Africa Tech News

The Central Bank of Kenya has announced the Kenya Quick Response Code Standard 2023, also shortened as KE-QR Code Standard 2023. The service seeks to boost digital payments, which are offered by multiple financial institutions in the country. These companies usually have in-house payment solutions, meaning customers can only use a channel that has been implemented by a vendor. The CBK governor, Pa...

The Government of Kenya has proposed multiple amendments to the Finance Bill for 2023. The proposals aim to expand the tax base for the government, which has been having revenue issues that have forced it to at some point, delay the salaries of its employees. One of the proposals in the Bill is the taxation of payments made to digital creators. Content creation has grown over the years, and creato...

South Africa’s supreme court of appeals is set to rule on whether prisoners should have access to computers for educational purposes during their incarceration. Judges have ruled that the present policy, which prohibits or limits computer use, constitutes unfair discrimination, a ruling that the country’s ministry of Justice and correctional services is appealing against. Currently, in South Afric...

The African Development Fund and Smart Africa Alliance have jointly launched a $1.5 million project to streamline digital trade and e-commerce policies across 10 African countries. The project will evaluate policy gaps in the digital trade and e-commerce ecosystems of Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Uganda, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the Democrat...

Nigerian payment service provider Nomba has raised $30 million in a pre-Series B investment to support the delivery of bespoke payment solutions for African businesses. The round, which values the company at $150 million+ according to YCombinator data on its most valuable companies, was led by San Francisco-based Base 10 Partners. Partech and Khosla Ventures, existing investors from its $5 million...

Kenya is considering enforcing new regulations that will tax crypto exchange platforms like Binance and Bitmama. Business Daily reports that crypto platforms operating in Kenya may soon have to pay a 1.5% duty on every transaction they make, per the Value added Tax (Electronic, Internet and Digital Marketplace Supply) Regulations, 2023. Kenya has repeatedly ranked top of cryptocurrency adoption on...

A federal US court in Texas has ordered the CEO of a South African firm to pay $3.4 billion for bitcoin fraud. This is now the biggest fraud case involving Bitcoin. Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, head of Mirror Trading International was charged by the Commodities Future Trading Commission for running a $1.7 billion bitcoin scam. A federal judge ordered Steynberg to pay $3.4 billion—$1.7 billion in...

Kenya wants to curb the sale and distribution of fake phones and its solution is a spyware software on every mobile device in its territory. The Supreme Court of Kenya approved installing and using the Device Management System on all mobile phones to help curb counterfeit devices. DMS would reportedly use mobile networks to remotely access devices’ International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers a...

Apple Card customers in the U.S. can open a savings account and earn interest starting today. When the company originally announced the new financial product back in October, Apple said that it couldn’t share what interest rate would be paid out on these accounts because rates are fluctuating so much these days. Apple is going to offer an APY of 4.15%. It looks like a competitive offering when you...

The World Bank Group Board of Directors just gave Kenya a digital high-five with a whopping $390 million in financing for its Kenya Digital Economy Acceleration Project. This project is all about widening the doors to the digital economy for everyone in Kenya through high-speed internet, better education and government services, and building skills for the regional digital economy. TechMoran repor...

Twitter Inc, the company, has ceased to exist as a standalone company and has been merged into an entity called “X Corp”. Twitter would merge with X Holdings II, but keep its name and general corporate structure while continuing to operate under Delaware law. X Holdings I, controlled by Musk, would then serve as the merged entity’s parent company, while X Holdings III would take on the $13 billion...

Kenyan loan company, WhitePath Company Limited and workspace provider Regus Kenya are feeling the heat for not playing by the data protection rules, Techweez reports. Each company has been slapped with a hefty penalty of Ksh5 million as per the Data Protection Act and Complaints Handling Procedure and Enforcement Regulations. It turns out that WhitePath has been receiving a barrage of complaints,...

Global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has announced that it is partnering with South African healthtech firm MedSol AI Solutions to help promote the use of Artificial Intelligence in the detection of breast cancer. The initiative will be done through a state-of-the-art Wi-Fi ultrasound probe that can detect cancer in seconds. The partnership is part of AstraZeneca’s Africa Health Innovation Hu...

The City of Cape Town has announced that it is pursuing the Paardevlei Ground-mounted Solar Photovoltaic and Battery Energy Storage System project. The R1.2 billion project promises to shield the city from one full stage of load shedding. The assistance will come in the form of expertise required for specialist studies regarding environmental impacts, the engineering design of the project, as well...

Chinese technology giant Alibaba has announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence ChatGPT-style product called Tongyi Qianwen. Its cloud computing unit says it will integrate the chatbot across Alibaba's businesses in the near future but did not give details on its timeline. The company says Tongyi Qianwen, which is capable of working in English as well as Chinese, will initially be...

Google has announced plans to restrict loan apps on its Play Store from accessing sensitive user data such as photos, videos, and contacts. The update, which was pushed to the Personal Loans Policy yesterday, will take effect from May 31st. Kenya’s central bank and Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission are gradually overhauling the industry, one licence at a time. Google...

Liquid Intelligent Technologies has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the government of Zambia to launch a new data centre in the country. The agreement is part of an initiative to accelerate the country’s digital transformation and provide reliable and affordable connectivity to all Zambians. The data centre is intended to respond to increasing data-hosting needs from local businesses and...

The Eskom Pension and Provident Fund plans to expand into venture capital to reduce its dependence on traditional investments. Bloomberg says the fund has about R185 billion worth of assets under management, with roughly two-thirds allocated to South African stocks, inflation-linked debt, property and nominal bonds. Phathutshedzo Mabogo, deputy chief investment officer of the fund says they are ab...

DataPortal’s Digital 2023 South Africa report shows that more than a quarter of the country’s population still does not have access to the internet. South Africa had 43.48 million internet users, an internet penetration rate of 72%. Social media users stood at 25.80 million people, roughly 42.9% of the total population which stood at 60 million. The number of internet users in the country increase...

Nigeria’s consumer protection agency, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, released a list of all the loan apps licensed to operate in the country. 173 digital loan companies have been approved, with 119, including Renmoney and FairMoney, holding full approvals; and 54, including Soko Lending, holding conditional approvals. These processes come at a critical time when loan a...

Nigerian fintech unicorn, Flutterwave, was likely breached a second and third time on March 1 and 14, 2023. The sources alleged that, much like the first incident on February 5, the perpetrators used monies fraudulently obtained from Flutterwave accounts to buy USDT on the crypto platform Binance. The monies involved in both incidents in March are estimated to be N550 million. It remains unclear h...

There’s a new social media content sheriff in town. As TikTok tried not to get banned in the U.S., thousands of Gen Z creators are using Fanfix to monetize content and interact with fans. And it’s already paid out $11 million to creators so far. Fanfix, a Patreon competitor that is focused on Gen Z creators and only allows clean content, may provide an extra revenue stream for creators. The subscr...

Zyod, an Indian startup offering apparel sourcing and manufacturing to fashion brands globally, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture India Partners. As the e-commerce sector makes inroads, consumers are finding increasing convenience in purchasing clothes online. This stands in stark contrast to the traditional supply chain’s 180-day lead time and 2,000-piece minimum o...

Shuttlers, a Nigerian shared mobility company that allows individual and corporate passengers to take rides on multiple bus routes via an app, has raised $4 million in a new funding round led by Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures, a Pan-African focused venture capital firm. Shuttlers’ business primarily focuses on corporate trips and commutes. In Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, the average professio...

Edward Ochieng, CTO of Sklylab Systems, Microsoft’s Africa Development Centre was also affected by the layoffs. Microsoft opened its ADC branch in Kenya and Nigeria in 2019 in a move it called a long-term investment and promised to spend $100 million in its first five years. The Lagos branch expanded last year with a new facility. Microsoft had hired over 500 developers by June 2022, most of whom...