Rest Of World

Busani Moyo fears AI could soon wipe out his job, so he’s been trying to learn how to use ChatGPT to his advantage.

EV adoption in Nigeria is almost nonexistent, but a local startup is helping solve that problem. The vehicle experience center tackling EV misconceptions in Nigeria. Mosope Olaosebikan is the founder and CEO of Possible EVs, an Abuja-based mobility startup launched in 2021. The company is helping educate Africans about electric vehicles through its experience center.

South Africa’s new labor laws have slowed down skilled migrants’ visa renewal processes and restricted the pool of available jobs. Previously bright career prospects in the country have now come to an end, and migrants are turning to odd jobs to make a living.

Kenya’s Ridehail Transport Association has sued 14 ride-hailing apps, including Uber and Bolt, for failure to comply with various rules governing operations and driver welfare. The association’s acting secretary, Zakaria Johana, is at the forefront of these lawsuits. Although Johana is not a trained lawyer, he has drafted several legal cases for the association, which represents itself in court proceedings.

In August, TikTok was banned in Senegal and Somalia, with petitions to do the same in at least three other African countries. Citizens and experts believe the motive behind the ban is to suppress public criticism of the government.

InnBucks was launched as an app to pay back loose change at popular restaurants like Nando’s and Chicken Inn, amid a shortage of small denomination currency notes. Now, it offers digital payment services and loans. The app features a wide range of financial products and services, including savings accounts, mobile wallets, microloans, mobile banking, and value-added services such as airtime. It is Zimbabwe’s most popular free financial-sector app on the Google Play store.

South Africa’s web designers struggle to stay afloat as new players using cheap AI tools flood the market. Earnings have dropped significantly as recruitment agents push to hire fewer professionals.

A report by South Africa’s Competition Commission alleges that Google and some other large tech companies are anti-competitive and making growth difficult for small local businesses. The commission wants Google to tailor some of its products to promote the local businesses and then invest up to $17.3 million in them. Experts say the commission is putting the country’s burgeoning digital economy at risk.

A new foreign exchange policy increased the rate of naira from 460 per dollar in early June to nearly 800 by August. Nigerian startups, which typically raise funds in dollars and earn revenue in naira, say the currency depreciation has led to sharp increases in costs for cloud servers and software, while their incomes remain low in dollar terms. Investors have been reviewing the valuations of startups and say the new rule could lead to some companies shutting down.

Tech workers are leaving Lagos and Abuja — the country’s economic and political hubs, and flocking to cities like Ibadan, Jos, Benin City, Uyo, and Osogbo. Nigeria’s rising inflation and other economic challenges are making remote tech workers move to smaller cities, where living costs are relatively lower. The influx has led to rising rents, and increased costs of food and transportation in the secondary cities. Although locals have been seriously affected, researchers and startup developers say the development could be good for the cities’ economies in the long run.

Without a cash withdrawal option, Kenyans are turning to the country’s informal crypto economy — and some are losing their coins in the process. Officially launched on July 24, Worldcoin gives 25 WLD tokens as a signup bonus to new registrants. With Worldcoin operations halted in Kenya, many are now scrambling to redeem their tokens for cash. Informal coins-for-cash trades have created a new opportunity for fraud and theft.

Anti-government protests in Kenya have found a digital home on TikTok. While creators are making money from livestreaming protests, protesters say the videos help them stay safe against police brutality. Mũtana Gakurũ, founder of a Nairobi-based creators collective, warns the trend may stoke political tensions and violence.

Lacina Koné is the director general and CEO of Smart Africa, an alliance backed by African heads of state and governments to facilitate technological and digital innovation on the continent. In a conversation with Rest of World, Koné shared what he has learned about the digital capabilities of African countries so far and what they must prioritize in the future.

Several unemployed Zimbabweans were scammed by E-Creator, a platform that promised payment for writing fake reviews on e-commerce websites. In June, local reports said the company’s director Zhao Jiaotong had run off with over $1 million obtained from the scam. He has since been arrested. Experts say such schemes thrive on people’s desperation at a time when unemployment in Zimbabwe is as high as 90%, according to some estimates, and inflation is more than 100%.

In Nairobi, Bengaluru, and Hong Kong, our reporters found lots of people were eager to take the deal. At Nairobi’s Imaara shopping mall on a quiet Thursday, two dozen people stood in line to have their irises scanned. It was the fourth day after the official launch of Worldcoin, a global blockchain project championed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Sending money in and out of Africa is a stressful task. For starters, it’s costly: Each transaction incurs fees of up to 8.46% on average, according to the World Bank, making it the most expensive region to send money. Internet scams and regulatory bottlenecks present further challenges, leading global fintech companies, including Wise, WorldRemit, and Mercury, to often cut African users off from their services.

In the 2000s, it seemed as if there was an internet cafe on practically every Lagos street corner. Inside, young people spent their days looking at pictures of their favorite hip-hop artists, playing online games, tapping away on pay-to-click (PTC) websites, or chatting over Yahoo Messenger. The demand for internet access was so great that eventually cafes sold internet access in bulk. More access meant faster connectivity and increased productivity.

Uganda’s first internet cafes came to life in 1996. Now, they barely exist. The history of internet cafes is synonymous with the history of internet access in Uganda. Uganda had less than 5,000 internet users in 1999. That’s around the time when the country’s first internet cafes cropped up, catering mostly to tourists and researchers. For most Ugandans who used the internet during the 2000s and early 2010s, these cafes represented their first experience of going online.

Fintech company Flutterwave is scoring international business partnerships amid a series of controversies. It announced strategic partnerships with Audiomack, Microsoft, and Token.io in one month. Investors and experts believe Flutterwave’s size and importance in the African tech ecosystem make it almost too big to fail.

Germany, Canada and the U.K. have launched immigration-friendly visa policies that are attracting skilled workers from Africa. Experts worry this will lead to brain drain in Africa, and entrepreneurs fear losing good talent to the West.

Uber Eats delivery drivers in South Africa are looking to form a union to hold the company accountable. Drivers say they lack basic equipment and benefits, and that Uber Eats has not been responsive to their grievances, forcing them to consider unionizing. Uber says it has done its best to create flexible and rewarding work conditions for its drivers, including providing insurance. But drivers say they have not received any such benefits.

Over 20 current and former employees of Call Center International Kenya told Rest of World they had faced sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace. The company is a branch of CCI Global, the largest business process outsourcing organization in Africa. CCI Kenya’s clients include T-Mobile, Foxtel, Spirit Airlines, Instacart, MultiChoice, and M-Kopa.

ThriveAgric fell into a crisis when the pandemic hit. Three years later, it has found its way back up. Uka Eje is the co-founder and CEO of ThriveAgric, a Nigerian fintech providing smallholder farmers access to finance, agricultural insights, and distribution assistance. In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the company sank into a crisis and was unable to pay out investments that users had made on its platform. Three years on, ThriveAgric has pivoted its business model and turned its fortunes around. Now, the company provides tech and value-chain support for farmers.

Asmelash Teka Hadgu is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Lesan, a Berlin-based startup developing machine translation products for Ethiopian languages. Founded in 2019, Lesan has launched translation tools for Amharic and Tigrinya, which it says outperform Google Translate in terms of quality. The startup’s use of offline print resources to create a new benchmark data set for languages from the Horn of Africa has been key to its success.

Uber and Bolt drivers say the fuel subsidy removal has put them at risk of losing their livelihoods. President Bola Tinubu has initiated several significant policy changes since his inauguration on May 29. One change is the removal of the fuel subsidy, which has caused fuel prices to nearly triple. Institutions like the World Bank have hailed the policy as a great move for the country. Gig workers, however, are suffering under the new fuel price regime.

In Senegal, a country with low levels of literacy, WhatsApp voice notes allow farmers and researchers to share information and collaborate. Farmers, researchers, and NGOs use WhatsApp as their primary source of communication, using it to spread information about techniques that help them face challenges like climate change.

Female ride-hailing drivers in Johannesburg describe their daily work as risky and dangerous, as they face a threat to safety from male customers. Uber and Bolt said they have introduced features to keep drivers safe. But a South African ride-hailing drivers’ association said the companies need to do more.

New research casts doubt on multilingual language models, which are commonly used for AI moderation of low-resource languages. Two such languages, Amharic and Tigrinya, are at the center of recent violence in northern Ethiopia, where Facebook is accused of fueling the violence through poor moderation

What started out as a matchmaking WhatsApp group has turned into a popular dating app with over 2.1 million recorded matches and 44 marriages.

Nigerian engineering students are increasingly turning to Indian YouTubers for supplementary academic support. Though the Indian educational channels weren’t created with the idea of catering to Nigerian students, they’re now trying to keep their lessons accessible to all.

The civil war in Sudan has severely damaged the country’s crucial infrastructure, impacting health care, telecommunications, and banking. At least six Sudanese startups have risen to the occasion, and are helping citizens get by in challenging times.

In February 2022, Fraol Ibsa, who was making a living on ride-hailing apps, downloaded SunPick, the latest ride-hailing app to hit the market in Addis Ababa. Ibsa was excited, as the company was promising to bring new features for both drivers and passengers, such as enhanced security features.

Small hints of big things to come between some of the world’s most overlooked regions. he attention of business and technology in Latin America almost always looks north to the U.S. The more sophisticated Latin American VCs and entrepreneurs take the world’s other great markets into consideration when thinking of where to scale, seek out investment, or talent — namely, Europe, China, India, and Japan.

Wave’s rise has burst open the mobile money landscape in the West African country by fueling competition with existing players.

Eloho Omame shares what female-focused VCs can do better. Eloho Omame co-founded FirstCheck Africa after spending three years as the founding managing director of Endeavor Nigeria. In addition to her work leading a group of startup founders on the continent, Omame is known for her commitment to gender and inclusion in the venture capital (VC) sector in Africa.

FreshSource is an Egyptian B2B agritech platform, which streamlines the fresh-produce value chain and works directly with local farmers. It leverages data and technology to work with producers and sells fresh produce directly to businesses. In February, the startup raised an undisclosed “seven-figure” seed round to help it scale its operations across Egypt, and serve more farming communities by cutting back on food waste.

When it comes to top valuations, venture firms have never questioned the shaky facts behind them, but with a financing slowdown on the horizon, some are.