The Estonian tech ecosystem was not built in one day. According to the East European nation’s ambassador-at-large for Africa, Daniel Schaer, Estonia, which achieved independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union, was just like any country across the globe that has freed itself from colonisers. It was poor but had big ambitions, and based on who you ask, it has managed to achieve them. Part of its development agenda was to modernise its government and the overall public sector.

African governments are pushing for digital IDs without informing people of their privacy implications. Many African countries plan to gradually phase out traditional IDs with digital alternatives. This transition has become commonplace in recent years as governments throughout the continent slowly call for digital identification. Key progress can be seen in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Rwanda.

The new goal for African telcos is becoming technology platforms not just old goody mobile carriers. Twenty-five years ago when Mohammed Ibrahim was setting up MSI Cellular Investments, the mobile network provider better known as Celtel, in Africa, few people thought mobile phones had a future in Africa. But the Doubting Thomases were wrong and the few hardy believers like Mo were right. From a few thousand telephone connections in the late 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa has today become the epicentre of the GSM mobile phone revolution.

Africa has 99 problems, and electricity is top 2. Governments and private sector interests have spent billions of dollars trying to rectify this problem – with bare luck. Now, companies and startups are raising money to replicate previous interventions. One of the leading companies in this space is Husk Power, and they raised good money to solve this problem.

In 2022, diasporans sent $100 billion back to Africa. While this powered economic growth, it presented an opportunity for asset managers and venture capital firms to turn remittances into investments for Africans in the diaspora.

In the last 10 years, venture capital has become a global industry, but the latest crisis will test how much the underlying principles of VC investing apply outside of Silicon Valley.

Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Egypt are dubbed the Big Four in Africa’s tech ecosystem – but new players are making a play for the title. This edition explores three countries building special cities to attract tech talent across Africa.

It’s easy to talk about how African entrepreneurs will face more challenges with raising funding because VCs dashed (a Nigerianism for a gift, typically in cash) millions of dollars to poorly thought-out venture experiments or outright fake businesses. A lot of people like to talk about this and go on and on about it. I don’t. I intensely dislike the discussion because not only is it distracting, it is fodder for bad assumptions and priors. Priors in this sense is the statistical probability of an outcome regardless of unknowns. For me, the meaning of new reports detailing bad founder behaviour is simple. Everyone needs to grow up and stop being sheep.

It’s IPO season, and everyone’s eyes are peeled for the next big listing. ARM and Instacart blew open the IPO drought with a strong debut but a predictable flattening days later. In Africa, our stock markets are getting new blood with the latest listing on Nigeria’s stock exchange – NGX.

With the inclusion of venture debt, venture inflows to Africa totalled $6.5 billion across 853 deals – but Somalia did not get any of this share.

Tech startup founders face a series of challenges on the path to success. When do they finally get to reap their rewards? The thing with arguments like how much a founder should earn is, it is subjective. We can speculate and harmonise based on an industry standard but who sets it anyway? If indeed there is a standard for how much a founder should earn, it is still subjective and mostly dependent on the founder to set.

One of the biggest news stories last week, at least in Nigerian tech circles, was my colleague’s (Ngozi Chukwu) reporting about Payday, the virtual card app. Per her reporting, Payday which announced a $3 million pre-seed earlier this year is now seeking a buyer after a potential deal with Moniepoint fell through amidst internal strife and customer complaints. Like Payday, two other fintechs, Dash and Float, raised significant sums which were subsequently lost or misappropriated. Stories like this, where startups raise significant sums only to go bust months down the line, inevitably get a lot of attention. The businesses involved usually have thousands of customers and interested stakeholders from investors to regulators.

Nigeria’s tech ecosystem and Nollywood made a baby called The Black Book. For the first time in Nollywood’s history, Nigerian startup founders were the main backers of a Netflix original directed by Editi Effiong. The founders became executive producers on The Black Book, now streaming on Netflix. Here’s a recap of my conversation with Effiong and some of his executive producers about funding The Black Book and what local investments mean for the future of Africa’s movie industry. In this issue, we’ll break down how the tech ecosystem brought this Netflix original to life. Plus, I’m hosting my first tech conference! And I’ll tell you all about it.

Africa is on a fast and furious boom. And its cities are rising with it. Right now, Africa is home to 1.4 billion people, twice as many as Europe, and it's growing three times faster than the global average. The UN projects that by 2050, Africa’s population will double to at least 2.4 billion people, and that one-fourth of the world’s population will be African.

Last week, the Africa Climate Summit was held in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference was attended by key delegates from African countries, international organisations, and the private sector. The summit was a significant event for Africa, as it was the first time African leaders had come together to discuss climate change on a continent-wide scale. It also served as a platform for multiple electric vehicle (EV) companies—including BasiGo, which serves Nairobi with 20 electric buses for public transport—to showcase their products.

Shola Akinlade, CEO/Co-founder of Paystack, broke the internet when he announced he’d launched a football club to spend the next 40 years building football talent in Nigeria – two years after Stripe acquired his startup in a whopping $200 million deal.

Big news this week – India has its eyes on Africa. Black Ostrich Ventures launched a $20m fund to invest in pre-seed and seed stage startups outside the “Big Four” African markets, and Uganda’s Asaak is expanding into Latin America.

In 2012, Jumia, Africa’s first ecommerce giant, revolutionised shopping by offering the service online, alongside shipping. Since then, they have grown as a market leader over the African continent. They have also gone on to list their shares on the stock exchange, in 2019. The listing went well; their stock prices surged 75% on its first day of trading. This made the company a unicorn with an over $3 billion valuation. But four years after that IPO, everything has crashed. Its stock now trades at somewhere around $4, losing nearly 70% of its value since its listing date.

Africa has a big digital payment potential. It’s the fastest-growing digital economy in the world. Nearly 70% of all telecom mobile money transactions globally come from Africa. And other digital payment methods like cards, digital wallets, and tap-to-pay are catching up. According to McKinsey’s report: The Future of Payments in Africa, Africa’s digital payments market will grow 152% between 2020 and 2025.

Ethiopia has always enchanted foreigners with its rich history and dated traditions. Some of them are preserved in the form of solid rock monoliths that defy explanation, given the crude tools of the era they were built. More recently, Ethiopia enchanted global emerging market watchers with its average GDP growth of more than 10% from the mid-2000s to the 2010s. This economic growth miracle dipped to 8% in 2015 and has since struggled to break 7% since 2019, around the same time that violent fraternal conflict drew storm clouds over economic reform and progress.

Top stories – the CEO of one of Kenya’s most prominent startups gave a masterclass in crisis comms; Elon Musk gifted Twitter users thousands of dollars while still owing ex-employees in Africa. Plus, crypto startup Patricia might be playing a fast one with user funds.

Africa is a hotspot for embedded finance. A continent with: An underbanked population of 350 million adults 90% of payments made with cash 46% phone penetration in 2021 (not including children)

See African tech, deal round ups and events of the week. Sendy is shutting down and finalizing an asset sale. The startup has been around for 8 years and raised $26.5 million. We are staying tuned to hear who the acquirer is, and articles indicate it could be sold to Sabi, Wasoko, or Trella...

African startups are in the third year of a brutal winter, with foreign investors tightening their pre-seed purse strings. But, there’s hope – and it’s no-code. Plus, in shocking news, Kenya’s top logistics startup Sendy shuts down, and startups are raising less than they did in their heyday—big surprise.

This week, I’ll take a break from the ecosystem review series to share a bit of my evolving thoughts on B2B retail digitisation in the past few weeks. The summary is that hurting FMCG sales leaves a question mark over how thick the digital layer in FMCG retail should be.