depict a portrait that can be used as a social media avatar—also hit some record-breaking milestones. For example, Crypto Punk NFTs that were given out for free in 2017 at launch started trading for prices between $480,000 and $1.25 million in January 2021 and, by the end of the year, they wouldn’t go for anything less than $4 million. Though NFT has been around since 2014, 2021 was the pivotal year for this “novelty and strange” technology. It was the year it broke into the mainstream, disrupting the art world and waltzing its way into the hearts of almost every aspect of pop culture, from music to film to sports and literature. While all of this was happening, a crop of young and curious African minds have also started to develop an appetite and build an NFT ecosystem on the continent. Although it felt—still feels—like a myth to the broader population, more people had started buying into it. Jacon Osinachi was well on his way to becoming the foremost NFT artist on the continent and, arguably, the world. Anthony Azekwoh would soon create and sell his first NFT “The Red Man”, one of the most popular NFT pieces out of Africa. Zimbabwean Nyasha Warambwa’s “We’ll Meet Again”, a digital art of late African-American entertainment and sports stars—DMX, Kobe Bryant, Aaliyah, Chadwick Boseman, Tupac Shakur, and Nipsey Hussle—would soon be picked up and displayed on a billboard in New York’s Times Square. Somewhere in Abuja, Nigeria, is Peace Ojemeh 24, a Nigerian product designer and an Open Source advocate, who, like everybody else, is trying to understand the “insanity” around this technology, the reason anybody would spend millions of dollars on something intangible—something they might never touch physically. While Ojemeh was still making sense of this, the original copy of “Disaster Girl”, a viral photo meme of a girl smirking as a fire roared behind her, sold for $500,000 (180 ETH at the time). “Reading about Disaster girl, a meme I casually use in my WhatsApp chats with friends, selling for such a ridiculous amount of dollars, was an awakening. I just knew I had to get in on NFTs,” Ojemeh told TechCabal. But judging from Ojemeh’s journey, this could have been all talk. That wasn’t the first time Ojemeh would get excited about crypto and its related ventures. In 2017 and 2018, she had planned to buy her first ethereum (ETH) but ended up not going through with it. When she finally did something in the space, it was a disaster. She bought edcoin, a crypto token from a Nigerian blockchain company Edmark. She even convinced her mother and uncle to invest in it but a few months after, while ETH ballooned into over $1,000, Edcoin started dropping in value. By 2020, it was obvious edcoin wasn’t going anywhere so she began to think of how to flip this seemingly bad investment into a lucrative one. She withdrew her investment from edcoin into ETH and then into e-gold and some other coins that yielded positives. This experience exposed her to the slippery world of crypto and the learnings from it shaped how she approaches crypto today. Founding Haze Monkey Society So instead of going right into NFTs after the “Disaster Girl” news, Ojemeh decided to learn about the industry, and invested in some NFTs to have access to their communities to understand how they function and are being managed. By the time she gathered enough knowledge, she reached out to her friend Alabo Briggs, 22, a blockchain engineer, about building their own NFT collection. Having done some work in NFT prior that time, Briggs got on board quickly. With a bold ambition to build a strong and important community like Crypto Punk and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) had built, the duo hit the ground running without looking back. So, in August, while Pablo Stanley, one of the most respected product designers and doodlers in the world, was launching Robotos, a 10,000-robot NFT collection, and selling out, Ojemeh and Briggs started building a collection of stoned monkeys they would call Haze Monkey Society. Haze Monkey Society was launched as a collection of 4,200 NFTs focused on building a no-code platform aimed at empowering NFT creators and artists and making an environmental impact in Africa. “Because we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, we needed to associate ourselves with a successful project while not being a complete replica. So with the success of BAYC, we chose to identify as monkeys,” said Ojemeh. “Haze indicates the weed-smoking culture among creatives. It’s also an inspiration behind our unique number: 420.” A thoughtful roadmap One of the things that determines the success of an NFT project is its community. And what makes a community thrive is the utilities, the benefits, that come from holding such NFT. Ojemeh and Briggs know this, and that’s why they spent a lot of time deliberating on their roadmap. “We don’t want to just sell NFTs, we are keen on finding a way to provide value to Haze Monkey’s holders,” said Ojemeh, who also consults for the United Nations, the International Telecommunication Union, and the African Union on a project that exposes technology as a career path to girls across African countries. Besides access to an exclusive social community, there are 3 major benefits on Haze Monkey’s roadmap. One of them is the no-code platform which Ojemeh said was born out of creating an environment where people don’t need deep tech knowledge to harness the blockchain technology. The next one is the animation series about Haze Monkey’s unique stories where holders and community members will be characters. Lastly, the duo, having been born and bred in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where petroleum exploration in the area continues to pollute their water and atmosphere, decided to include something personal to them: they want to plant 100 trees somewhere in Africa for every single NFT minted. A learning curve that led to a new direction About 10 days before Haze Monkey NFTs would start its public minting in February, the team behind the project launched a countdown campaign and daily Twitter space discussion, where the community would come together, ask questions, calculate the societal impact of the project and, most importantly, the fortune it promises. The minting calendar had been set; the public minting price was set at 0.08 ETH at a maximum of 4 NFTs per address and the presale price for those who had been whitelisted after performing some tasks or winning giveaways was pegged at 0.06 ETH at a maximum of 2 NFTs. In one of those Twitter Spaces, a community member with a monkey avatar and a Mexican accent asked what would happen if the collection did not sell out within the opening week. For a few seconds, there was silence and one could tell he’d ask an unexpected question. It was obvious the team hadn’t considered this. “Well, the plan is to sell out, but in a situation where we don’t the community will decide what to do,” answered Ashlei, one of the US-based community managers who was moderating the space. Before the countdown campaign started, Haze Monkey had gathered over 5,000 organic social followers and over 6,000 Discord community members from across the globe. The project had also been listed and verified on 7 of the largest NFT platforms—NFT Calendar, NFT Drop, NFT Evening, Coin Market Cap, Rarity, Next Drop, NFT Genie, and Rarity Sniper. With this increasing traction at zero marketing budget, the possibility of not selling out was out of the question. But Haze Money did about 20%. Among other factors, this could be attributed to the recent scare of stolen NFTs that was happening on OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace in the world. However, the slow movement couldn’t deter the team as they’ve quickly started looking for new strategies. They are currently iterating their roadmap to suite the new reality and as a result, the community has agreed to reduce the amount in circulation. “As a request from the community, our genesis collection was cut down to 1,242 with a vision of releasing the rest over time,” Ojemeh told TechCabal. She also mentioned that the community had initially agreed to cap volume at 1, 000, but because of how significant 420 is to the project and its weed-cultured monkeys, the number 1,242 was chosen. Haze Monkey is now a collection of 1,242 NFTs. Though built by Africans in Africa, Haze Monkey has already positioned itself as a global brand. In its Discord group, the project has about 5 different channels for people who can’t speak English. Its team members are also from across the world. There is an increasing number of African women venturing into the NFT scene, minting and selling their own NFT, but there’s none building a collection of NFT at the scale that Ojemeh and her team are doing. Ojemeh believes that as they continue to build on the genesis collection and iterate their roadmap to benefit their community, there’s nothing stopping Haze Monkey from becoming one of the most valuable NFTs in the $80 billion industry — and that their “holy f*ck” moment will soon come. Source 1 Like
|
| Career › Ebun Okubanjo, Bento Africa's Founder Accused Of Work Place Bullying by techcabal21(op): 10:06pm On Mar 21, 2022 |
“Bento took everything from me—my sense of humanity, sanity, confidence, and trust,” Pascal*, an ex-sales executive at Nigerian payroll startup Bento Africa, said about his time working there. “We worked around the clock. Ebun [CEO and co-founder of the company] would send you messages by 2 AM and expect a response asap. No rest. We went to bed every night praying our jobs would still be there when we woke up the next morning.”Source 8 Likes 3 Shares
|
| Business › How Spleet Became A Fintech Solution For Tenants And Landlords In Africa by techcabal21(op): 9:23pm On Mar 16, 2022 |
When Akintola Adesanmi started Spleet in 2018, the original plan was to help common Africans, starting with Nigerians, find houses and pay rent monthly, seamlessly and cost-effectively. For anybody who’s rented a house before in Lagos, particularly, this might pass as the best news ever. Adesanmi, an ex-product manager at Guaranty Trust Bank Plc now Guarantee Trust Holding Company (GTCO) and eTranzact, one of Africa’s pioneering payment companies, was frustrated by how much anxiety he experienced whenever his annual payment of rent was due. He wasn’t the only one feeling this way, his friends and colleagues felt like too. So, he decided to do something about it: how about sourcing for understanding landlords who’d allow monthly payment instead of the “soul-sucking” annual payment? But finding that in Lagos is like finding a fish that lives on a tree. So he launched Spleet, a marketplace to connect people with living spaces. He convinced property owners—corporate and individual landlords—to list their houses on the platform for monthly rent, which, of course, is very unusual. For most Nigerian landlords, It’s better to chase a tenant once rather than 12 times in a year. And you can’t blame them; the annual rent payment cycle is their way of mitigating default risk. Although Spleet was a good development for tenants, it wasn’t entirely so for landlords who are used to receiving lump payments and planning their fiscal year around it. While the startup kept attracting more tenants, it couldn’t match up on the landlords’ end. In fact, it took Spleet 15 months to onboard 16 landlords and about 101 spaces on the platform. “Growth was slow on the landlords’ side. We just couldn’t add as many landlords as we wanted to on time. But on the tenants’ side, we had great occupancy rates—an average of 90% month-on-month occupancy rates.,” Adesanmi told TechCabal. It became apparent that this model would not scale. But what would scale? That was the next question the startup needed to answer to unlock its growth potential and, ultimately, stay in business. According to the Knight Frank Africa Report 2020-202, Africa is already suffering from a property deficit. That means, there are not enough homes to house the continent’s ever-growing population. To make things worse, the few decent houses available aren’t affordable, on the average. The cost of renting a house in Lagos, for example, is totally disconnected from the earning power of its inhabitants. That’s two problems: availability and affordability. It’s expected that in the case of scarcity, things become expensive. But in a situation where availability can’t be readily solved, then a system that helps people meet affordability should be created. So last year, after over 3 years of trying to scale its marketplace, Spleet realised that it must continue to create affordability for tenants—which is supporting monthly payment—but ensure that landlords could also get paid annually, which is the conventional setting it wished to disrupt in the first place. Now that they had the problem figured out, how could they build a sustainable business model around its solution? This is where MetaProp comes into the picture. MetaProp is a New York-based venture capital firm focused on the global real estate technology industry. It holds an annual proptech accelerator programme known to be the world’s foremost in that sector. Getting into MetaProp changes everything Before Spleet got into the MetaProp accelerator, the largest proptech accelerator programme in the world, last year, it had applied in 2019 but didn’t get in. At that time, MetaProp wasn’t familiar with the African business landscape, let alone the continent’s property market. But Stripe’s acquisition of Paystack in 2020 created a ripple effect that got everybody—including MetaPro—interested in what’s happening on the continent. So, by the time Spleet reapplied, the accelerator was more versed about doing business in Africa, super curious, and ready to make an entry into the continent. Spleet became the first and one of the only 2 African startups that have ever gone through the programme. The programme only accepts 9 startups yearly. The 6-month-long programme ended last month, and, on Tuesday, Spleet announced a pre-seed funding of $625,000 led by MetaProp VC with participation from Future Africa, FEDHA Capital, VFD Group, and Moonshot VC. Angel and syndicates—HoaQ, CEO of Squarefoot, Jonathan Wassersturm, CEO of Flutterwave, Gbenga Agboola, and others—also wrote cheques for the round. But, besides the funding, the startup came out of the programme with perhaps the most important thing—a new direction. As expected, the programme helped them to further understand the rental culture in Africa and how to build a sustainable business around the solution at scale—hence a pivot. “So, we’re essentially now pivoting to building an infrastructure for landlords and tenants. It won’t just be a marketplace. We’re building financial services for both landlords and tenants, facility management for landlords, and automation tools,” said Adesanmi. What this means is that Spleet won’t just be a platform where people go to look for houses to rent, it’s now a platform where tenants can request a loan to pay for rent and then spread the repayment across a maximum of 12 months. This way, tenants can continue to pay rent per month and landlords who want annual payments can be served as well. Adesanmi mentioned that the startup has partnered with a bank that provides the loan and then shares the return on the interest with them. Initially, before the rent-now-pay-later product, the startup had only made money from the rent paid by tenants. Looking through the numbers, one can only ask how the startup was able to survive till now without external funding. For Adesanmi, being capital-intensive is the answer. Apparently, Spleet had raised an angel round of $265,000 in 2019 and has managed to stay afloat that long on that capital. “There’s no point in raising when we haven’t figured out how to grow. We only knew what we must build, but we haven’t yet figured out how to scale it—so why raise capital?” said Adesanmi Adesanmi said Spleet’s financing offering was launched into beta last week and has already recorded over $10,000 worth of requests. Something they likely haven’t experienced in their 3 years of operations. Going forward, it looks like Spleet is finally ready to become the go-to platform for everything residential in Africa. Last month, it was reported that a bill seeking to compel landlords in the federal capital territory (FCT) to receive rent monthly has passed second reading in the Senate. Similarly but more diplomatically, the Lagos state government planned to launch a programme where landlords volunteer to receive payment monthly, hoping that by acting as a guarantor in a new payments system, landlords would be encouraged to switch to accepting monthly rents. Coincidence or not, Spleet is well positioned for this moment. Source
|
| Business › A Fantastic February For African Tech: Here’s What Matters by techcabal21(op): 8:46pm On Mar 16, 2022 |
After a dazzling January debut that saw Africa-focused tech startups raise over $430 million from roughly 60 announced deals, fundraising in February was similarly feverish. The shortest month of the year witnessed approximately 60 announced tech deals across the continent comprising ~$600 million in disclosed funding, according to Afridigest’s weekly tracker. So far, Africa-focused startups are on pace to raise ~$6 billion in disclosed funding and over $7 billion in total funding this year—assuming disclosed funding stays at ~85% of total funding. (In 2021, according to Partech Partners, fully disclosed deals represented 85% of total funding.) In terms of the number of deals, Nigeria led the way with 18—~31% of the total number of deals announced in February across the continent. But these Nigerian deals represented ~57% of the ~$600 million raised in the month, thanks largely to Flutterwave’s $250 million Series D (the continent’s second mega-round of 2022); it alone accounted for ~42% of February’s total disclosed funding. Regional spotlight February saw a return to fundraising dominance by the “Big Four” countries (i.e., Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt). Unlike January which saw the four countries account for just about half of disclosed funding, the Big Four accounted for a whopping 95% of disclosed funding raised in February. Sector breakout Sector-wise, fintech unsurprisingly led the way again, attracting 52% of disclosed funding in the month (up significantly from January’s 29%), followed by software’s 16%, thanks largely to chat commerce software provider Clickatell’s $91M Series C. The top 5 sectors that attracted funding in February were fintech, software, e-commerce, healthtech, and mobility. And rounding out the top 10 were logistics, connectivity, crypto, proptech, and insurtech. Trends and developments While fintech, overall, continues to be ascendant, developments in February emphasised one broad theme in the sector: There’s still a massive opportunity in financial infrastructure. In 2020, I wrote that “in an ecosystem, the pre-potent layer is infrastructure [and] there generally remain robust opportunities to create ventures that introduce basic or alternative infrastructure that can underpin the entire ecosystem”. This still rings true today, and February brought with it a strong reminder of the opportunity in building fintech infrastructure across the continent. Nigeria’s Flutterwave is now the most valuable startup in Africa, thanks largely to its initial focus on and success with building prized payments infrastructure. Other payments infrastructure providers like Nigeria’s TeamApt and Kenya’s Ubawa raised rounds in February; Egypt’s MoneyHash raised a pre-seed to build payments orchestration infrastructure that integrates and sits on top of payment providers like Flutterwave; South Africa’s Stitch and Kenya’s CredRails raised rounds to build open finance API infrastructure; and CrowdForce raised a round to grow its last-mile financial services distribution infrastructure. While it’s appropriate to lead with fintech, given its dominance in February, perhaps it’s a well-worn theme for regular observers of ecosystem trends. That said, February also saw interesting, fresh developments relative to strategic acquisitions and investments across the continent: M&A in African tech is heating up. At the start of the year, I put forth that an increase in strategic bolt-on and tuck-in acquisitions is among 5 major trends to expect across Africa’s startup ecosystem in 2022. And thanks to a very acquisitive February, this now seems prescient; at least eight acquisitions were announced in February alone. (This trend also continues into March with a number of additional acquisitions already announced, just halfway through the month.) Strategic minority investments are on the rise. Coupled with the uptick in outright and majority acquisitions, February also saw an increasing number of companies take strategic minority positions in various startups (in Egypt mostly, but elsewhere too). Egyptian non-bank consumer finance provider Contact Financial invested $9 million in Egyptian shopping browser Wasla to help it deploy BNPL offerings, Egypt’s Brimore invested $5 million in its logistics spinoff Milezmore, the UAE’s super app (& Uber subsidiary) Careem took a stake in Egyptian food delivery platform Elmenus to gain more exposure to a strategic vertical in a high-potential market, and Mauritian survey-focused gig economy platform Rwazi invested in Mauritian HR tech platform KrediblePro which helps it source talent. Switching gears and looking back to the article, “Key trends & themes to look for across Africa in 2022“, I offered there that “2022 could see the rise of crypto/blockchain/web3 projects deployed across the African continent as it increasingly becomes the global centre of utility-driven ‘web3’.” And February brought good tidings for web3 in Africa: The race to onboard African users to web3 is on. In early February, Nigeria’s Nestcoin, a builder, operator, and investor in web3 applications (in the mold of the US’s Digital Currency Group) raised a sizeable pre-seed backed by a mix of globally-recognised web3 VC firms and local investors in order to accelerate crypto and web3 adoption in Africa. And later on in the month, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Jambo Technology raised a seed round of its own backed by Tiger Global, Coinbase, & other names that the global crypto community would easily recognise in order to build the “web3 onboarding portal of Africa”. Also in the month, Canza Finance raised a seed round for its DeFi neobank play that acts as a crypto on/off-ramp, enabling a variety of services including staking, P2P transfers, and cross-border settlements. (And, notably, this trend has continued at least through the first few days of March, with announced fundraises from crypto exchange VALR and airtime-based crypto onramp Fonbnk.) While the crypto or “web3” sector heats up, other sectors worth watching include healthtech, foodtech, “vehicle tech”, and logistics. Healthtech is warming up. In my piece on the Africa tech trends to watch for this year, the fourth prediction began: “2022 could see significant developments in non-fintech sectors like healthtech.” So far so good in February as the month saw the $40 million Series B of Nigerian health insurance & telemedicine platform Reliance Health, Kenyan digital health record and healthcare management platform Afya Rekod’s seed round, Nigerian health (and job loss) insurance platform Casava’s pre-seed, and Nigerian pharmacy-focused procurement & management platform Remedial Health’s pre-seed and acceptance into Y Combinator’s W22 batch. Foodtech is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. January saw Orda, a Nigerian restaurant management platform, raise a pre-seed round to build digital infrastructure for restaurants. And the momentum in the sector carried over into February with fundraises from Egyptian B2B restaurant supply chain platform OneOrder, Egyptian B2B cold-chain logistics and agri-goods storage platform Freshsource, Nigerian food delivery platform HeyFood (also a participant in Y Combinator’s W22 batch), Kenyan tech-enabled B2B food distribution andlogistics platform Kwanza Tukule, and Egyptian food delivery platform Elmenus’ strategic investment from Careem. It’s still the early stages of foodtech in Africa but entrepreneurs and investors seem to increasingly see a sizeable opportunity here. Everybody’s gotta eat after all. Vehicle access and maintenance are attracting increased attention. February saw fundraises from: Nigerian mobility platform MAX, which is increasingly focused on providing access to low emission vehicles via collateral-free subscription packages; Kenyan electric mobility startup Basigo, which provides locally assembled mass transit electric buses; Nigerian vehicle management platform Mecho Autotech, which offers vehicle insurance & maintenance subscription packages; South African digital vehicle identity platform CarScan; and Tunisian automotive claims digitization platform Avidea. Mobility is an everyday need, and in the African context, the sector faces a number of challenges, from insufficient public transport infrastructure to low vehicle affordability to the ubiquity of older, barely roadworthy vehicles “dumped” across African markets to a lack of trust and transparency in various processes (from purchase to insurance claims), and more. It’s with this lens that one should view the traction and variety of approaches within the continent’s “vehicle tech” sector. There’s still lots of love for logistics. In addition to fintech, tech-enabled logistics has been among the sectors receiving significant investor attention in recent years—trucking logistics in particular. From the $30 million Series A of Nigeria’s Kobo360, the $23 million Series A of Egypt and MENA-focused Trukker, and the purported $20-$30 million Series A of Kenya’s Lori Systems, all in 2019, to the $20 million Series B of Kenya’s Sendy in 2020 to the $42 million Series A of Egypt’s Trella in 2021, there’s been a lot that investors have loved when it comes to logistics. This love was kept alive in February with fundraises from Kenyan trucking logistics platform Amitruck; Egyptian instant delivery and quick-commerce specialist logistics platform Yalla Fel Sekka; Egyptian cloud fulfillment, last-mile delivery, and customisable operations platform Milezmore; and Moroccan logistics management platform Freterium. Final word All in all, it was a fantastic February across Africa’s startup ecosystem, which bodes well for 2022 and beyond. And early returns in March, including fundraises from M-KOPA and VALR, suggest that the pace won’t slow anytime soon. While an increasingly common refrain is that there’s too much focus across the ecosystem on fundraising news and figures, one thing it allows for is connecting dots, synthesising and contextualising developments, and sense-making as done here. What matters isn’t (just) the numbers, but the narratives behind them. Source
|
| Jokes Etc › The Untold Story Of How Thriveagric Survived A Turbulent 2020 by techcabal21(op): 11:25pm On Mar 15, 2022 |
In September 2020, a few days after Muhammed Akinyemi didn’t receive payment for a 6-month poultry cycle investment made in ThriveAgric, he informed his lawyer about this but didn’t take legal action. He was expecting the sum of ₦581,000 ($1,200) for the ₦510,000 he’d invested in March. Akinyemi had also invested ₦200,000 in April, which was due (₦224,000) in October. “At first, I just felt it’s money, and it’s with them. Whatever the problems are, within a week or two, they should resolve it,” Akinyemi said. “But I found out that they hadn’t addressed the issue to all their subscribers; rather they were explaining to individuals. And there was no specificity as to when it would be resolved.” Unfortunately, a few weeks later, Akinyemi’s car broke down and he urgently needed money to fix it. ThriveAgric hadn’t yet paid him and he was running out of patience. He was one out of hundreds of ThriveAgric’s retail investors who hadn’t received the payments. His lawyer sent a warning notification to ThriveAgric, threatening to sue if the issue wasn’t resolved. Akinyemi also put out a tweet calling out the company to fix the problem. He tried to rally around other retail investors who hadn’t been paid, but a number of them didn’t want any media attention. “We fought it from the legal and social aspect,” said Akinyemi. Over 500km away, in Southwestern Nigeria Osun State, Esther*, a poultry farmer who partnered with ThriveAgric, had lost over 1,000 birds because there was little to no movement. “It was a difficult period losing my birds in the middle of the pandemic,” Esther said. She was one out of many farmers within ThriveAgric’s network who suffered massive losses. While the losses incurred varied among the farmers, depending on the capacity of their pens, ThriveAgric shared that there were over 400,000 mature birds that had no buyers. Despite efforts made by ThriveAgric to rent more cold rooms for storage of processed chickens, the lack of buyers and difficulty in moving the birds during the pandemic meant that over 90% of the birds were lost. The losses started happening as early as April 2020, until the end of the year. With hundreds of unpaid, angry retail investors dragging ThriveAgric online, asking for their money, and farmers recording millions of naira in losses, this was ThriveAgric’s darkest hour. Founded by Uka Eje (CEO) and Ayodeji Arikawe (CTO) in 2017, ThriveAgric started as an agricultural technology startup that provided access to finance, premium markets, and data-driven advisory for smallholder farmers. It financed agriculture projects through crowdfunding. In the space of 3 years, ThriveAgric had grown to become a notable African Agritech startup, with backing from Y Combinator—one of the world’s most successful startup accelerators—in 2019. How did it get into this mess? “It was a mix of different events. The pandemic meant that offtakers couldn’t pay for the goods we’ve already supplied,” Eje said. “Farmers were also suffering losses in the farm, and we lost over 100 million naira worth of produce in transit because they were held up on the road. No movement during the pandemic.” The dilemma for ThriveAgric was that its owing offtakers—FMCGs and restaurant chains—made repeated failed promises on when they’d repay. “They’d promise to pay next week and, banking on their words because they hadn’t defaulted before, we’d in turn promise our retail investors that they’ll be paid next week, only for the offtakers to go quiet,” Eje said. The offtakers too were anticipating that the pandemic would wind down and business activities would return, but it took longer than expected. This affected ThriveAgric’s communication with its retail investors as it repeatedly failed to fulfil the promises it made to its retail investors. The fact that its large network of farmers were also experiencing losses also exacerbated the situation as ThriveAgric had invested in them by providing seeds and chicks, expecting to receive returns when they were sold. Many of those farmers haven’t recovered from those losses till today. A popular question that came up during this period was whether ThriveAgric’s claims to be covered by insurance were true. The company explained that the insurance covered the farming activities and not the retail investors’ investment—the logic being, if the farming process went well, the returns on the investment by the retail investors were guaranteed. Also, in this situation, the fact that farmers were unable to sell and the offtakers were owing weren’t valid bases for requesting for insurance claims. American serial entrepreneur Elon Musk once described the experience of running a startup as being similar to the act of chewing glass and staring into the abyss. “After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends,” Musk said. ThriveAgric’s experience validates this description. All through this turbulent phase, the company maintains it didn’t take its retail investors for granted. “One of the things we realised was that this money we were owing was important for these people; for some it was house rent or school fees,” Eje said. “It was money that meant a lot to them. Regardless of how people reacted, it was their money, and they needed it back.” Salvaging the situation As the situation escalated, different parties showed up to help out. “We stepped in as quickly as we got wind of the situation and did the best that we could at the time by guiding the team on the right approach to take, as well as by providing the practical support they needed in what was a very time-sensitive situation,” said Kola Aina, General Partner, Ventures Platform, one of ThriveAgric’s investors. Ventures platform helped with recruiting an interim CEO, Adia Sowho, who was then VP of Growth and Managing Director, Nigeria, for credit platform Migo. It also restructured the finance and communications team. When ThriveAgric came knocking, the first question Sowho had to answer was “Did she care enough?” “The big question for me was, do I care enough about ThriveAgric and what it’s doing? And am I willing, because I wasn’t bored,“ Sowho said. With the answer to that question being yes, in October Sowho agreed to step in, with Eje stepping down to the role of chief operating officer (COO). “Food security is an important part of our economy. It doesn’t get enough love and support as far as I’m concerned,” Sowho said. “If every Nigerian were a farmer, we’d be feeding ourselves and the continent, which is literally ThriveAgric’s vision.” Solving for Y Tasked to initiate a turnaround in a new company and entirely different sector, the guiding principle Sowho turned to was first-principles thinking, a reverse engineering technique that has its origins from the teachings of Aristotle and has been made recently popular by leaders in Silicon Valley. “For me, I tend to work with first principles. At the end of the day, whatever problem you’re trying to solve, whether it’s a startup, enterprise, or even conglomerate turnaround,” Sowho said. “They all involve the two or more parties exchanging value. With ThriveAgric there was an equation and it was broken.” “It was this hazy chain of unfulfilled agreement that just ended up in a crisis. And, of course, when it hits the public sphere, it makes the news.” To fix the broken equation, Sowho deployed three things: structure, governance, and documentation, concepts she claims startups tend to be wary of. The different teams and processes were restructured in order for the company to solve existing problems and be “10 steps ahead of any risk before it materialises”. “A lot of the things I did were an outcome of the experience that I have working in building organisations,” Sowho said. “These things don’t happen by accident. The success of any enterprise has to be by design.” Sowho and Eje worked on structuring the financing plan for the repayment of the retail investors and hiring for key roles. Alongside Sowho, a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and a head of risk were hired. As the new hires got to work, stabilising the ship, co-founder and CTO Arikawe couldn’t help but wonder why they joined the company at such a time. “These people joined us during the crisis. I was thinking, didn’t you look up ThriveAgric online, a company that people are bashing, before joining,” Arikawe said. The typical response from the new hires was that they believed in what the company was doing and were willing to put their names on the line. “Our CFO joined us and 2 days later he’s on a call where investors were insulting him,” Arikawe said. “A similar incident happened with Sowho, who joined and 1 week later had 300 angry people on a Zoom call with her.” In a few months, the presence of additional hands, fresh ideas, and the “bridge” capital (temporary financing) provided by Ventures Platform helped stabilise ThriveAgric. Transparency—the currency of trust During this period, members of the support team and other departments had to work overnight for many days. “Everyone was stretched but we had a lot of empathy for the people and also a sense of responsibility to ensure that things don’t go wrong again,” Arikawe said. On one of those nights, the engineering team in collaboration with the support team, decided to enhance transparency around the repayment schedule by creating a new payout dashboard—Payout.thriveagric.com—that reflected each retail investor’s exact repayment date. This was done to fix an issue with the initial payment dashboard which automatically indicated that the retail investors had been paid, as soon as it was due date. This feature caused retailer investors to be confused and angry, because they hadn’t been paid. “When we initially built the payout dashboard we didn’t foresee a period like this where we wouldn’t have been able to pay. People always got paid on or before payout day,” Arikawe said. With the new payout dashboard, the retail investors could also see how many other people have been paid. A feature which the engineering team hoped would provide extra comfort and ease tension. Utilising the bridge loan secured, over the span of 9 months ThriveAgric was able to pay back the hundreds of customers it was owing. Akinyemi was paid in November and December 2020. ThriveAgric also repaid the bridge loan in 2021. Unexpected support and lessons During the turbulent period, there was a lot of pushback from retail investors but also surprisingly a lot of support from investors, financiers, and friends. “I remember people calling and asking, what’s the challenge, what do you need?” Arikawe said. “For example, one of the people we sold birds to but hadn’t paid called to apologise that he’s trying his best. He was owing us because someone else was owing him.” After 6 months at the helm of ThriveAgric, Sowho left to join telecom giant MTN Nigeria as its first-ever female Chief Marketing Officer while Eje returned to the position of CEO. During his time as COO, Eje worked on ensuring that repayment and communications with different stakeholders happened seamlessly. “Essentially, I ensured that the core business operations ran smoothly and built a system to ensure that the defaulting offtakers paid,” Eje said. “I also identified other funding opportunities outside crowdfunding.” Reminiscing on her experience, she said, “You often wonder whether you can hack it with a turnaround, and I did, so that’s one thing I learned. Now people are calling me the queen of turnaround after one event.” Another valuable lesson for Sowho was how she was able to manage her productivity considering that she joined ThriveAgric during the pandemic and managed things virtually. “I didn’t realise how focused I could be, because I’m one of those people that like to do everything all the time, all at once,” Sowho said. “But I think in this situation, the urgency required that I stay very focused.” There were ThriveAgric team members she didn’t meet until about 2–3 months into the job, because she was very focused on talking to the people nearest to this issue. For the team at ThriveAgric, the incident was a learning moment for them. “We’re learning to scale with structure. Right now as we explore different opportunities, we look at the risks and how to scale sustainably,” Eje said. “For us, we’re still certain about what we want to do. It’s still day one.” Kola Aina believes the incident was a reminder as an investor that “supporting companies through difficult times is one of the truest forms of portfolio support.” Opportunities ahead ThriveAgric has since paused crowdfunding from retail investors to focus on institutional investors. Since the pivot, ThriveAgric has sealed investment partnerships with several commercial banks, the CBN, World Food Program, and USAID. Its landmark partnership came recently in the form of a one-year project in partnership with USAID-backed West Africa Trade & Investment Hub (Trade Hub). The partnership, which aims to empower at least 50,000 farmers across Nigeria, will be supported with a $1.75 million co-investment grant from Trade Hub. The startup is also focusing on building out its farmer-centred technology solutions which currently serves over 200,000 farmers. The company’s focus is to build the largest network of profitable farmers across Africa. “Agritech is not just about having a website and asking people for money,” Eje said. “It’s about building the infrastructure that supports the food production value chain.” Source |
| Nairaland General › This Online Art Marketplace Is African Artists’ Road To Hollywood And Beyond by techcabal21(op): 11:12pm On Mar 15, 2022 |
After months of struggling to sell his artworks, Okedoyin Oluwatosin, a Nigerian artist who displays his pieces at Jakande, a popular market in Lagos, wanted to quit making art. But then, ArtDey, an African online art marketplace, offered to help him sell them, for prices ranging from ₦50,000 to ₦150,000. Okedoyin evolved his art while working with ArtDey, and today, some of his pieces are on display on the international online marketplace, Artsy, selling for as high as $3,000. ArtDey—co-founded in 2020 by Chioma Onyenwe, a 33-year-old filmmaker, and her siblings: Emeka Onyenwe and Adaobi Onyenwe—is an online marketplace that connects contemporary African artists to a global audience. Onyenwe studied economics at the University of Lagos, before going on to the Imperial College in London for a master’s in management. Before going into film full-time in 2013, she had worked in investment banking and consulting for firms such as Chapel Hills and Accenture, for a few years In 2013, she got her first job in the film industry as a programme coordinator at the Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF); she left the organisation last year after some time as its artistic director. In 2014, she benefited from Project Act Nollywood, a programme created by Nigeria’s federal government to fund filmmakers for production and distribution and capacity building. With help from the programme, she produced her first short film 8 Bars and a Clef through her production company, Raconteur Productions, back in 2015. Since then, she has worked across different mediums—theatre, podcasting, and documentary filmmaking. Onyenwe, who has been collecting African art since 2015, went to collect art in an art market in Kenya in March 2020 but found she could afford only 1 of the 2 paintings she liked. She decided she would return to the art market later for the second painting, but, during that weekend, Kenya recorded its first COVID cases and was set to close its airports. Onyenwe had to take the first flight on Monday back to Lagos. She never went back to the art market, and never got the piece, mostly because there wasn’t a way to move the artworks across countries. Fast forward to June, Onyenwe visited the art markets in places such as Jakande and Muri Okunola in Lagos, but they were empty, and the shops that opened did so on specific days. These markets were tourist attractions, but air travel restrictions, because of COVID, had shrunk their sale of art pieces. Onyenwe created ArtDey’s website in June 2020 to supply art to collectors outside Nigeria. At the end of June that same year, the website went up. Apart from trying to help relieve the struggles of these artists, Onyenwe revealed that, at the time, she, too, was struggling as the pandemic had destroyed her plans for the year, and she needed to get something to work. ArtDey set out to provide a platform for local and emerging African artists who are not digitally savvy enough to use the internet to connect to a global audience themselves. ArtDey wants to supply art to people who want to buy art simply because they like the work’s colours, or it fits their house curtains; they don’t need to read deep meaning into these pieces. “Everybody can own a piece of African original art.” ArtDey organises physical pop-ups—and has done 8 of them—to introduce art to people who wouldn’t normally go into galleries, by going to public spaces, such as bars, and selling art pieces for prices ranging from ₦30,000 to ₦200,000. This pricing, Onyenwe noted, was to help buyers make a decision on the go. The pop-ups have taken place in Abuja, Lagos, and Copenhagen. Onyenwe noted that the pop-ups and exhibitions were prompted by Nigerians’ consumer behaviour which makes it difficult to sell art pieces that were sometimes above the country’s minimum wage without a physical presence. Nigerians, she noticed, are not used to standard-sized measurements which are important to selecting art pieces’ sizes. “If I tell a customer an art piece is 42 inches by 42 inches, for example, they wouldn’t know what that looks like. They tend to ask to see if it can fit the space in their house.” This is because their buyers are not your traditional collectors who probably have bigger houses and have experience in interacting with African art. So, the people we sell to tend to buy for functionality.” Initially, ArtDey found it difficult to convince local artists that they weren’t a swindler trying to rip them off by taking pictures of their art and replicating it. But the artists got convinced as soon as their pieces sold. ArtDey only picks up the art it displays from the artist online when it sells it. This gives the artists the opportunity to sell on their own. Today, these artists are leaving their pieces with ArtDey and even creating collections for ArtDey. Onyenwe noted that they have higher margins from the sales that come from the website compared to the pop-ups, even though they have sold more pieces from the pop-ups, exhibitions, and open houses. ArtDey in Bel-Air In the last quarter of 2020, ArtDey tried to target Nigerians and Africans in the diaspora, whom it suspected most likely felt an affinity to African art. It started cold emailing set designers and cinematographers, but despite interest, no production house took up their offer; lockdowns had not been completely lifted, so production had not properly opened up. Normally, filmmakers acquire a licence from artists to use a replica of their works on set, but Onyenwe wanted to get the original works to these filmmakers at a lower cost. Morgan Cooper, Bel-Air’s director, expressed interest in ArtDey’s artworks. So, Bel-Air, a re-imagination of the award-winning 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, bought over 10 art pieces belonging to artists on the streets of Lagos: such as Bright Osodalor, Abiola Daniel, and Bertha Onyekachi, from ArtDey. When ArtDey launched, it had 3 artists on board and sold 5 pieces in its first week. Today, it has been in operation for 20 months and has sold about 300 pieces. Source |
| Nairaland General › Nigerian Government Shuts Down 6 Illegal Digital Loan Companies by techcabal21(op): 10:28am On Mar 14, 2022 |
On Friday, 3 Nigerian federal government agencies—Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), National Information and Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Related Offences Commission (ICPC)—collaborated with the Nigerian police force to raid some illegal financial institutions operating from their Opebi Road offices in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria. According to Punch, digital lending platforms like GoCash, Okash, EasyCredit, Easi Moni, KashKash, and Speedy Choice were among the busted companies. The FCCPC, which led the joint operation, said the raid was a response to several customers’ complaints about the malpractices carried out by financial institutions. Speaking at the raid, the CEO at FCCPC, Babatunde Irukera, said the agency started investigating and monitoring these companies in 2020 when consumers started accusing them of mishandling and violating their private data in the process of loan recovery. “This information started quite a while ago. When the country was on lockdown in 2020 due to the pandemic, we started seeing the rise of money lenders,” Irukera said. “Because of the lockdown, people needed small and instant loans to sustain, which is understandable. But, over a period of time, people started to complain about the malpractice of the lenders so we started tracking it.” Irukera also mentioned that, towards the end of last year, the agency had gathered a lot of information and started working with some other key agencies to monitor these businesses. According to Irukera, their findings so far are: the interest rate charged by these digital lenders appears to violate the ethics of how lending is done; secondly, the unethical loan recovery practice of violating customers’ privacy to abuse and shame them and their acquaintances. “So, we started an investigation trying to determine the location of these firms, which has been very difficult. These companies move around a lot, and it took us several months visiting each of their locations,” he said. The FCCPC boss, however, said investigations also revealed that the loan firms weren’t Nigerian nor registered in the country, they don’t have an address nor do they have a licence to do business in Nigeria. He also said that most of these companies operated from the same place and by the same person. With no address, all these companies have are mobile apps that can be downloaded on both Google and Apple Stores. So the agency had to engage the people who have been their victims and gather more evidence. By now, all the agencies involved had gotten enough information and evidence to convince the court to issue a warrant for them to proceed with an investigation into a search and seizure. “And sometime last month, a court issued a warrant and between then and now, we were preparing a sting operation, which is what you are seeing here today. The reason for this is because we wanted to be sure we were hitting at the place where we could get many of them,” said the FCCPC boss. He also mentioned that the agency had issued an order to Apple and Google to take down these companies’ apps from their platforms. It has also ordered the banks to freeze these companies’ bank accounts. Last year, when NITDA sanctioned Sokoloan, TechCabal reported that that would be the first of many. Though it took longer than expected, it’s finally happening. “It doesn’t also mean that the people we are proceeding against today are the only ones—no. We want to start with them. We also understand that there are between 5 and 7 companies operating at the same location,” said Irukera, hinting at the agency’s ambition to cleanse the nation of all illegal digital lending practices. Source |
| Science/Technology › After Dominating Bike-hailing In Ibadan For 2 Years, Can Safeboda Keep Its Lead? by techcabal21(op): 11:43pm On Mar 07, 2022 |
On Wednesday, Ibadan-based Ugandan bike hailing startup SafeBoda clocked two years of operating in the Nigerian market. SafeBoda launched in Nigeria in December 2019 but started operations in January 2020. The startup had initially set to launch in May 2019 but months of deliberations—including that of the best city market entry—delayed its launch. Then, finally, in a surprising move which immediately created an outlier reputation for the company, SafeBoda skipped Lagos, the Nigerian commercial hub, to launch in Ibadan, a decision that continues to pay off—especially considering that the Lagos government shutdown bike hailing businesses a month after it launched. SafeBoda’s growth since its launch has been groundbreaking. In June 2020, about 6 months after its operation started, it reached a milestone of 100,000 rides. Also, in August 2020, it grew 150% and recorded 250,000 rides. And by the end of the year, while it was pausing its Kenyan operation, it celebrated half a million rides in Nigeria. However, its defining growth started when in April 2021, the startup reached the 1 million rides milestone; that’s a 150% growth in a month. Prior to that, it had done the same rate quarterly, and since then to date, it’s been bumping up the numbers. As anyone would expect, an increase in the number of rides must have been the result of an increase in other proportional metrics. By June 2021, 100,000 passengers had signed up on the platform, and 3 months after that, its 8,000th rider was onboarded. And in November it was doing 20,000 rides daily. Fast forward to today, SafeBoda claims to have recorded over 3 million rides, more than 10,000 riders, over 100,000 users, and completed 50,000 deliveries. The startup currently offers 3 services in Nigeria: rides, deliveries, and airtime purchase. The payment vertical which has already launched in Uganda, will launch in Nigeria soon. The end and the beginning of an era SafeBoda is endearing to people for many reasons. One of them is its first Nigeria Country Director Babajide Duroshola, who led the startup from launching till June last year when he exited for another East African startup that had just expanded into Nigeria. Changing leadership always comes with challenges and SafeBoda faced its fair share. But it quickly made an internal replacement when it appointed its Head of Operation Olaoluwa Arokoyu as Country Director. Arokoyu had previously worked in operations with Opay and Jumia and joined SafeBoda 5 months prior to Duroshola’s exit. Ever since his appointment, the company said that Arokoyu has achieved some laudable milestones including taking the company from 1.5 million rides to over 3 million rides, optimising the app for address verification during the onboarding process to reduce fraudulent activities, and improving how riders are being paid to increase brand loyalty among riders. Creating a better experience for all SafeBoda says it’s as compassionate with its riders the same way it is with passengers. It says in a statement that it’s constantly looking for a better way to increase the earning power of its riders while giving passengers a good experience. “As a result of this increased earning power, SafeBoda riders and their families have access to a more quality lifestyle.” “SafeBoda’s primary mission is to provide a better standard of living for drivers and customers. Everything we do is aligned with this goal,” - Arokoyu told TechCabal. For SafeBoda riders like Ghazali Saheed, who’s the 5964th rider that joined the bike-hailing startup, the best thing about SafeBoda is the respect they [the riders] get from customers that other riders don’t get. “SafeBoda also makes it easy to set targets and reach them. It’s easy for us to know where to get a lot of orders so that we can easily reach our targets,” he said. Like many bike-hailing startups, SafeBoda is also destigmatising bike [okada] riding in Ibadan and Nigeria as a whole. The way it looks, it’s like these bike-hailing companies are formalising a sector that’s been informal for a long time. “The okada or boda business isn’t categorised to be prestigious within African communities. But with a touch of orange, the story is different. SafeBoda riders are highly regarded and respected, not just because of the colour but because of their conduct,” said Clement Obaro, Growth Manager at SafeBoda. Competition is stronger than ever Due to SafeBoda’s success in Ibadan, it has become apparent that the city is the new juicy spot for the bike-hailing market and, as a result of that, it has also become a battleground. Everybody wants a piece of the pie. Uber last month launched its bike-hailing arm in Ibadan and joined the host of others like MaxNG, ORide, and Gokada to snag more market share from SafeBoda. “We have been expecting this to happen and now that it has, we are not worried. Our focus is to keep giving the best experience to our customers and keeping our riders happy and willing to complete more rides daily,” said Arokoyu. “The sky is wide enough for all birds to fly; healthy competition is always good for business.” SafeBoda is one of the most active bike-hailing companies in sub-Saharan Africa as it holds more than 80% market share in Uganda and Nigeria. Uber and Bolt had first launched their bike-hailing product in Uganda but couldn’t beat SafeBoda. If combining the popularity and capital war chest of Uber and Bolt, the two most powerful mobility startups in the world, couldn’t beat SafeBoda in Uganda, there’s no saying that only Uber can pull it off in Nigeria. But it’s a different market, however, with the level of loyalty SafeBoda has built among riders and customers, it won’t be an easy call to dominate over it in Ibadan. Source Learn more about the mobility industry in Africa here.
|
| Science/Technology › Vault Hill Is Building A Human-centric Metaverse. What About It? by techcabal21(op): 9:51am On Mar 07, 2022 |
Jimi Daodu has always been entrepreneurial. Back at Babcock University, he had established an entertainment business that organised parties in the school. After Daodu completed his master’s programme in Advanced Computing at the University of Bristol, he wanted to stay back in the UK for a couple of years to work and earn back his master’s fees. At the time, Daodu recalled, the British government allowed international students to apply for a post-work-study visa, which grants one a two-year stay in the UK. Daodu got the post-work-study visa, but things started to look grim when, for months, he couldn’t get a job. Frustrated from his job search, Daodu contemplated booking a return ticket to Nigeria and returning to his shoe selling business. He eventually got a job that sustained him until he got yet another which secured a visa for him and got him to stay. In the past decade, Daodu has worked in project management, hospitality, financial services, and the telecommunications industries all in the UK. Daodu was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and lived most of his years in the bustling city. He had studied Computer Science at Babcock University before going to the UK for a master’s degree in Advanced Computing at the University of Bristol. In 2017, Daodu got into the crypto space, Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin (BTC) were buzzy, so, he bought a couple. He then stumbled on virtual lands and saw them as an opportunity to diversify his digital assets and, as a Nigerian accustomed to the notion that land is the best investment, he bought some, even though he knew nothing about virtual lands. He got 8 plots of land in virtual spaces: 2 plots in Decentraland and 6 in Somnium Space for $200 each. The idea for what would become a blockchain-based metaverse company, Vault Hill, started to form last February when he got an email stating that there was an offer on his land. He accepted the offer and sold a plot of land in Somnium Space for $10,000. He was stunned because he hadn’t gotten such a high return from the stocks and shares he had purchased. He realised that the only reason the buyer paid that much was because of the value associated with the virtual land, so, he realised that there was a market there. When he shared his idea with his friends, they said, ”Jimi, you have come with your ideas again!” But Daodu assured them: “This is the one.” In May 2021, Daodu started bootstrapping Vault Hill by selling a few investments as well as plots of land in Somnium Space, for amounts ranging from $9,000 to $12,000. To differentiate itself from other virtual spaces and metaverse, Vault Hill City (Vault Hill’s Metaverse) has four different islands and each island has 7 human-themed districts: Play, Romance, Curiosity, Community, Idealism, Vitality, and Imagination. “Each district is human-themed to ensure the metaverse is open to everybody. This space is infinite; it is hard to choose a target audience, so we want to build an ecosystem where anyone can come in.” Currently, the cost of a plot of land in a district in Vault Hill City range between $2,000 and $2,600. Daodu describing a metaverse, said, “Metaverse is a shared virtual space. It’s like Twitter, but in a gamified perspective—the use of augmented reality and virtual reality. In a metaverse, you have to create a digital representation of yourself called an avatar, which allows you to navigate the digital world since you can’t go into the digital world with your physical body.” Daodu’s definition of a metaverse involves a connection to the blockchain, decentralised finance, and freedom from control by the government, or even private individuals. It is in respect to this vision that Vault Hill is building through 3 phases and at the end of the third phase, Vault Hill is handed over to a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO)—the community of token and landowners—which will be responsible for decision making on its metaverse. Vault Hill is building a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace to allow NFT artists to list their art on the metaverse and display it to potential buyers through a gamified experience. Vault Hill is also encouraging companies to build edifices in their metaverse. The two plots of land Daodu bought on Decentraland were merged together to build Vault Hill’s sales office. Vault Hill is also partnering with Ready Player Me to build out avatars and incorporate digital wearables and limited-edition accessories. It is also partnering with Nigerian brands including Crivel Watches and Looks Like a Good Man for corporate and traditional wear. “Additionally, we are currently working to have interoperability of avatars. That is, using one avatar across multiple metaverses instead of having to create one for Vault Hill, and another for Decentraland,” Vault Hill said. Vault Hill Part is also partnering with Lingua54 to use machine learning to translate the speeches of avatars across different languages in real time. As funding was a constant headache for the team, Vault Hills started talking to traditional venture capitalists to raise funds, but a lot of them didn’t understand what they were building. A senior colleague, at the time, had said “If you’re talking to VCs, and they don’t understand what you’re building, you’re doing something right.” To meet its funding needs, Vault Hill created a token called VHC token—which is currently going for $0.003697 on Coin Market Cap, as of the time of writing. With it, Vault Hill raised $2.1 million in pre-pre-seed and private equity rounds, selling 25% of its total supply of tokens of 340 million. The majority of the fund will go into product development and hiring, Daodu said. Majority holders of the VHC token or majority landowners in the Vault Hill City will have voting power in the DAO. The VHC token will serve as a medium of a transaction within the metaverse, give majority token holders voting power in Vault Hill’s proposed DAO and reward content creators when they get to sell or get traction for their artworks and content. Daodu speaks about the challenges of building a metaverse company: “There isn’t a book on how to build a metaverse, so there isn’t anything like what a good one looks like.” But one challenge stands out: getting talent. “You need a host of developers—extended reality developers, a mix of augmented and virtual reality developers, blockchain developers, full-stack developers, etc, but because it is an emerging technology and these skills are not taught in most traditional schools yet, they can be difficult to find.” But Daodu is optimistic, especially about the increase in VR adoption in recent years, which he said is both the cost and effect of the cost of the tech. “As adoption grows, the cost of technology always drops. The Oculus quest is retailing for $300, would that get to $50- $100 at some point in time? Absolutely. People are already spending $1,000 on an iPhone every year.” Daodu noted that Vault Hill is not building an escapism platform, but intentionally thinking about how humans do things in the real world and then creating a way to augment it virtually—with an ultimate aim of fostering human interaction. For example, in its Vitality district, it will collaborate with physiotherapists to help people with mental health challenges and create an augmented reality (AR) consultation service for London Bridge sports medicine, which will allow patients that can’t come in physically for consultation in the hospital to get consultation services through augmented reality. The first glance of Vault Hill City will be up by Q2 2022 and by the end of the year, it will be fully running. “Users will be able to design their own unique experiences, explore their fantasies, and also enjoy activities they do in the physical world such as interacting with other users, attending events, playing games, curating arts, exercising, host shows, visiting a library, build a music studio, and so much more,” Vault Hill said. “Users will be able to access the metaverse using a virtual reality headset for a fully immersive experience. But they will also be able to explore the metaverse through laptops.” Source Learn more about crypto here.
|
| Nairaland General › Breaking Down Funding Terms: What Do Equity, Debt And Hybrid Financing Mean? by techcabal21(op): 11:22pm On Mar 01, 2022 |
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: “[Insert startup name] has announced the close [insert millions of dollars in raise] of a pre-seed/seed/Series A round led by Venture Capital/Private Equity/Angel Investor firm…” Startup funding across Africa has grown by at least 600% since 2017. In 2021, African startups raised more than $4 billion, tripling the $1.43 billion raised in 2020. This total funding was made across 600+ funding deals. This means that funding announcements like the excerpt above—in differing variations—were published on media platforms over 600 times. It also means that you’ve seen those words over and over again, and you’ll definitely be seeing more in 2022, where startups have already raised over $1 billion across 130 funding deals. But what do these terms mean? What’s the difference between a Series A round and a Series D round? Who is an angel investor and what do they do? How does debt financing differ from equity financing? In this guide, we’ll break down these funding terms across three categories: the fund types, the funders, and the funding stages. The funding types There are 2 major ways startups can get investors to fund them. There’s equity financing and debt financing. Equity Financing In equity financing, the startup offers investors a chunk of ownership in the startup in exchange for funds. The investor is paying to own a part of the startup, which means that he also owns a share of the profits when the time comes. Think of it equity financing this way: The startup is a piece of farmland and needs money to buy seeds and farming equipment. In exchange for money, it offers an investor a small portion of the land and during the harvest, the investor gets whatever was planted on his portion of the land. Startups can sell as much of their equity as they want to. In equity financing, there’s no obligation for the startup to pay investors back because it’s technically a trade, and the investors are buying ownership. Thus, if the startup fails or makes no profit, the investors get nothing. Startups can also buy back the ownership shares from the investor and this is called repurchasing or the repurchase option. Investors can also resell their shares to other investors which is one of the ways investors can exit a startup. Startups can also sell the rest of their equity shares to investors and this is called an exit. In an exit, the startup’s founders are basically selling their shares or ownership stakes in the company to other investors or companies who then acquire the startup. Debt financing In debt financing, there’s no exchange of money for shares or equity. Instead, the startup collects loans i.e. gets investors to invest in exchange for a return on the capital, and a pre-agreed interest rate. Continuing with our farmland analogy, rather than paying for a portion of the farm, investors give the farm holders money on the condition that the farm holders pay back what they owe and an agreed-upon interest. The investors’ profit is not tied to how many shares they have, but how much they agreed on with the startups. In debt financing, there is an obligation for startups to repay; if a startup is unable to pay, whatever collateral they put down will be claimed by the investors. Other types of financing There are a few other types of financing investors and startups may consider. First, there’s Hybrid financing which is where both debt and equity financing are combined. Last year, MFS Africa raised $100 million with $70 million as equity financing and $30 million as debt financing. There’s Mezzanine financing—or convertible debt or note—which allows investors to convert their debt financing into equity financing in the event a startup defaults on its debts. Finally, there’s Bootstrapping which means the startup finances itself through capital laid down by the founders, donations from family and friends, and/or rolled over profits. Many startups start out with bootstrapping. The funders Now that we’ve explored the different ways to finance a startup or a company, let’s talk about the different types of people behind the “investor” tags and why they’re investing. Angel investors Angel investors are private individuals who usually finance startups during their early-stage period. They’re everyday people, usually family and friends, who invest in startups usually in exchange for equity or ownership in the company. Now, the conventional definition of angel investors explains that angels are usually family members or friends but it’s not always so. Angels can be anyone interested in helping startups get their feet off the ground. For example, Herconomy, a startup empowering women through financial literacy, raised $600,000 through the community crowdfunding route. In Africa, several startup founders who have built successful startups are now venturing into becoming angels and helping other startups actualise their dreams. They include Olugbenga “GB” Agboola (Flutterwave), Odun Eweniyi (Piggyvest), and Shola Akinlade (Paystack). Private equity firms (PE firms) Private equity firms are coalitions of investors who invest in private companies i.e. companies that aren’t listed on the stock exchange. These equity firms use a combination of both debt and equity financing to invest in high growth later-stage or mature companies that are often underperforming. These firms also acquire majority of the equity shares of the startups they invest in, in order to maximise output and growth. An example is Adenia Partners’ majority stake acquisition in Herholdt, a 57-year-old energy company in South Africa. Presently, there are about 176 private equity firms in Africa that have made over 940 investments in the past decade alone. Examples are South Africa’s Norrsken22, Senegal’s WIC Capital and Egypt’s Sigma Capital Holding. Venture capital firms/Venture capitalists (VCs) Now, Venture Capital firms or VC firms are a subset of Private Equity. Unlike PE firms though, VCs invest in younger and smaller businesses. It’s also a coalition of investors who finance smaller businesses and startups with equity and/or debt financing. VCs also acquire lesser shares or minority stakes in the startups they invest in. Most announcements we see are led by VC firms like Novastar Ventures, Oui Capital, Partech Ventures or Ingressive Capital. There are about 780 VC firms in Africa with over 78,000 investments across the years. The funding stages Finally, here’s where all the seeds we’ve sown in the past paragraphs come into fruition. Under this heading, we’ll explore the funding stages that the investors we’ve listed above participate in. Pre-seed “Founders typically float a startup with personal funds, before seeking out investments from family, friends or external well-to-do individuals known as angel investors. All of this broadly falls under the pre-seed funding stage,” As the name implies, the pre-seed stage consists of a startup’s first push to raise funds to get its operations running. In this stage, you won’t see many VCs or PEs because the startup is at its earliest stages and the only people willing to take a chance on it are angel investors. The sizes of seed stages can vary, depending on the startup. For example, Herconomy’s pre-seed was $600,000 while Nestcoin, a blockchain startup out of Nigeria, raised $6.5 million in its pre-seed round. Conventionally, VCs don’t participate in pre-seed rounds but that’s slowly changing on the continent as more early-stage startups bring innovative solutions to the continent’s most pressing issues. Seed Seed stages come after the pre-seed stages, and they’re usually when the startup has built enough traction to attract institutional investors like VCs or PE firms. As in the pre-seed stage, there’s necessarily no maximum or minimum amount for what qualifies as a seed. It all depends on the startup. In 2019, however, Palmplay raised the largest seed funding Africa has seen so far with $40 million. Series A B C D E F to infinity… Here’s what you need to keep in mind about Series A, B, C… funding stages: the letter of the alphabet attached to a funding round expresses the number of times that a startup has raised external funding. Essentially, the naming helps differentiate each new funding round from the previous ones. In Series A and B funding, startups have entered their target market but need financing to build relationships with customers and further develop their business models. Every round after a Series A is not so different in terms of deal structure. Most startups at these stages are looking to expand into new markets, launch new products or release new features. From Series C upwards, startups are looking to maximise profitability and growth, expand into new markets and push out new products. Of the 8 African unicorns—startups valued over $1 billion—6 attained unicorn status during or after their Series C rounds. It is, however, important to note that most African startups don’t make it past the Series B funding stage. The World Economic Forum states that only 8% of startups on the continent make it past Series B and this is due to a number of reasons including lack of funding and operational failure. The good news, however, is that more startups are popping up and solving problems acoss board. The number of African startups that have been able to secure funding has increased from 55 startups in 2015 to 359 startups, a 552.73% growth. What this means is an increased chance of solving African problems. Source |
| Science/Technology › Nigeria’s 5G Race: MTN And Mafab Pay $547.2m Licence Fee by techcabal21(op): 10:57pm On Mar 01, 2022 |
Today, February 24 2022, marks a milestone in the race for Nigeria’s 5th generation (5G) mobile network spectrum. The winners of the bid for 3.5GHz 5G spectrum, MTN and Mafab have each completed payment of the $273.6m licence fee required by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). Aside the $273.6 million payment, MTN paid additional $15.9 million, being the bidding sum it offered at the assignment state of the spectrum auction, making it clinch its preferred Lot 1 (3500-3600 Megahertz-MHz) in the 3.5Ghz spectrum; while, Mafab Communications, which bided lower at the assignment stage, consequentially settled with Lot 2 (3700-3800Mhz) at no extra cost. “I wish to officially announce that NCC has received and confirmed payments from MTN and Mafab for their acquisition of 1 slot of 100Mhz each in the 3.5Ghz spectrum auction, which was successfully conducted by the Commission on December 13, 2021, ” Umar Danbatta Executive Vice Chairman, NCC said. “They both met the deadline of February 24, 2022 as set by the Commission.” Mafab emerges winner On December 13, 2021, when the NCC announced that the MTN Nigeria and Mafab Communications were the winners of the bid for the 5G licence, it came as a surprise to many as Mafab is an unknown player in the telecommunications space. In response to the announcement, Transparency Nigeria Group petitioned the Federal Government and all relevant security agencies to launch an investigation into the business practices of Mafab Communications Limited. “Mafab Communications was incorporated in 2020, has no comprehensive tax history, and appears to have been specifically set up by connected insiders for the purpose of acquiring one of the highly valued 5G licences,” the group said in a statement. How MTN and Mafab won The top bidders were Airtel Networks Limited, Mafab Communications Limited and MTN Communications Nigeria Limited, with the bidding price starting at $199,374,000. After 11 rounds of auction over a duration of 9 hours, the bid price rose to over $200 million with all 3 companies still active. The auction process came to an end when MTN and Mafab posted an exit bid of $273 million, while Airtel posted a final bid of $270 million. Simply put, Airtel offered to pay the least amount among the three companies for the 5G licence, thus falling out of the race. Prior to the auction, Airtel, MTN Nigeria and Mafab Communications had paid an initial non-refundable 10% deposit of $19.75m each, which was statutory and mandatory to qualify them to participate in the bid process. There were also allegations put out that Mafab is connected to former Lagos State Governor, Bola Tinubu, but the NCC has denied the allegations. The NCC also added to its claims that the auction was free and fair by pointing out that it had earlier awarded Mafab with international data access (IDA), inter-connect data exchange (IDE) and Value-Added Service (VAS) licences. The earliest licence being the IDA issued in October 2020, 4 months after Mafab was incorporated. Mafab Communications Limited was registered on July 8, 2020, according to the company’s website and TechCabal’s search on the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) site. It claims to provide and operate local Interconnect and International carrier services; there’s no information about clients on its website. The company is led by Musbahu Muhammad Bashir, the chairman of the Althani Group, an Abuja-based holdco that oversees a group of companies, including Eman Homes & Estate, Althani Investment Limited, Salam Takaful Insurance, and Mafab Communications. Deployment Phase After payment of the licence fee, the next phase for the bid winners is to deploy the 5G network service across Nigeria. According to the Information Memorandum of the 3.5GHz spectrum licence, the licencees have a rollout obligation plan spanning a period of 10 years, beginning from the date the license is award. Between the first and second year of the licence, the operators are expected to roll out the service in, at least, one state in each geo-political zone. From the third to fifth year, they are obligated to cover all the zones. Between 6 to 10 years, they should cover all the states in the country, according to guidelines set out in the Information Memorandum. Right of Way and energy costs At the deployment phase, the two operators will have to deal with the Right of Way (RoW) fees of different Nigerian states. In 2020, the Nigerian government tried to get different states to reduce their RoW charges for fibre cables and adopt the agreed ₦145 per linear metre signed by the National Executive Council. But only 7 states agreed to this while 29 states stuck to their guns—states like Benue, Ogun and Lagos charge ₦2,500, ₦4,000, ₦750 per linear metre. The argument of the 29 states is that RoW is a source of revenue for their governments, but the big picture is that if any of these states reduce the fees, they may attract significant broadband investment from telcos. Telecom operators also have to contend with the heavy power demand of the 5G network infrastructure. Due to Nigeria’s insufficient power system, telecom operators in the country have to generate and distribute the power they use. These are some of the obstacles MTN and Mafab will have to surmount along the journey to deploying 5G network in Nigeria. Why 5G matters The advent of 5G comes with significant advantages, one of which is higher bandwidths. This translates to the ability to transfer large volumes of data at extremely high speed and very low latency. Simply put, 5G is faster than previous generations of mobile networks. It can, for instance, transfer data at 10 gigabits per second—up to 100 times faster than 4G. The increase in data transmission speed is important because new technologies and revolutionary innovations such as driverless cars and remote classrooms require faster connectivity and reduced latency to function optimally. 5G networks are expected to make an estimated contribution of $13.2 trillion in economic value globally according to a recent WEF report. It’s also expected to generate 22.3 million jobs from direct network investments and residual services. The race to deploy 5G in Nigeria is still on, as MTN and Mafab head into the deployment phase. Source
|
| Business › Looking To Africa’s Digital Frontier For Impact & Returns by techcabal21(op): 10:00pm On Mar 01, 2022 |
Development finance institutions have long funded traditional finance and infrastructure projects in Africa; now they’re increasingly backing Africa’s digital future. What will this mean for the continent? On the about page of the UK government’s overseas investment arm, the CDC Group declares its goal to be “do good without losing money”. That may well be the universal motto of its counterparts like Proparco, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) or any of the many institutions that recently jointly committed to investing $80 billion in African businesses over the next 5 years. In theory, these “Impact-first” funds typically focus on how to move the development needle when they invest. This is even more true in Africa, where both development and the capital it needs are sorely lacking. However, what is arguably more important than how much capital is available is how the capital is allocated. Now that development finance institutions (DFIs), which represent the bulk of available capital in Africa, are looking to technology startups to support development goals and find returns, players in that ecosystem, and Africa in general, need to step up the thinking and conversations that should shape the future of Africa’s digital economy. DFI interests and money are not new To be clear, DFIs are not new in Africa. They have been here, at least since the Colonial Development Corporation was set up by the UK’s Overseas Resources Development Act in 1948. That Colonial Development Corporation became the Commonwealth Development Corporation Group (CDC Group) and will become British International Investment (BII) later this year. Both the CDC Group and peers like Proparco, FMO, and others have been active in Africa for decades. What is interesting is the role they play in funding technology startups and funds in Africa. They are, after all, impact investors, and asking how much impact potential they see in Africa’s insurgent tech startups is a legitimate question. At a surface level, the implication of more capital from DFIs going to African VC funds or technology businesses is clear. It means capital for experiments and growth will probably be less of a headache. This can mean a variety of things, depending on how it is executed and engaged with by relevant stakeholders. For example, it can mean growth stage capital is here, that is if DFIs, which are notoriously slow and bureaucratic, can fix their processes. It can mean more opportunities unlocked as DFI money de-risks investment in high risk but critical business models. In short, it can mean everything that better access to capital brings plus development impact. But it can also mean DFIs’s public money competing with private investors over the best (or less risky) deals, and there is some ugly history that makes this scenario, wild as it may seem plausible. It can mean that we are deepening our vulnerability to public money that is itself vulnerable to political currents, especially foreign public money. Of course, the reality is that we lack significant options and, on the balance, this is a much better deal than where we are coming from. So, why are we seeing this interest and influx of capital backing the funds that invest in African startups, and in some cases, directly backing startups? Ido Sum, a partner at TLcom Capital thinks this activity is happening because individual pioneers in development finance institutions “saw the potential and ignited internal processes in their respective institutions to consider VC as an impactful and material asset class.” That makes sense. DFIs have been active on the continent for decades. Mo Ibrahim’s Celtel, (later acquired by Bharti Airtel) is a good example of how DFI activity supported the development of Africa’s telecommunications infrastructure. That first-mover advantage or least “actively-prospecting” advantage in growth markets can enable them to see and take advantage of opportunities early on. Sum agrees. He says that “[DFIs] were able to see the changes in dynamics and in the creation of a new generation of startup companies through working with early managers on the continent like ourselves [TLcom Capital] and others.” He adds: “After supporting the establishment of the African PE industry, with the help of some entrepreneurial team like ourselves, several DFIs decided in late 2015 to try and support the establishment of a local VC industry on the continent—that hardly existed before. With EIB and AfDB being the pioneers, and Proparco, BIO, IFC and CDC following shortly after.” Following this first foray into backing “fund of funds,” TLcom Capital, for instance, became the first institutionally backed commercial VC in Africa, when it closed $40 million for its TIDE Africa Fund in 2017. Since then, DFI money backing VC funds have only gone up, and in some cases, they have invested directly into ventures. This is a long-winded way of saying more money than ever is coming into African startups because DFIs judge technology businesses to be a good way to deliver their impact mandates and make handsome returns—or at least, not lose too much in a market as immature as Africa. Do we need DFI money? Yes, in short, and more specifically, yes because the capital that Africa needs to develop her economies is in short supply. When DFIs invest in emerging markets for example, their investments should ideally skew towards the more difficult or riskier businesses that private investors almost automatically avoid. In other words, DFI money is welcome because it can enable founders to take on tough problems. Tough problems and sometimes obstinate legacy monopolies that thrive on maintaining friction need tough money to break through seed-stage business. That type of growth capital needs to be substantial. “Today, a fund can raise capital up to say $50 million from family offices and high-net-worth individuals. [But] larger funds still require DFIs, almost without exception,” says David van Dijk, investment advisor and co-founder of African Business Angel Network. There is some indication that local limited partners (LPs) are stepping up. For the first close of TLcom Capital’s $150 million fund, FBQuest, and Sango Capital committed additional funds, doubling down on their earlier commitments to TLcom Capital. However, traditional sources of capital for funds investing in African companies remain locked out. As long as the doors of pension funds, insurance companies, or university endowments remain closed, DFIs will continue to play a strong role in financing what you might call Africa’s future. It’s not what can be. It is what is. That does not mean DFIs are going it alone. Far from it. A number of DFIs explicitly make it a part of their mandate to “inspire” third-party capital to come alongside them. This co-investment strategy rests on the back of the fact that the public component of DFI money is, in theory, willing to shoulder a greater share of the risk. The Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, for example, leverages a first-loss guarantee to encourage private investors to co-invest alongside. This de-risked investment—the near-technical name for how DFIs/MFBs enable private investor partners to put up money—is lacking or insufficient in Africa. An obligatory note here on “de-risked capital” from impact funds. Nimrod Zalk, Industrial Development Advisor in the Office of the Director-General of the South African Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, notes that it is unclear if the much-talked-about “blended finance principles” de-risk projects to enable development, or if they simply de-risk investor returns through complex financial engineering, regardless of impact outcomes. There is a cost for over dependence on DFIs Everything has a price, even capital, and sometimes we will only truly know how much after the fact. That said, the biggest obvious risk of overly depending on DFI funding to build Africa’s nascent technology businesses is ownership. Not just equity ownership, but ownership of the direction, the data and the results that technology can create for Africa. “It is unclear if the much-talked-about “blended finance” de-risk projects to enable development, or if they simply de-risk investor returns through complex financial engineering, regardless of impact outcomes.” – Dr. Nimrod Zalk, Advisor, South African Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) It’s easy to celebrate the latest fundraise from startup X. Almost everyone agrees that building an impactful and profitable business is difficult, but there is surprisingly little conversation around what building a truly Africa-led ecosystem that is both sustainable and economically viable means. Also because DFIs especially foreign DFIs or multilateral financial institutions (MFBs) are run from offices geographically distant from where their target investments are located, the question of competent allocation remains. There is also the small matter of how little data is available and how much less is shared. The result? Everyone operates in self-contained silos from London, Paris, or Amsterdam, or even (looking at you AfDB) Abidjan. “How are you able to invest in these companies if you’re not on the ground?” asks David van Dijk, himself a seasoned investor. Where leadership is lacking, impact is a fairytale. Being African-led does not refer to a nominal leadership. Instead it means a system that is driven by targeted investments and solutions in the most pressing problem areas in Africa. In a perfect world, DFI and MFB activity in Africa’s fairly young venture space should be led (not nominally) by African development finance institutions. In the real world of today, however, these organisations do not even have sufficient capital to lead the original impact mandates for which they were created. “A lot of African countries have a challenging fiscal environment. The governments cannot finance their development banks. This is where the big multilateral development banks can help,” says Zalk. He adds that national development banks in Africa are themselves plagued by a myriad of issues that affect their performance. “There are issues around governance. They have made bad loans and bad investments in the past that might have been driven by corruption or lack of technical know-how.” All of this combines to lock out the type of capital scale that is needed to say nothing of directing these funds towards something as alien as venture capital. To unlock and direct capital better, Zalk suggests that national development institutions in Africa should be consolidated. That should help these institutions gain more financial clout and firepower to direct African technology to the areas of greatest need. For example, Zalk who is also a non-executive director on the board of the South African Industrial Development Corporation is unconvinced about the hype around service-based technology. “A lot of attention has been focused on things like payment based systems like M-pesa and shopping on ecommerce stores. I believe what is being missed out is [the opportunity] to industrialise,” he argues, “Historically, manufacturing is one of those places where countries have been able to adapt technology for development.” He believes that the convention of discouraging local production over imports is faulty, “Over the last few decades, there has been discouragement from conventional policy advice about building local production systems, and a view that you can always import the things you need. But the COVID crisis points to the need to change the structure of African economies. It is no longer sufficient to export primary and semi-processed commodities, we must find ways to add much more local value, and construct more sophisticated production structures.” Rather than directing “impact money” to the latest shiny software technology, Zalk believes that investing in agricultural research and 21-century relevant education for example, are more important. That “industrialisation over software” argument is one that is very nuanced and nationally disparate. Africa is, after all, not one country or even a functioning union of countries. What one country needs may not necessarily be what the other will need. The point again is that by passively accepting that “DFIs bring the money”, we unconsciously give up the more subtle type of ownership in how what is being built is built. No one disputes today that Africa needs and welcomes DFI money. We simply do not have, or have not unlocked, enough capital from here, and there are a myriad of issues why. But, we are beginning to see local players step up, especially in MENA and South Africa. Knowledge yield is a missing ‘key’ ‘Knowledge yield’ is my fancy term for how much knowledge return on investment (KROI) an investment brings. It is basically asking alongside any investment update, ‘What is my money teaching me?’ Where money comes from is not as relevant as what it teaches. Within some contexts, capital conveys information. So, beyond simply looking at impact metrics and returns, it is important to ask what businesses that have received investments teach in the short to medium term about the African consumer and market landscape. This is a big conversation, not just something for the stage, but something that should intimately concern every person invested in the future of Africa. Knowledge yield is not obvious on balance sheets as traditional returns on investment typically are. It is the result of deliberately seeking non-intuitive market data to judge assumptions and verify claims because capital in itself, is a zombie. Instead of simply fighting to have a piece of the DFI pie, companies, governments and even private investors can redirect their energy towards learning from the data yield of past and current investment, building better data systems so that they can more artfully distribute capital. Yes, Africa still clearly needs the so-called patient capital from DFIs. We also need to learn how lead that capital, to transform the continent. Source
|
| Science/Technology › Influencers Were Paid $10 To $15 To Discredit Controversial Bills On Twitter by techcabal21(op): 1:41pm On Feb 28, 2022 |
In the past 3 years, the Kenyan parliament has discussed two pieces of health legislation that has sparked online debates. The bills are the Reproductive Healthcare Bill and the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, also known as the Surrogacy Bill. According to a new report by Mozilla Foundation, Kenyans’ conversations on Twitter on these health bills have been manipulated by disinformation campaigns sponsored by an anti-choice Spanish advocacy group, CitizenGO. The report shows that CitizenGO, a group that has been linked to the Spanish far-right, by exploiting the Twitter Trends algorithm, was able to input itself in these conversations in an attempt to influence debates around health bills. According to briefs seen by the researchers of the report, the messages the campaign used to attack activists contained cartoon caricatures and memes that echo messaging by American and European right-wing groups. The Reproductive Healthcare Bill was introduced to the parliament in 2020 and is supposed to outlaw forced sterilisations; make prenatal, delivery and postnatal services free and provide rights to reproductive healthcare services to every woman in Kenya, including adolescents. In 2021, the Surrogacy Bill proposed Kenyan politicians should develop standards and regulations around surrogacy—an arrangement where a woman (a surrogate mother) carries a child in her belly on behalf of another woman, who receives the child after birth. Odanga Madung, a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation based in Nairobi, reviewed content posted between 2019 and 2021 and discovered that CitizenGo, and accounts linked to it, had tweeted 20,811 times and engaged in 11 campaigns—when a large number of accounts tweeting using a predetermined hashtag or keyword. 10 of these problematic campaigns made it to the Trend section. The Mozilla report reveals that CitizenGO paid the owner of these accounts or “disinformation influencers” around $10 to $15 to make tailored tweets that discredited the bills. The campaign made multiple false and misleading claims about surrogacy and reproductive health. For example, a tweet in the campaign claimed that children of surrogates display behavioural and emotional issues—a claim the report revealed the African Population Health Research Center (APHRC) had debunked. Those tweets went on to attack journalists, activists and politicians that advocated for reproductive rights or the two reproductive bills. In response to this report, Twitter has permanently suspended 240 accounts connected to this disinformation campaign for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy. A booming disinformation industry Last year, Madung and Brian Obilo, another Mozilla fellow, discovered, through a series of interviews with social media influencers who coordinated disinformation attacks, were responsible for spreading the hashtag #AnarchistJudges. The tweets under this hashtag, which trended countrywide, cast suspicion on the competence and integrity of court officials that were against the Constitutional Amendments Bill of 2021 in Kenya. Like this campaign, it was also coordinated through WhatsApp and social media influencers were paid between 10$ to 15$ per campaign to tweet predetermined malicious tweets. The Mozilla Foundation report noted that the campaign had all the patterns of a disinformation campaign: heavy repetition of content under hashtags, newly created accounts tweeting political content, synchronised posting period and false tweets. Heightening Twitter Trend’s criticism Twitter’s Trends section helps users identify the most discussed topics on the platform and also help them find popular information or discussion. They vary depending on geographical location and personal interest. But the feature has come under fire multiple times over the years for spreading hate and disinformation, and at some point, external critics and Twitter employees suggested eradicating the feature altogether, after it struggled to deal with disinformation around the US presidential election. One of Twitter’s efforts to clean up the feature was by adding more context to trending topics. Madung expressed concerns about the potential influence of these disinformation actors in the upcoming Kenya election: “Health is a political issue & more so reproductive health. As we mentioned in the report, there’s clear evidence that these groups will be looking to exert their influence on candidates and citizens to ultimately affect the ballot in favour of candidates that agree with them.” The report recommended that Twitter should assess individual countries and map out how the Trends section can be used to push disinformation; establish collaborations with local researchers, and develop a transparent partnership with fact-checkers and civil societies, all of whom can offer context about the region. Last year, Twitter was forced to disable the Trends feature in Ethiopia as it was increasingly used to push by warring parties to spread hate campaigns. By the way, researchers could not find any tangible impact of this intervention on the subsequent volume of hate speech on the platform. Last year, an investigation by BuzzFeed and Digital Africa Research Lab revealed that Nigerian influencers paid to tweet in a coordinated manner successfully manipulated Twitter Trends in order to sway public opinion and court judgement in favour of Venezuelan politician, Alex Saab. “It’s quite easy to manipulate (content) in jurisdictions such as ours where the volume of content is not as high as countries such as the US,” Madung tells TechCabal. With African countries increasingly vulnerable to disinformation actors on Twitter, a collaborative effort between Twitter, policymakers, civil societies and media organisations will be crucial to keep online discourse saner and difficult to manipulate. UPDATE: This story was updated to reflect Digital Africa Research Labs’ role as a joint investigator in the Alex Saab investigation. Source Did you like this article? Read more like it here |
| Science/Technology › What’s It Like Building In Unpopular Sectors? by techcabal21(op): 8:14pm On Feb 09, 2022 |
Building a successful business in an unpopular sector is difficult globally, especially in Africa. In such sectors, there are almost no supporting communities and infrastructure to leverage for growth. So, founders interested in such sectors would have to build from scratch. But, regardless of how difficult it is to build in Africa, some people have done it and are still doing it. Now the question is, how? On January 22, 2021, Daniel Adeyemi, Senior Reporter at TechCabal, spoke with Judith Okonkwo, founder/CEO at Imisi 3D and one of the outliers who have built a successful venture in a sector that’s not hugely celebrated, to answer this question, during the second episode of Building From Ground Up, Season 2 by the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub. Imisi 3D, an Extended Reality (XR) creation lab that focuses on building the African XR ecosystem in Nigeria and beyond, was founded in 2017 in Lagos, Nigeria. And its core mission is to groom and grow a community of African AR/VR creators, create solutions using AR/VR, and provide educational and engagement experiences with AR/VR. A slow lonely road Judith Okonwo, whose career spans 22 years across many industries and continents, comes from a business psychology background. When she founded Imisi 3D, some people thought her decision was ambitious, others thought it was silly. But 5 years on, Imisi3D is not only a successful venture, it has placed Nigeria and Africa in the global XR conversation. “We wanted to build an XR ecosystem and nobody was really seeing why such a thing should exist. It’s a crazy idea,” said Okonkwo. Regardless of which sector one’s building, the early days are usually lonely and filled with trial and errors in product iterations and product-market fit. Seek knowledge and leveraging your network Having in-depth knowledge about a business will make the building less strenuous. However, in a case where you don’t know much about the territory, the best thing to do is to put yourself out there to seek real-life knowledge on how your solution will solve real-life problems. According to Okonkwo, the best way to keep your leg on the ground is by talking to people and asking for help when you need it. “Coming from my background, the first thing I needed to do was to learn, aggressively,” said Okonkwo who is also a founding director of AR/VR Africa. After gaining knowledge, the next thing is to leverage your network for support. Remember the territory is unpopular with almost no existing infrastructural support, so your best chance at success lies with people. Sell the vision clearly to your people Now that things are getting better and people are less dismissive of your “crazy” idea, setting a clear goal that puts everybody on the same page is important. For Okonkwo, the vision was clear: an impact-driven venture that would create an advanced and thriving XR ecosystem across Africa, starting from Nigeria. Okonkwo said Imisi 3D got its first lab at CcHub because she was speaking to everybody that cared to listen—sharing what the success of their venture would mean to the country and Africa at large. Having helped Andela launch, Okonkwo was exposed to the possibility of what Africa’s young people could build when given a platform, so quickly defined her vision to do what Andela was doing but for XR. “Our mission and goal is specific and written on the wall. It’s important because we could see that XR is one future of computer, and we must be involved now if we want to be part of that future,” Okonkwo said about the vision of Imisi3D. The arrival of mass acceptance Entrepreneurs in unpopular territories are outliers; they are people who can project and see what the future holds and decide to build for that future. Although XR is as old as a century, it wasn’t until recently that innovators started to think about commercialising this technology for the mass market. Today, there’s a massive acceptance of the XR sector owning to the numerous conversation around blockchain and the metaverse, which is essentially a digital world powered by virtual reality. The buzz started in 2014 when Facebook acquired then 2-year-old Oculus for $2 billion to power its metaverse ambition. Last year Facebook rebranded as Meta, thus becoming a full XR company. Similarly, Apple also bought Space and NextVR, two different XR companies, to power its own metaverse ambition. In fact, almost all the big tech giants now understand the role XR will play in the future and are buying into it. “A lot of people are now interested in the sector, it’s no longer a crazy idea to want to build in this space,” said Okonkwo. “And that’s a good thing, more people means more innovation and investment.” For Okonkwo and her team, the future of computers has always been XR, from the beginning of their foray into the sector; the rest of us are only just joining in. Source Read more interesting tech stories here |
| Sports › The Viral Photographer That Afcon Cameroon Made by techcabal21(op): 8:00pm On Feb 09, 2022 |
As the African Cup of Nation (Afcon) fiesta rages in Cameroon, a young photographer is positioned to make a name for himself. The moment comes but his accreditation doesn’t. What next? The making of a viral photographer. The crowd’s roar is taking eardrums in the stadium to the point of bursting. Colourful and exuberant football lovers have packed the 60,000 seat arena and now they are screaming, shouting, singing, dancing and enjoying themselves as legendary Congolese rhumba hit-maker Fally Ipupa belts out a crowd-pleaser. The sky is bright over the Olembe stadium in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital city, where the 33rd Africa Cup of Nations is opening on a memorable and vibrant show. Standing near the pitch, a young man is looking on. In a few minutes, he will be triggering his camera, producing incredible shots that will go viral and bring him fame. This is the power of Afcon, Africa’s biggest regular footballing event. The 28-year old Cameroonian in the crowd is Didier Lefa, a wedding and event photographer who spent two years in the run-up to Cameroon’s African Cup of Nations event preparing to break into sports and freelance photography. He upgraded his gear with a new lens and other state-of-the-art equipment to ensure quick delivery of his photos. He’s still bemused at how he has found himself in the crowd and worried that he has somehow messed up. He needn’t worry. He’s minutes away from being one of the most-watched photographers on the continent. Only a few hours before the beginning of the competition, Didier’s dream was on the verge of collapse. After two years of preparation, a crucial element was missing “I hadn’t received my accreditation yet,” he explained. He had not yet been granted accreditation from the CAF, the Confederation of Africa Football. The accreditation document gives journalists and photographers the right to access stadiums and venues where the Afcon takes place. “Without it, I couldn’t do anything. I was totally discouraged. My morale was at its lowest, all of my efforts had been in vain”, he said in an interview. Had his aunt—who is a sports photographer—not woken him up in the early hours of that Sunday morning, he would have stayed home and watched the fiesta on TV. “Accreditation or not, be there”, she told him. He argued but finally bowed to her harsh insistence. “She took me to the stadium at 7 am”, he said. He recalled that he was wondering why she was taking him there so early in the morning. The opening ceremony was set to start only at 2.00 pm. He would soon discover why. “The stadium’s gates were still closed, but the place around was already overcrowded, everyone was already in a joyful mood, the Afcon fiesta had already started. Ten hours before the game kick-off, it looked like we were late”, he remembered. He pulled his camera out of his bag and started to shoot. He and his aunt were the only photographers on the site, and being there gave him a renewed energy, Lefa said. “I took pictures frantically. I captured images of football fans undergoing their covid-19 tests and being vaccinated. I posted them on Twitter, and they went viral. Every picture I was posting was going viral, it was amazing.” Amid the excitement of his work going viral, Lefa was still worried about his accreditation. He still didn’t know if he would finally be able to enter the stadium. Once again, his aunt came to his rescue. “I don’t know how she managed to do that, she just said ‘don’t worry, follow me’ which I did, and I found myself inside the stadium. It was an awful wait,” he said. More than 4 hours into a non-stop filming spree, he was starting to feel tired, but being near the pitch and a few meters from the players provided an energy boost. He excitedly shot joyful fans screaming in the stands, game action and players’ prowess on the field, streaming to social media with a flow of powerful and vivid pictures, all of them going viral, one after another. And at 11 pm, totally exhausted, someone called him on the phone. “Your accreditation is ready, come and collect it” said the voice. Feedback on his Twitter profile showed how his pictures had struck a chord with an audience. “There is real life in his pictures, when I saw them, I really felt like I was there at Olembe enjoying with the other fans,” said Bernadette, on why she became one of Lefa’s more than 130,000 Twitter followers. “Our country is mired in crisis, and I think his pictures are keeping hope alive and helping us believe that despite the crisis, we still have the potential to achieve big things,” Onana, another Lefa fan, added. The opening ceremony of the 33rd Afcon in Olembe stadium, Yaounde on Jan 9 2022. Image source: Didier Lefa. Lefa made photography his profession just 4 years ago, resisting the demands of his father who wanted to veto his career choice. His mother, however, defended her son’s decision and such was his determination that finally won his father over too. The family supported his passion and career orientation to the extent that they financed a $2,000 professional camera. It’s that very camera that is now producing memorable pictures of one of the most important moments in his country’s modern history—capturing the raw emotion, the life and beauty of a moment in time. His passion for photography came at an early age, he said, when he discovered photography through his aunt. “I‘ve always liked to take pictures”. He recalled that one day his aunt took him to an orphanage for a photo report. “She gave me a Nikon reflex camera, it was my very first experience with that kind of camera. She told me ‘just take pictures’ which I did. This is how it all started.” Lefa believes that in Cameroon photographers do not receive the social credit they deserve for their job. For example, he explained, many media organisations across Africa “loot” pictures on the internet and use them without the permission of the owner and without respect to copyright principles. He had exactly that issue with a local Cameroonian newspaper that took one of his Afcon images directly off Twitter to use for content illustration, without citing him as the author. He denounced the move on his Twitter feed, sparking an online mobilisation against the media, leading the offending organisation to apologize. Lefa didn’t slow down after that first viral photo. Throughout the tournament, he traveled from one town to another, passionately capturing the essence of each Afcon game. He agreed to a bird interview during a short transit in Douala from Yaoundé, on his way to Limbe where he was to cover the game between Ivory Coast and Algeria. With a burning desire to embrace new challenges, Lefa was already looking ahead. His current experience has allowed him to build connections with foreign photographers and to enter partnerships with some media like RTI, the Ivory Coast public broadcaster. His next “big thing” will be the football World Cup next November in Qatar, he said. Source Read more internet viral related stories here |
| Business › Women And E-commerce: Capturing The $14bn Opportunity In Africa by techcabal21(op): 2:43pm On Feb 09, 2022 |
In Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic has, to a great extent, brought to the fore the potential of the digital economy. One sector where this is most vivid is e-commerce. Stay-at-home orders boosted online shopping activity during lockdowns and companies, large and small, are now leveraging online channels to drive business growth amid the crisis. But much of the gains in e-commerce has so far been realised by male-owned businesses, which saw a collective 7% rise in sales during the pandemic. By contrast, female-owned businesses saw a 7% decline, per Women and E-commerce in Africa, a report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) that examines the state of e-commerce across Kenya, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast. More often than not, technological advances exacerbate existing gender inequalities. In this instance, women lag behind their male counterparts in terms of accessing and using digital marketplaces, despite representing half of Africa’s population and accounting for the bulk of entrepreneurial activity in many African countries. “There is a digital disconnect,” says Mercy Wanjau, Director, Legal and Board Advisory, at the Communications Authority of Kenya (KCA) while delivering her keynote speech during the first TechCabal Live session this year. “It’s provocative and sad. So much progress has been made in connectivity globally, even in Africa, but there’s still a disconnect when you look at the situation from a gender lens.” Wanjau adds that the internet is a “gateway to huge economic opportunities” and with women having no access, there’s a digital disconnect and denial of opportunities, particularly in the low and middle-income countries. Over the past decade, e-commerce in Africa has expanded rapidly and the market value is expected to quadruple in the next decade. But with equal participation rates from both men and women in e-commerce, the growth could be even higher, per the report. Beyond participation, however, there exists an earning gap between e-commerce businesses owned by women compared to those owned by men, skewed in favour of the latter. According to the IFC report—compiled with data from Jumia, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform—closing this gap between male and female vendors by 2025 would yield $14.5 billion in additional e-commerce market value in Africa by 2030. How can this be achieved? Juliet Anammah, Jumia Nigeria’s Chairwoman and Chief Sustainability Officer for the Group, notes that increasing the number of women selling through e-commerce platforms is crucial. In countries like Nigeria, many women own physical stores while a growing number of female merchants sell through informal social commerce platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram. Helping the latter group transition to selling via formal e-commerce platforms, where they can access wider markets and business records needed to secure loans, is one of Jumia’s objectives, in line with closing the gender gap in e-commerce. “It’s clear one of the ways women can grow their businesses through e-commerce is participating on platforms,” Anammah says. “Many traders opt for social commerce but in such instances, you’re a single player and not aggregating data that can be useful when applying for loans. On Jumia, there’s a database on your sales history, transactions, which lending partners use in providing credit.” As an entrepreneur and mother of 3, managing her business while taking care of the family was tough for Bukola Ogundijo, until she started selling on Jumia. “The platform has been very helpful in managing my business in 3 major ways,” the founder of Purple Linings Ventures told the TC Live audience. “Warehousing my product, packaging, and delivery whenever I get orders, all of which has reduced my operational costs.” In terms of access to credit to grow her business, Ogundijo says she’s been able to secure low-interest loans from Jumia’s lending partner, which has helped scale the business faster than her pre-Jumia days. For Alexa Roscoe, the Disruptive Technology Lead (Gender and Economic Inclusion Group) at the IFC, the value of an enhanced seller base isn’t just about the number of sellers going online but also bringing in more diverse products and services that serve a wider market and more customer needs. “Entrepreneurs are just half the puzzle of the marketplace,” Roscoe says. “Women are also buying online and we know they are responsible for making the vast majority of consumer decisions such as what groceries to buy.” Hence, understanding what women consumers want to better serve them is of equal importance, she argues, especially the women new to online shopping. “That way, they see e-commerce as a way to meet their needs. That’s how we can help grow the market and make it more diverse.” While the report finds that e-commerce companies can lead the way in the bid to increase the number of female entrepreneurs in e-commerce, as well as their sales, the IFC does recognise the importance of partnerships involving investors and policymakers in achieving this goal. “Partnerships play an important role in bringing together different expertise, expanding knowledge and evidence, and most importantly, scaling impact massively and addressing multiple challenges,” Anne Kabugi, the IFC’s Regional Gender Lead for Africa (Gender and Economic Inclusion Group), says. “There is a huge e-commerce opportunity in Africa but Jumia alone may not be able to do massive research covering different geographies.” With partnerships that bring in the right resources, expertise, and investments to undertake research, players like Jumia can leverage the data to inform strategy and expansion across the continent. “More of these partnerships are needed, not just in the private sector but also the public. Government can help remove the legal and regulatory bottlenecks for business expansion and enable women access e-commerce and other digital services through inclusive connectivity policies for instance.” KCA’s Wanjau holds a similar stance on partnerships between stakeholders. “E-commerce companies or the government can’t do it alone. There’s a need for collaboration across board,” she says. “Cooperation between investors, e-commerce platforms, governments, and development organisations is needed to ensure a multi-stakeholder approach to address these issues. This isn’t restricted to national levels because e-commerce is international.” Source Read more eCommerce related articles here |
| Business › Auto Tech Startup Mecho Secures $2.15m To Expand Its Vehicle Maintenance Service by techcabal21(op): 2:29pm On Feb 09, 2022 |
Regular vehicle maintenance is not commonplace in Nigeria, despite the fact that around 90% of the over 12 million cars on roads are used vehicles. Even in instances where car owners are open to constant checks, existing service providers, the majority of whom are not formally trained and lack adequate equipment, are often inefficient and provide inconsistent service quality. “When you consider the sheer number of used cars in Nigeria and the state of our roads, car maintenance isn’t optional,” says Olusegun Owoade, co-founder and CEO of Mecho Autotech, a startup that has set out to develop vehicle maintenance and high-quality repair culture in Nigeria. The Y Combinator-backed Mecho Autotech on Wednesday said it has secured $2.15 million in a seed funding round which it claims was oversubscribed by over 300%. Investors that participated in the round include Future Africa, Hoaq Capital, Cathexis Ventures, V8 Capital, Silver Squid, and Tekedia Capital. The startup was launched in April 2021 by Owoade and COO Ayoola Akinkunmi and operates a digital platform that connects B2B and B2C customers with both in-house and third-party mechanics. Mecho’s in-house capacity comprises 3 workshops—known as Mecho Shops—across Lagos, where it services corporate fleets and Mecho Mobile operations. Its corporate clientele includes some of Nigeria’s popular brands such as Uber’s partner Moove, Tolaram Group, and UAC Group, with several other notable service-level agreements (SLAs) in progress. Mecho also expanded into B2C services with the launch of its app (available on both Android and iOS devices) in January and has a plan to grow that segment via a subscription service model. On the app, users can enter their vehicle’s unique identification number (VIN) or basic vehicle information. Based on the vehicle’s specifications, the algorithm calculates a routine vehicle maintenance programme and subscription fee which can be paid monthly, quarterly, or annually. “Through automation, we want to make it easy, convenient, and affordable for Nigerians to access high-quality vehicle repair and maintenance,” adds Owoade. “We aspire to build a maintenance culture in the country and beyond to keep roads and people safe.” Mecho also offers mobile service to meet a customer at their own location, if preferred, while customers can visit a workshop or partner garages for service. For business customers, Mecho Autotech can manage fleet-wide needs with flexibility to request repairs on demand. With the new funding, which the company claims in a statement is the largest investment to date for a vehicle maintenance startup in sub-Saharan Africa, Mecho Autotech plans to expand its multi-channel service capacity, engineering team, and marketing efforts for B2C acquisition. “At Future Africa, our thesis is to back founders solving hard problems in large markets,” says Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, founder and General Partner at Future Africa, on the investment in Mecho. “With over 12 million cars on our roads, and more on the way, leveraging technology to bring order to vehicle maintenance and repair is overdue.” By building out the vehicle repair value chain across Africa, Mecho is creating new skilled auto repair jobs. Since launch, the startup said it has onboarded over 7,000 third-party mechanics to its platform after they passed rigorous assessments. More so, Mecho says it is developing a spare parts value chain that has already served over 100 third-party mechanics and several large ticket inventory purchases for B2B customers. Source Read more funding stories here |
| Business › Purpose-driven Startups In Africa Are Growing At An Explosive Rate by techcabal21(op): 12:22pm On Feb 04, 2022 |
There’s never been a more exciting time to be in the startup space in Africa. The number of local startups that have secured funding between 2015 and 2020 has increased by 46%—a growth rate 6 times faster than the global average, according to a recent BCG report. The very nature of the startups in our ecosystem amplifies the buzz around this explosive growth rate, as many are not only bringing innovation to the market but also a strong sense of purpose that drives everything they do. The fintech sector has seen the most exponential growth in investment, with many of the startups in this space intentionally making financial services more accessible to people who have been excluded in the past. A purpose-driven startup in the healthcare space, HearX provides affordable, digital hearing health solutions and has just expanded into the US. Moving to the fight against climate change, SunXchange is a peer-to-peer solar leasing platform, accelerating the transition to renewable energy in emerging markets. At Kandua.com our mission is to shorten the distance between having a skill and making a decent living from it. We do this by helping trusted small-service businesses and independent professionals to find more customers, and we build easy-to-use tech tools that help them strengthen their marketing and operations. Combining profit and impact is key to success Talking about profit and purpose is hardly revolutionary. However, while there may be a strong tradition of business philanthropy in Africa, harnessing the core strengths of the business to address social issues and make purpose central to a company’s strategy is less common. The latter approach is where this new breed of African startups shine, and there are reasons why this can be advantageous. Having both a profitable business model and social impact opens you up to blended finance models, where you can attract impact investors as well as traditional venture capital. For example, at Kandua.com, we have recently closed a funding round involving Knife Capital, but we also count the Agence Française de Dévelopement (AFD) as one of our supporters. Donor funding does have rigorous reporting requirements and is one of the reasons we had shied away from impact investing in the past. However, certain aspects of a mission-driven business won’t be sustainable on a market basis only, and if you are committed to your purpose, impact funding can help to realise your goals and demonstrate your impact. An audience looking to consume consciously The second reason being a purpose-led company is beneficial is that this model reflects global trends in consumer choice and in investment. Despite the economic turbulence of the pandemic, or perhaps, in part driven by COVID-19, conscious consumerism is a trend that shows no signs of slowing. We’ve seen this reflected in our sector, where homeowners are eager to support small local businesses or restore or upcycle home goods and furniture rather than replace them. Investment driven by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria is proving to be a sound strategy, with ESG funds often outperforming traditional ones. A word of caution, though: Disingenuously retrofitting purpose just to adapt to a trend is something that most would-be customers and investors would quickly see through. As a startup, purpose can be integrated into the enterprise from the ground up, and a bigger why is often the reason the company was started to begin with. This is certainly true for us. Purpose over paycheck A third reason why we think that being a mission-driven startup is powerful is the impact it has on our employees. People want more than just a paycheck. The kinds of flexible and remote work models that many people prefer and that are fast becoming the norm are nothing new in the startup space. Purpose gives us an edge. When there is a bigger reason to come to work every day, you take greater pride and ownership in your work, and you are more motivated to succeed. Seeing the real impact of your work on others’ lives is a powerful reward. Technology has the potential to transform aspects of life that are fundamental to the prosperity of our continent and well-being of its people: education, healthcare, financial services, decent employment, and small business growth. However, without rigour and a commitment to excellence, it will remain exactly that: potential. Being a mission-driven business doesn’t mean you should not have a sound business model, a disciplined approach to priorities, or the courage to make tough calls. The tough decisions you make and the discipline it requires are all in service of your driving purpose and ultimately your success as a startup. Source Read more African tech/business stories here |
| Business › Nestcoin Raises $6.5m Pre-seed To Deepen Crypto And Web3 Adoption In Africa by techcabal21(op): 10:28pm On Feb 03, 2022 |
Globally, cryptocurrency industry funding has been growing increasingly fast in the past couple of years. Last year alone, crypto startups raised over $27 billion in venture capital in 2021 —slightly higher than the past 10 years combined. And just last month, despite a dip in the price of cryptocurrencies, American VC, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm launched a $2.2 billion fund, one of its biggest efforts to fund crypto startups. The firm is reaffirming its commitment to crypto with its third and largest industry specific fund, after investing $850 million last year between 2 rounds of investments. This shows that institutional investors are getting more comfortable in putting their money in crypto—an entirely different experience 4 or 5 years ago. In Africa, Web3—powered by crypto, is becoming a large industry, and it is not surprising because Africa is the fastest adopter of cryptocurrency in the world, consequently, investors are pumping money into the industry on the continent. On a mission to further deepen crypto adoption in Africa is Nigerian crypto startup Nestcoin which is building out Web3 products. Today, Nestcoin announced that it raised a $6.5 million pre-seed round. Since launching last year, in November, with a promise to “help Nigerians first, then other Africans, exit the status quo by offering them access to wealth using crypto technology or elements of web 3.0 like NFT, DAOs and DeFi,” Nestcoin has made tremendous progress. Founded by former Binance director Yele Bademosi and former Bundle Africa CTO, Taiwo Orilogbon, Nestcoin has made good on its promise to create crypto-native products beyond trading and investments, with a focus on driving the adoption of crypto in Africa. Last year, it launched Breach, a media arm to simplify complex crypto topics to a global audience. It later launched one of Africa’s earliest play-to-earn crypto games, Metaverse Magna (MVM), which it says will allow members of its gaming community to earn as much as $1,000 monthly. It has invested in Lazerpay, a crypto startup that allows businesses to accept payment in crypto, and collaborated with fintech, Bitsika and its music superstar partner Davido to launch the Echoke social token. Nescoin has hinted that it is developing several other products to “provide compelling use cases for crypto”. “We are excited that our investors are backing this ambitious plan to create a future where billions of people in frontier markets have access to the opportunities that crypto brings. With this financing, we will continue to grow our diverse team, which already spans 9 countries, expand our product offerings, and invest in more ventures aligned with our vision,” says Nestcoin’s CEO, Yele Bademosi, in a statement. The company, which boasts of a global network of investors, had its round led by Distributed Global, Alter Global, Serena Ventures, Alameda Research, and A&T Capital. Other institutional investors include MSA Capital, 4DX Ventures, Raba Capital, Goat.vc, Old Fashion Research, CMT Digital, Electric Capital, Social Capital, CoinFund, gumi Cryptos Capital, DeFi Alliance, among others. Nestcoin, in a statement, says that the new funding will enable it to expand its global operations and invest in building products that will help accelerate crypto adoption and financial freedom for people in frontier markets. Source Don't miss out on more blockchain/crypto related content. See well written content on the topic here |
| Education › Altschool Raises $1m Pre-seed Round To Ease Young Africans Entry Into Tech by techcabal21(op): 10:17pm On Feb 03, 2022 |
A report from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Google last year estimated that there are currently some 700,000 professional developers across Africa and half of them are concentrated in countries like Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa. Interestingly, this number is disputed in some quarters and expected to be lower. Globally, according to the State of the Developer Nation report, as of 2021, there are 26.8 million active software developers in the world. And experts predict that this number will grow to reach 45 million by 2030. Africa, like every other region in the world, is looking to increase the number of software developers in its region. It is no longer news that Africa’s tech talent, from mid to senior level, are being poached by global companies, with many seeking better pay and perks as well as the global recognition that comes with working for companies outside of the continent. Founded by Adewale Yusuf, Akintunde Sultan and Opeyemi Awoyemi, AltSchool Africa has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to scale its effort to solve Africa’s talent problem and become an entry point for young Nigerians into tech. But this isn’t the first time a company have tried to become an entry point for young Nigerians into tech. Nigerian startup Andela was founded in 2014 to solve Africa’s talent problem by training developers and placing them in global companies. Andela’s programme was free and its developers were on a payroll. Unfortunately, in 2019, Andela—now a unicorn worth over $1.5 billion—started experiencing difficulty finding work for the junior developers it had trained. Their model wasn’t profitable mainly because tech companies around the world needed more experienced developers—mid to senior level. After laying off at least 500 junior developers, Andela switched its model to now focus on placing senior developers in international companies. AltSchool, however, understands that Africa’s talent deficit cannot be filled without junior developers, so unlike Andela, it is focused on training junior to mid-level developers. Usually, university graduates for 4 to 5years before transitioning into tech, but AltSchool is trying to reduce that transition time to 1 year. Alongside AltSchool, the team will scale its sister company TalentQL, in launching products like Pipeline, which trains mid-level engineers, turns them into senior engineers, and gets them placements in global companies. AltSchool will operate as a free online school (although the application fee is $24 or ₦10,000) where students will receive training in software development and a diploma certificate at the end of their programme—9 months after commencement. AltSchool also promises to make space for participants without a laptop by providing the device for them via soft loans. Although AltSchool will not be placing its students under a payroll, as Andela did, it will, at the end of their programme, make provision for a 3-month internship that will make the newly-minted junior developers more employable. As for tuition for the programme, participants will be required to pay a percentage of their salary to AltSchool over an agreed period of time—a model pioneered by American BloomTech, formerly known as Lambda School. With 60% of Nigeria’s 200 million population under 25, training like what AltSchool offers is essential as 1 in 3 Nigerians that are able and willing to work do not have jobs—an astonishing 34% unemployment rate, which translates to 23.2 million jobless people within an 80 million-strong labour force. Individual investors in AltSchool’s funding include Flutterwave co-founder and CEO, Olugbenga Agboola; Paystack co-founder and CEO, Shola Akinlade; Nigerian musician Folarin Falana, popularly known as Flazthebahdguy; and Akitoye Balogun, another Nigerian musician known as Ajebutter22; while the VCs are Nestcoin, Pledges, Voltron Capital, and Odba VC. AltSchool will use this funding to build its content and curriculum, technology infrastructure, and expand its “Community Peering Learning (CPL)” initiative, which allows participants to meet physically on occasion to network, learn, and exchange ideas. Source Follow up on what African startups are up to here |
| Business › How To Keep Your Startup Afloat With Little Or No Funding by techcabal21(op): 6:36pm On Feb 03, 2022 |
2021 was a record year for the African tech ecosystem as startups raised over $4 billion in venture capital funding, the highest amount raised yet. While this feat is laudable, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that many startups don’t make it to the stage where they can attract external funding before folding up. According to a 2019 World Economic Forum report, only 8% of African startups make it to the Series B stage of funding. In 2020, the startup failure rate in Nigeria reportedly stood at 61%, meaning that only 39% of startups in Nigeria survive. Across Africa, startup failure rates range from 75% in Ethiopia and 74% in Ghana to 58.3% in Senegal and 58.7% in Kenya. This trend has raised the important question of how startups can keep the lights on with limited funding while looking to raise capital. So, on January 14, 2021, Koromone Koroye, TechCabal’s Managing Editor, spoke with Vivian Nwakah, CEO Medsaf and João Pinheiro, CTO Medsaf to answer this question, during the second episode of Building From Ground Up, Season 2 by the The UK-Nigeria Tech Hub,. Medsaf, a healthtech startup that facilitates and finances the movement of medication in emerging countries, is a startup that’s gone through the phase of bootstrapping and succeeded in raising capital. Bootstrapping in the early stage of a business Nwakah’s interest in solving problems in the healthcare space happened after her friend died from taking a fake malaria drug. This spurred her to co-found Medsaf in 2017, with the mission to combat the proliferation of fake and substandard drugs in Nigeria and across Africa. Today, the healthtech startup which started in a small apartment in Victoria Island, Lagos, now has offices in 20 Nigerian states, with 45 team members across 3 continents. It has grown 500% since the company was launched in 2017—growing 200% during the pandemic. It has raised $2.7 million in funding. Considering that Medsaf started at a time when healthtech startups weren’t popular, Nwakah explained how the startup was able to bootstrap itself to its current state. Nwakah, who relocated from the US and quit her job in 2016 to focus on Medsaf, had to fund the company through her savings. Back then, she tapped into her experience from managing a political campaign to get people interested in Medsaf. “My experience from motivating people in Chicago to come out and knock on doors in below-zero-degree weather, for the sake of elections, prepared me for this role,” Nwakah said. “I used that same knowledge to rally people around Medsaf’s single cause: quality medication is a fundamental human right. By the end of 2016, we started receiving our first angel cheques and launched in January 2017.” Pinheiro, remembers that in the early days of Medsaf he worked multiple jobs. What made bootstrapping easier was focusing on keeping it simple by using tried and tested technology. Transitioning from bootstrapping to fundraising Over the years, the African startup funding space has matured and it’s relatively easier for a startup to raise money. In 2016 this wasn’t the case; to attract external funding all Nwakah could do was talk about Medsaf to different people all day long. She targeted investors who had achieved some level of success in an African context and global level. “I pitched Jason of Iroko TV 10-20 times before he invested. So many people told me that healthcare wasn’t scalable or needed, but I had resilience, drive, and deep passion for what I knew Medsaf could be, so I just kept pitching people.” How did Medsaf get its first investor? Nwakah attributes this to her relentless efforts to be out there meeting various people. “I was attending events and meeting people who were in popular startups like Jumia. I met our Silicon Valley investor at a tech conference in Lagos. I was out there and meeting people, but I also understood that they’re really busy and I needed to get to the point. I also never felt that they owed me anything,” she said. The issue of attracting the right people Attracting talent is a common challenge startups face. How has Medsaf navigated this? “I didn’t think talent would be the most difficult part of building Medsaf, when we started,” Nwakah said. In the early days it was about getting people who were passionate about healthcare, but because Medsaf was one of the first healthcare tech companies, the concept of a healthtech startup was so unknown that it was excruciatingly difficult to get people to join Medsaf in the beginning. “In those days, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals would rather work for a pharmaceutical company, hospital, or government. There were questions about job stability because typically pharmacists end up setting up their own pharmaceutical shops.” What has worked for Medsaf is that it has focused on investing in its employees. Nwakah said Medsaf was one of the first companies to highlight the importance of transparency in the supply chain of drugs, and because of that, pharmacists are now going back to school to learn more about the supply chain. “One of our team members is going to Canada for an MBA. I’m glad that we’re changing how pharmacists are thinking of their career paths. We’re charting new territories.” In terms of getting technical talent, Pinheiro has also found it challenging to attract the best ones. This is because Medsaf is a smaller company that can’t offer the same pay or prestige that bigger companies can offer developers. However, Medsaf is able to offer them independence and the opportunity to grow, which is satisfactory for some of them. Building systems and processes for a startup As startups grow, they must put more processes and systems in place to build a lasting company. This belief is one that has been embraced at Medsaf. Nwakah said she’s learnt along the way not to be rigid about change. “What worked when you’re a team of 5 doesn’t work when you’re 15 people. You have to constantly innovate around the process and check with customers to be sure you’re still serving their needs. The real reason Medsaf has any success is that we focused on processes and systems.” Pinheiro chipped in that from a technical perspective, he’s noticed that people struggle to properly define the goal before breaking it down to processes. “Often people come with problems like, ‘I need a website’, and my response to them most times is ‘What problem are you trying to solve?’ It’s important that people first understand what goal they’re trying to achieve before trying to define the process.” Source Learn from successful African startup founders/CEOs here |
| Health › Detty December: New Data Identifies Lekki Phase 1 As Lagos’s COVID-19 Hotspot by techcabal21(op): 6:23pm On Feb 03, 2022 |
Adaobi* is a 24-year-old software engineer living with her 49-year-old mother Oge* at Lekki Phase 1, in Lagos, Nigeria. On the morning of January 1 this year, she complained of a sore throat and took some Strepsils for it. By the next morning, however, her sore throat got worse—and her mother began to feel an itch in hers as well. Both women went to the hospital and there tested positive for COVID-19. They were then placed on medication and advised to self-isolate. Now, their gateman Bosun*, who must have caught the virus from them, thought he had malaria and got on antimalarial medications. But, after a week, his symptoms persisted, so he decided to switch medicines to honey, ginger, and turmeric mixed in hot water, as advised by a friend. According to the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Nigeria entered the 4th wave of COVID-19 in December, reporting 223,887 cases and 2,985 deaths in its 36 states and federal capital Abuja. This is an over-500% increase. The surge in COVID-19 cases during the December festive period may be attributed to 2 major factors: the mass of unquarantined people that came into Nigeria from abroad, especially into Lagos; and the several crowded gatherings where social distancing practices were not observed. In the case of Adaobi and her mother, Adaobi had attended several crowded outdoor activities in December and her mother had just returned from a business trip in Europe, so it’s difficult to determine who infected who. Like Bosun, many Nigerians are ignorant of the symptoms of COVID-19. On top of that, many people do not see a doctor whenever they feel sick, preferring instead to self-medicate, with the belief that they have “ordinary malaria”. This is what’s currently happening in Lagos and, according to Remedial Health, a healthtech startup that improves access to original medicines by creating a direct supply chain between retailers and manufacturers or registered distributors, Lekki Phase 1—one of the highbrow areas of Lagos—is at the center of it all. Remedial Health founder and CEO, Samuel Okwuada, told TechCabal over a call that their company saw a 250% increase in orders for anti-malarial drugs in December last year from pharmacies and chemists in Lekki Phase 1. “It started around November but peaked in December. We noticed that customers in Lekki Phase 1 that would normally order 20 packs of antimalarial drugs for sale within 3–4 days were now ordering 60–70 packs every 1–2 days,” said Okwuada. “When we asked the manufacturers for more products and they told us they’d reached their production limit, we realised this is more serious than we thought.” Drugs like Artemether & Lumefantrine and Vitamin C saw about 250% and 130% increase, respectively, in demand. This continual spike in demand of antimalarial drugs—which is still happening—led Remedial Health to investigate the cause. Their conversations with pharmacists on the frontline suggests that some of the symptoms reported by customers are more consistent with COVID-19 than malaria. A sore throat is not indicative of malaria but it is one of the major symptoms of COVID-19. “The number of COVID-19 cases in Lekki is overwhelming. When these people come to the clinic, they always complain of malaria but test positive for COVID-19,” said a lab scientist who works at a testing centre in Lekki and who spoke to TechCabal anonymously. Another resident of Lekki Phase 1 jokingly said he suspects everybody in Lekki has the virus already. “That’s an old story now. It’s just another malaria symptom,” he said. The importance of data in combating the virus It’s no more news that healthcare institutions around the globe are using data to design better pandemic responses and train frontline staff. Without appropriate data, misinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus will flood the media and undermine efforts to sensitise the public. The World Health Organisation’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, once said, “We’re not just fighting a pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.” Governments across the world are using data to drive COVID-19 innovation to mend the economic stress, misinformation, and division the virus has unleashed on the world. In Nigeria, the Global Partnership UNECA worked with the country’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) to create a comprehensive data hub to show where cases of COVID-19 were occurring and what support might be needed. In Togo, the government is using artificial intelligence, via GiveDirect-Novissi COVID-19 Aid, to collect and collate data of the poorest communities in order to provide them with contactless financial aid through mobile money. According to a Reuter data, COVID-19 infections are decreasing in Nigeria, with 94 new infections reported on average each day. That’s 5% of the peak—the highest daily average reported on December 27. Okwuada, the lab scientist and some Lekki residents that spoke to TechCabal believes that these numbers are underreported and that is evident from the case of people like Bosun. Where’s their own number? However, even though data is not a direct antidote to the virus and not always correct, Okwuada believes it’s a strong fighting instrument. He said data is essential to curbing the spread of the virus and, possibly, ending the disease altogether. Source Read more Health Tech articles here |
| Science/Technology › Microsoft's Quest For Custom Chips by techcabal21(op): 2:38pm On Jan 14, 2022 |
It’s poaching season—the desperate time of year when companies battle over employee retainment to plan for their end-of-year goals. This year, Microsoft is kicking it off with a new hire, high-profile ex-Apple engineer Mike Fillippo who will help Microsoft achieve one of its pressing goals—developing its own custom chips. What kind of chips? Sadly, not the digestible kinds. � They’re computer chips for Microsoft servers that help power its cloud services, and possibly its devices. Currently, Microsoft has a long-standing partnership with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) to use their chips for its devices. However, more recently, Microsoft has been looking to make its own homegrown chips. And it’s not the only one. Apple announced its custom M1 chip in 2020, and both Alphabet Inc. (aka Google) and Amazon are also working on their own chips. What’s wrong with the stale old chips? To put it in Amazon Web Services VP Nafea Bshara’s words, “When we improve the hardware, everything that runs on it improves.” Tech companies want to make chips that are optimised for the services and devices they have, they’re not just looking to buy mass-produced chips that can fit any devices or servers. There’s also a higher demand for energy-efficient chips which consume low power. Apple’s M1 chips, for example, has not only increased the overall performance of MacBooks, it’s also reduced heat generation and increased battery life. Big picture: The drive for custom chips could also be due to the shortage of chips manufacturers have been experiencing. What this means for everyone is that we can expect faster devices from Microsoft and Google soon. It also means that companies like Nvidia and Intel will likely experience a drop in stock prices. Source |
| Nairaland General › Will 2022 Be Another “buzzing” Year For African Startups? by techcabal21(op): 1:57pm On Jan 14, 2022 |
The stakes are growing, with huge cheques now being floated for Africa’s most promising startups, opening up a much bigger fundraising window. This could be another monster year for the continent’s already “buzzing” startups. Africa’s startup ecosystem is off to another exciting year that could see companies continue raising more capital to fund their expansion into new markets and even grow more “unicorns”. Renowned American Silicon Valley-based accelerator, Y Combinator has pulled a new year surprise by doubling up its standard deal size to $500,000, setting the stage for more funding competition within accelerator circles – and ultimately pumping more money to startups. “This is the type of deal that we have wanted to offer YC founders for years – and with the recent success of YC companies, including 10 IPOs in 2021 and more to come this year, we are now able to do so. This sum will enable founders to focus on launching, building, and scaling their company. It will remove the immediate pressure to fundraise and accept less than favourable terms,” said a statement from Y Combinator. Last year, the continent’s startup scene began bubbling, thanks to multimillion-dollar venture capital injections, high-profile acquisitions, and billion-dollar (“unicorn”) valuations. It also birthed a second-tier ecosystem that helped smaller countries like Malawi, DR Congo, Botswana, and Benin jump into the funding limelight. The most notable development last year was the huge interest in African fintech startups – in markets across the continent – from funders. Five African fintech startups raised over a billion US dollars in growth funds in 2021 between them, as the sector remained the star of the continent’s venture capital funding and set a very high bar for startup fundraising in 2022. Baobab Insights shows the sectors’ top five funding rounds last year yielded $1.05 billion, out of more than $2 billion in disclosed funding from 159 fintech fundraising rounds it tracked – making Fintech the most active sector in 2021. “The financial services sector has certainly been buzzing this year,” said the accelerator network on its weekly analysis of the sector. Nigerian Fintech startup, Opay still holds pole position as the continent’s biggest fundraiser after breaking the African startup fundraising record by raising $400 million in series C fundraising in August. Through this historic fundraising round, Opay became Africa’s seventh unicorn, with a valuation of $1 billion. Senegalese mobile money provider Wave raised $200 million in September, pushing its valuation to $1.7 billion, following its acquisition by global payments firm, World Remit in a $500 million cash and stock deal. Wave also joined the unicorn status club, giving francophone nations their first unicorn. South Africa’s exclusively digital retail bank Tyme Bank also joined the top five list after securing an additional 70 million US dollars to complete a Series B funding round of $180 million. “The funding will go towards growing the South African market base as well as expansion into the Philippines,” said Baobab Insights. Flutterwave’s $170 million in March and ChipperCash’s $150 million – both in Series C funding – closed fourth and fifth top position in Fintech’s biggest funding rounds on the continent in 2021. All five fundraising rounds delivered “unicorns”. Chipper Cash is now valued at $2 billion following the $150 million in a Series C extension round led by global crypto exchange, FTX in November. In October, Nigeria’s Flutterwave began a new fundraising streak that would triple its current valuation to 3 billion dollars, highlighting the kind of sustained competition that looks likely to continue through 2022. The trend is in line with an earlier Digest Africa, Q3 2021, Africa funding report, “Record Funding Explodes” that had projected a fundraising boom in Africa’s startup ecosystem. According to Digest Africa, the Fintech sector had raised $906 million by the close of Q3, not only sustaining the leading role of Fintech investment but also totalling more funds than that raised by all sectors in the first half of 2021. With $4.27 billion raised by all African startups by end of December 2021, according to Substack’s ‘Africa: The Big Deal’ that tracked more than 800 deals worth $100,000 and over, 2021 set a very high bar for 2022, with the amount raised being more by 2.5 times that of 2020. Fintech’s over $2 billion represents approximately half of all these deals, making it a key focus area for 2022. The big question now: will this year present us with even more surprises? Source Read the latest tech stories here |
| Science/Technology › Bitpowr Wants To Power Blockchain Applications For African Businesses. Here’s Ho by techcabal21(op): 10:27pm On Jan 13, 2022 |
Interest in blockchain technology—a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across several computers—has grown significantly in recent years. Today, particularly in developed economies, modern blockchain technologies exist that provide practical value for several business use cases and applications, from improving financial transactions and enforcing contracts to simplifying trade. In Africa, the use of the emerging technology is still largely limited to cryptocurrencies and individual use-cases such as for receiving remittances. At the enterprise level, the integration of blockchain into business processes is still very much nascent, typically because it would require building systems from scratch, a time-consuming, arduous, and expensive process. For instance, it could take up to 4-5 months for an online retail platform to build and integrate a system for customers to make crypto payments, considering the several blockchain protocols that exist, each with its own node, implementation, and documentation. Nigerian startup, Bitpowr, officially launched this month to help businesses and developers slash this timeframe to a month. BitPowr is founded by CEO Tobi Oyetoke and has operated in beta mode since last February, providing organisations in Africa with tools to easily build and integrate blockchain applications. It currently offers an infrastructure that helps businesses create and manage crypto wallets through its application programming interface (API) as well as a system that processes cryptocurrency payments seamlessly for merchants and developers. Side project turned startup Unlike most startups whose founders at the onset identify a market need and set out to build a marketable solution to address it, Bitpowr started as a solution to a problem Oyetoke faced while building software products. His professional experience as a software developer/engineer goes as far as 2014, three years before he began studying in a tertiary institution in Nigeria. Asked when he got into the tech world, he told TechCabal that he was exposed to programming at the tender age of 11. “I first learned about tech through my family. I had an uncle who was an engineer and my brother an IT person that does networking. So I always had the opportunity to be around computers and during junior secondary school, I got to know about programming languages HTML, CSS, and Javascript,” Oyetoke said. His eight-year professional career as a software engineer spans roles mostly in international organisations including the US-based The Clouditicians Inc and Python Signal in Mauritius, where he built and launched agrotech and crypto exchange products. After working on some products, Oyetoke realised he had to build wallets from scratch for every new crypto project. “It was then the idea came to build a simple crypto wallet system to help create and manage Bitcoin wallets and also accept crypto payment easily,” Oyetoke recalled in a conversation with TechCabal. “Then we later decided to commercialise the solution, built for a couple of months and launched with six clients.” An all-in-one blockchain infrastructure suite Essentially, Bitpowr has set out to be a go-to platform for any company looking to create and integrate blockchain applications – from fintech startups that need crypto wallets for exchanges to e-commerce platforms that wish to incorporate crypto payments. Oyetoke reveals the startup’s ambition is to become the “AWS for blockchain services” in Africa. Its wallet API is a complete suite wallet management solution that lets businesses create and manage different types of wallets for different blockchain and several use cases. In addition, a payments API allows users to accept crypto payments with little to no setup and its soon-to-be-launched payouts API is a settlement service that lets merchants convert crypto to fiat. “A major drawback when it comes to building on the blockchain technology is its complexity and timeframe but we are providing the infrastructure for people to do that much faster and even at cheaper rates,” Oyetoke said. According to him, it could cost companies around $3,000 per month to integrate and support several blockchain protocols whereas, for a monthly base fee of $100, businesses can use BitPowr’s infrastructure that supports at least 10 blockchain nodes. The startup also makes money by charging a commission on transactions processed by businesses through its platform. Going forward, Bitpowr plans to expand its 12-member team as well as raise external funding for further product development. The startup currently has clients in Nigeria and Cameroon and plans to expand to more African countries by Q2. Due to the limited pool of blockchain engineers available in the country, Oyetoke revealed BitPowr is open to partnering with players in the crypto community training new engineers in Nigeria. Source Read more here |
| Nairaland General › "Buy Now Pay Later" Startup Lipa Later Raises $12m To Expand Across Africa by techcabal21(op): 6:42pm On Jan 13, 2022 |
Lipa Later, a Kenyan buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) company, has raised $12 million pre-series A to expand across Africa. This brings the company’s total funding to about $16 million to date. The funding, which is a mix of equity and debt, was co-led by GreenHouse Capital and Lateral Frontiers VC, which led the company’s seed investment. The round also saw participation from Cauris Finance, SOSV IV LLC, Sayani Investments, and Axian Financial Services. The company said this new fund will allow them to provide their buy-now-pay-later services to its current pipeline of consumers, solidify their presence in current markets—Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda—and expand into new markets such as Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Tanzania. Founded in 2018 by Eric Muli, Lipa Later started as a programme to help internal employees access mobile phones that’d allow them to be efficient at work. Muli had initially founded Alpha Force Security Ltd, a company that dispatches security guards to homes and offices in Kenya. In 2017, Alpha Force started a mobile phone financing programme for their employees—especially their guards—but found out there was no company offering a mobile phone BNPL solution, so they decided to tackle it themselves. “We started looking around to see if there’s a BNPL platform in the region, but there was none. So, at that point, we just did it ourselves,” Muli told TechCabal over a call. In 2017, there was no BNPL company focused on mobile phones in Kenya; the ones available, like M-Kopa, are mostly into solar power. So Lipa Later capitalised on this throughout 2017 and put hundreds of mobile phones in the hands of their employees and later external people. Helping their employees to get mobile phones was a kind of pilot; it brought them close to the market and, as a result, they realised that for every one Alpha guard that received a phone, there were hundreds of people outside who needed one but couldn’t afford it. So, after some research, Muli and his team became certain that they could extend this solution to more Kenyans; and in 2018, they built a tech-enabled product and launched it to the public. Within 3 years of operation, Lipa Later extended its offers into more retail options like electronics, furniture, home appliances, etc. Other than the traditional offline method of buyers purchasing items in stores, Lipa Later has tapped into the rapidly growing online presence across Africa and built a unique BNPL option API that integrates into e-commerce platforms and enables merchants to sell products directly to consumers and pay for them in affordable monthly installments. “Lipa Later is not a BNPL platform for only phones; it’s for anything that is retail. When we started out, we were doing things heavily manually. But we’re now fully tech-enabled; we integrate directly into e-commerce platforms and payment gateways.” Muli said the company also offers an offline solution for the merchants and small-scale retailers that have not yet moved online. He also said Lipa Later has served about 200,000 customers so far and maintained a 100% year-on-year growth. Lipa Later’s proprietary credit scoring and machine learning system enable the consumer to sign up and get a credit limit in seconds without the need for bulky documentation and a lengthy credit approval process. Speaking about the investment, Samakab Hashi, Partner at Lateral Frontier VC, one of Lipa Later’s first and lead investors, said, “Over the last few years, we have watched Eric and his team put together the building blocks for pan-African expansion, and this round of funding takes Lipa Later one step closer to being the dominant BNPL player on the continent.” “We are excited to be working with our investors as we look to grow and expand to more markets in Africa. In the next 12 months, we are looking to grow and double our presence in the existing markets, even as we open in 3–5 new markets in Africa,” Muli said in a statement made available to TechCabal. “Lipa Later is not only changing the consumer credit landscape across Africa, which to date has been largely inaccessible for most, but also catalysing the future of shopping, e-commerce, and payments,” said Ruby Nimkar, Partner at GreenHouse Capital. “They’ve done this in a true product- and customer-led way that benefits both merchants and consumers and has proven to be incredibly scalable across multiple markets.” The BNPL movement is waxing strong in Africa and so is the competition it brings. Lipa Later, even though it’s one of the early companies in the space in Kenya, has a lot of companies with the capital war chest to contend market share with. There is M-Kopa—which have since expanded into phones and retail products—in Kenya and Uganda. There are also CDCare, PayQart, Carbon, and even M-Kopa in Nigeria, where it just went live on Monday. In South Africa, there are PayJustNow and Payflex—which was recently acquired by Australian BNPL Zip. But Muli was sure that they don’t only have what it takes to compete but to emerge as industry leaders in the new market. One of Lipa Later’s cards is its wide array of exclusive merchants and world-renowned brands such as Carrefour, Apple, Tecno, Samsung just to mention a few, a strategy it has used to stay atop the market in East Africa and one it intends to carry along to the new markets. Source Read more here |
” Johnson thought he must have made a mistake somewhere on the statements, so he quickly double-checked before re-sharing the statements with Bento’s founding team. Okubanjo was still not satisfied with the statements. Apparently, some recent transaction hadn’t reflected yet in the company’s account at the time Johnson compiled the statement; there was no way Johnson could have included it in his report. But Okubanjo, “in his usual fashion”, asked Johnson to fix the spreadsheet or he’d fire him. Finally fed up, Johnson resigned with a simple message: “No need, I quit” and exited the WhatsApp group. An hour later, he sent in his resignation letter.