Africa Tech News

Kenya has received Ksh 50 billion from the European Union to facilitate the electrification of the country’s public transport system. The financing will enable Kenya to build the necessary infrastructure to make its bus rapid transit system more efficient and cost-effective. Kenya’s upcoming Green Mobility-Nairobi core bus rapid transit line 3 will feature zero-emission electric buses and will int...

Cote d’Ivoire has announced plans to launch its startup act, which will offer support to its burgeoning startup ecosystem. This follows a string of startup laws that have been enacted across Africa as several governments looking to support and build their technology ecosystems. Florence Tahiri Fadika, a technical advisor in charge of innovation and change at the country’s Ministry of Communication...

Kenya’s president William Ruto has reversed the rule that mandates that foreign companies must have at least 30% Kenyan ownership to operate in the country. The rule was implemented in 2020 to encourage Kenyan participation in the ICT and science and technology sector through equity ownership. It has also limited competition from foreign-owned companies that could not afford the heavy regulation....

GitHub, the popular developer platform, has laid off virtually its entire engineering team in India in an unusual move as the Microsoft-owned firm cuts its expenses amid the weakening global market conditions. The developer firm has eliminated over 100 jobs in the South Asian market. Gergely Orosz, a former software engineer who runs a popular newsletter Pragmatic Engineer, first reported about th...

German launch startup Isar Aerospace has scored $165 million in new funding as it races toward the inaugural flight of its Spectrum small rocket later this year. Isar CEO Daniel Metzler says that European governments are waking up to the geopolitical and economic upsides to sovereign launch capabilities. Isar’s funding history reflects this increasing overlap between public and private interests....

Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago. WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who set out to take the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and make them AI-po...

South African fintech Stitch has announced the addition of card and debit order pay-ins, as well as a payments management system PayOS, for payments orchestration and reconciliation. Stitch becomes an end-to-end Payments Service Provider (or PSP, defined as a third party that enables businesses to accept, manage and send digital payments through a variety of methods). Stitch president Junaid Dadan...

Twitter is actively seeking the person responsible for the recent leak of parts of its source code, which was posted on Microsoft-owned GitHub. The New York Times, says the code had been available online for months before Twitter took action to have it removed on Friday. Executives investigating the matter say the leak may have been done by an employee who left the San-Fransico-based company last...

Rwazi, a market intelligence startup that helps the world to understand consumers in emerging markets, has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Bonfire Ventures. With this fresh capital, Rwazi will double down on its penetration into emerging markets like Africa and South Asia. Rwazi crowdsources data collection through an app, working with on-the-ground consumers who are paid for sharing deta...

India will not tolerate the use of abusive language in movies and TV shows on on-demand video streaming services handed over direct ministerial power for censorship. Anurag Thakur, Union Minister of Information Broadcasting and Sports and Youth Affairs, says that the use of abusive language in the name of creativity will not be tolerated and that the government is receiving a growing list of compl...

Google announced that it had flagged several apps made by a Chinese e-commerce giant as malware, alerting users who had them installed, and suspended the company’s official app. Multiple Chinese security researchers accused Pinduoduo, a rising e-commerce giant that boasts almost 800 million active users, of making apps for Android that contain malware designed to monitor users. Ed Fernandez, a Goo...

The precision-punching European privacy rights campaign group has used data donated by users of the ‘Who Targets me‘ browser extension, which analyzes political microtargeting on Facebook, to build a case against every political party in Germany. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation classes information on political opinions as so-called ‘special category data’ which has a higher...

Bloomberg reports that Chipper Cash, one of Africa’s more prominent fintech companies and unicorns, is reportedly considering selling the company or seeking new investors. Bloomberg says the conversations are private, but Chipper Cash told the publication that it never sought to be acquired. Chipper Cash, says It’s been fairly common practice for them to receive various M&A proposals from diff...

Flutterwave has obtained its Electronic Money Issuer and Remittance Licences from the National Bank of Rwanda. With these licences, Flutterwave can now offer money deposit and withdrawal, electronic funds transfer, as well as inbound and outbound remittance services to the lovely people of Rwanda. Flutterwave will be offering a range of products to Rwanda’s e-commerce industry, including its cross...

The Nigerian government has launched a $672 million fund for tech for young people in its tech and creative sectors six months after passing the Nigerian Startup Act, Vice president Yemi Osinbajo says the African Development Bank (AfDB) will lead the fund with $170 million, while $116 million will come from Agence Francaise de Developpement. AfDB, says the fund will “marks the rollout of a flagshi...

B2B e-commerce startup Zumi is shutting down due to its inability to raise the funding necessary to sustain its operations. This close will see the company lay off its team of 150 people who have previous work experience from companies like SpaceX, Amazon, Twiga, and Jumia. CEO and co-founder of the Kenya-based startup, William McCarren, announced the company’s close in a Linkedin post saying, the...

Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies Stephane Kasriel says that the company will sunset its NFT and digital collectables features on Instagram and Facebook. By July, Meta expanded NFT support on Instagram for creators in 100 countries. Less than a year later, Meta is moving on from NFTs. Kasriel says they are winding down digital collectables, for now, to focus on other ways to suppo...

EchoVC, a pan-African VC firm with a global presence, has announced a fresh $8 million fund dedicated to blockchain startups in Africa. The fresh capital will be deployed to blockchain startups that are substantiating the utility of blockchain products and solving some of Africa’s pressing challenges. EchoVC is notably raising this capital at a time when overall customer and investor trust in cryp...

HSBC Holdings Plc has announced that its UK subsidiary, HSBC UK Bank, will acquire Silicon Valley Bank UK for £1. The deal, described as a strategic acquisition to strengthen HSBC’s banking franchise in the UK, will further restrict the economic fallout resulting from the bank’s collapse. HSBC Group CEO, Noel Quinn, says his acquisition makes excellent strategic sense for our business in the UK. I...

Africa’s most valuable company by market capitalisation, Naspers, has shut down its venture capital fund Naspers Foundry in an effort to scale down its operations. Post the sunsetting of the fund, the Foundry will continue to maintain the investments it has made which include in startups like Naked Insurance, SweepSouth, and most recently, Planet42’s $100 million mega-round. Naspers will continue...

The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority has opened an application portal for the maiden edition of its prize for an innovation programme. It says that the newly opened portal was the only means for submitting applications for the programme with each applicant allowed only one entry. It says the agency had December 2022 launched the NSIA Prize for Innovation programme with a total prize value of...

The European Commission has just announced that messaging platform, Whatsapp has agreed to improve how it communicates to users and presents future ToS updates. WhatsApp triggered a major user backlash after it pushed out an aggressive and confusingly worded update to its ToS that required users to accept the update in order to continue using the platform without making it clear what exactly was c...

Africa’s largest digital payments network MFS Africa has announced a partnership with Western Union. Users of the MFS Africa platform will be able to receive money from over 200 countries in their mobile wallets. MFS Africa reportedly connects over 400 million mobile money wallets and 200 million bank accounts across 35 African countries. The partnership will launch its service first in Madagascar...

Kenya is planning to generate Ksh3 trillion in taxes in the 2023/24 financial year, and Ksh4 trillion over the medium term. The Kenya Revenue Authority has launched a new tax-monitoring software: the electronic Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS). KRA deputy commissioner George Obel says the new system will improve compliance with VAT law through transparency and visibility of transactions subje...

Safaricom is in court over the operations of its mobile money arm, M-Pesa. Three plaintiffs have indicted Safaricom and Vodafone in a lawsuit which claims that Safaricom is operating its M-Pesa arm and Fuliza, its overdraft service, illegally. According to the petitioners—Gichuki Waigwa, Lucy Nzola, and Godfrey Okutoyi—since Safaricom uses the money from non-borrowing M-Pesa account holders as loa...