African Tech Roundup Podcast

Turns out Ghana’s top cop— Inspector General of Police John Kudalor thinks that blocking social media access across the country might be necessary to ensure Ghana’s national security on election day in November 2016. Mr Kudalor reckons that Ghana might do well to learn from the example set by other countries on the continent and around the world that have take similar steps in the recent past— Uga...

Brian Anderson is the Head of Sales and Business Development at Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), a NYSE-listed firm specialising in banking and payments technology as well as consulting and outsourcing solutions— which acquired one of the world’s leading financial software and technology services companies SunGard in 2015. The company services 20,000 clients in 130 countries and has 5...

Late last week a violent attack on two Uber partner vehicles in the Sandton Central Business District led to the injury of three police officers who attended the scene to calm things down, and also resulted in the damage of two law enforcement vehicles. The assault on the Uber partners’ cars is said to have been carried out by a group of meter taxi drivers unhappy with Uber’s disruption of their l...

Vodacom is finally pulling the plug on their disastrous six-year attempt to roll out M-Pesa in South Africa. (The service will be shut down on June 30th 2016.) Funny thing is, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub has blamed his company’s diabolical failure to meet their target of enlisting at least 10 million active users on South Africa’s relatively well-established banking industry. (By the end of 2015 th...

Following our coverage last week of the partnership between VAST Networks and Ruckus Wireless to deliver on Africa’s largest single deployment of WiFi infrastructure at the recently opened Mall of Africa in Midrand, South Africa— we thought it might be a good idea to invite a certified WiFi-freak to help us understand why WiFi may indeed be “the next big thing” in terms of ushering in seamless con...

There’s no doubt Kenneth Nkosana Makate is celebrating Workers’ Day in style following a South African Constitutional Court judge ruling that Vodacom owes him a big fat cheque for profiting from his Please-Call-Me idea for well over a decade. This brings to a close Nkosana’s 15-year legal battle with the mobile network. Or does it? In this episode of the African Tech Round-up, Tefo Mohapi and I un...

There is so much hype around the potential of technological innovation to lift Africa out of poverty and usher the continent into an era of peace and progress. I get a little annoyed when such rhetoric is bandied about by corporate marketers who know better than to think that free WiFi and cheap mobile devices will solve the massive structural socio-economic problems plaguing the continent. Provid...

And so our First Birthday Celebration continues… Over the past year, our sister podcast, African Tech Conversations, has featured relaxed in-depth chats with leading entrepreneurs, innovators and thought-leaders from Africa’s tech scene. In place of this week’s discussion on the African Tech Round-up, we’re sharing memorable moments from the series. In this episode, you can look forward to hearing...

The African Tech Round-up turns one today, and it’s difficult not be sentimental. It’s been an incredibly rewarding year! We set out to provide some much-needed coverage of the biggest digital, tech and innovation news stories from the African continent— minus all the PR-soaked click-bait and consumer-driven tech chatter one tends to find all over the web. We’ve certainly done our best to deliver...

Mbwana Alliy is the founder and managing partner at Savannah Fund, an Africa focused Technology Venture Capital fund that runs both an accelerator and seed investments in e-commerce, gaming, education technology and social networking. In this not-so-quick chat with Andile Masuku and Tefo Mohapi, Mbwana shares insights on the venture capital scene in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fields tough questions a...

At Afrikoin Joburg 2015, hosted at Alpha Code in December 2015, Andile Masuku spoke to two leading Zimbabwean startup founders with businesses in the fintech space, and asked them to unpack why Zimbabwe might be the perfect use-case for disruptive fintech innovations.

MTN’s West African headache is now officially a chronic migraine. Just as the MTN Group thought the worst was over, lawmakers in Nigeria’s House of Representatives decided to shake things up. Some members have declared any concession (promised or granted by the Nigerian Communications Commission) in terms of the $5.2 billion fine that MTN Nigeria was charged some months ago, “unlawful”. Others hav...

Lungisa Matshoba is a Co-founder & Director of the Cape Town-based fintech startup, Yoco, and Shafin Anwarsha is Founder & Head of Product at Giraffe— a Johannesburg-based mobile recruitment startup. The two are well-regarded poster boys for South Africa’s emerging startup scene. Both their firms are currently enjoying a season of relative success as their businesses continue to gain tract...

Geraldine Mitchley is the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships and Emerging Payments at Visa Sub-Saharan Africa. Andile Masuku caught up with her at Nest.vc's recent #WhatsNext #FinTech event in Johannesburg and asked her to describe Visa's approach to acquiring fintech startups that might be able to deliver the type of innovative solutions they might have difficulty developing in-house.

There are media reports doing the rounds regarding South Africa’s Film and Publication Board (FPB) Chief Operating Officer Sipho Risiba supposedly giving Netflix a two-week ultimatum to comply with its regulatory requirements (whatever those are), or risk facing tough sanctions. Word is, Risiba recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kenya Film Commission in a show of support for Ke...

Dare Okoudjou is the CEO of MFS Africa-- a firm which specialises in “making simple and relevant financial services accessible through mobile phones across Africa”. His international consulting background and current role as overseer of MFS Africa’s business across 22 African countries inform his perspectives on what might be next for the continent’s fintech scene. In this chat with Andile Masuku,...

Sechaba Ngwenya is the co-founder of fintech startup, Creditable, that is currently enjoying the support of VC’s like Nest.vc while “playing nicely” with financial incumbents like DBS Hong Kong to establish the commercial viability to their innovative banking solutions. Sechaba lets Andile Masuku in on what it’s taken to get his company to the relatively peachy phase they are now operating in, and...

Last week, the Standard Bank Incubator in Johannesburg played host to Nest.vc’s forum on finance and technology. The gathering formed part Nest’s monthly entrepreneurship speaker series and showcase dubbed #WhatsNext. It is the very first #WhatsNext event that Nest has hosted in Southern Africa— doing so in partnership with Standard Bank South Africa, and with support provided by iAfrikan and the...

Vodacom is reportedly fielding a lawsuit filed by a South African company called Ndabenhle Business Enterprises CC. Word is, Ndabenhle is alleging that Vodacom stole the “Airtime Advance” idea from them and ran with it, leaving them in the cold. Vodacom’s Airtime Advance innovation allows prepaid subscribers who run out of airtime to get R5 or R10 in prepaid minutes on credit and only pay it back...

Andile Masuku had a lively chat with Aaron Fu, Managing Partner (Africa) at NEST recorded during his first proper visit to Johannesburg in December 2015. They talked about everything from what he’s personally looking forward to in 2016 to what strikes his fancy in his professional capacity as the head of a leading VC firm on the continent.

Andile Masuku chats to Stuff Magazine South Africa Editor, Craig Wilson, about all the biggest news to come out of the Mobile World Congress 2016-- that went down in Barcelona.

Aspirational mobile trends like virtual reality are all well and good, but as Africans we must still grapple with the practical implications of having a massive percentage of mobile users on the continent continuing to rely on feature phones. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Stuff Magazine South Africa Editor and good friend of the show, Craig Wilson joins Andile Masuku to unpa...

Andile Masuku got to hang with two interesting African-American entrepreneurs who were in South Africa on business, and gleaned insights on the start-up scene they hail from. Talib Graves-Manns is the Entrepreneur in Residence with Google for Entrepreneurs and Code2040 at the American Underground in Durham, North Carolina. Talib is also the Co-Founder of three startups: RainbowMe Kids, Point AB, a...

It would seem that MTN might be off the hook over the small matter of the several billion dollars it owes/owed the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)— proving to many that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”, or as Tefo Mohapi so eloquently put it in this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, “TIA”. MTN Nigeria seems to have taken the casual legal advi...

Uganda’s most closely contested election in decades pitted the victorious incumbent, Yoweri Museveni, against seven other candidates, including his former doctor, Kizza Besigye, and ex-prime minister, Amama Mbabazi. While polls leading up to the election showed that Mr Museveni had a comfortable lead over his nearest rival, there was still the open question of the winning candidate needing to secu...