African Tech Roundup Podcast

Joining Andile Masuku and guest co-host, Vije Vijendranath, for this episode of the African Tech Roundup podcast is Kenyan repat, founder of Impact Africa Network and host of the Chini ya Maji podcast, Mark Karake. Following professional stints in Silicon Valley, working for the likes of Google, TrustArc and Oracle, Mark decided to return to his native Kenya in March 2018 to get involved in early-...

Good friend of the show, entrepreneur, investor and incurable blockchain technology fanatic, Simon Dingle, joins Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga to chat through three big questions: 1) What are we to make of Jumia’s much-publicised New York Stock Exchange listing? 2) Is blockchain technology as full-safe as we are often led to believe? 3) How excited should we be about PopCom founder, Dawn Dickson,...

This is the second and final part of an insight-filled conversation Andile Masuku had with one of Zimbabwe’s most well-known and well-respected business people, the economist turned banker, entrepreneur and investor, Dr Nigel Chanakira. In this instalment, Dr Chanakira shares entrepreneurial wisdom around commercialising market-relevant tech and innovation and explains why he remains pragmatically...

This podcast is the first instalment of a two-part conversation Andile Masuku had with one of Zimbabwe’s most well-known and widely-respected business people, the economist turned banker, entrepreneur and investor, Dr Nigel Chanakira. Dr Chanakira is probably most famous for founding Kingdom Financial Holdings Limited in 1997, and for orchestrating that company’s much-publicized merger and demerge...

This is the second instalment of a 2-part conversation with Africlick founder Dayo Akinrinade, which was taped at the fringes of the London stop of Afrobytes' 2018/19 International Event Series. Africlick is a new dating and networking app that aims to connect people of African and Caribbean heritage through their culture, and in this episode, Dayo sketches the magnitude of the business opportunit...

Dayo Akinrinade is the Founder of Africlick, "a new dating/networking app for professionals and creatives of African and Caribbean heritage". Dayo holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester and a Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship from University College London and has spent over ten years working in IT Management Consulting— delivering analytics and financi...

This bonus podcast miniseries episode features Lauren Servin, the American Founder and "Chief Tree Officer" of the Desert Date Company. The Desert Date Company is a natural ingredient supplier and skincare brand based on the banks of the Nile River in Northern Uganda. Lauren was previously SPARK’s South Sudan Country Manager – a role she inhabited for four years. In that role, she implemented an a...

Kenyan Margaret "Maggie" Nyamumbo is the Founder and CEO of Kahawa 1893, a San Francisco-based coffee company intent on revolutionising the global coffee supply chain and closing the industry's abhorrent gender gap. Prior to launching her bid to "disrupt fair trade" in the international coffee sector, Margaret worked on Wall Street evaluating retail and consumer companies, and, before that, she wa...

Former live theatre production specialist Heidi Lovett is the Executive Director of Swerve Robotics, a Washington-based organisation which uses applied-STEM education programmes to empower young people to pursue advanced STEM studies and career opportunities. Heidi initially started Swerve Robotics club (originally the Gothic Lawn Gnomes FIRST LEGO League team) as a means to channel her son's crea...

Mere days before 2018 came to a close, Andile Masuku sat down two bright, young Zimbabwean entrepreneurs to learn what it takes to engineer business success in Harare. Simanga Mdhlabuta is commercial sales and business development professional and Wits MBA who gained invaluable corporate experience working for leading Zimbabwean entrepreneurial giants such as Innscor, Econet and Africom. Simanga h...

Alain Nkurukiye is a Corporate Strategy and Economic Policy MBA who hails from Burundi, but has lived and worked in the Netherlands for the better part of 10 years. Through his startup, Wajenzi, he aims to channel all his professional competencies into narrowing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) financing gap by stimulating the African Diaspora to invest systematically in their countries of...

Co-founder and Co-MD of Secha Capital Rushil Vallabh joins Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga for the very first in-studio taping of 2019. Andile, Musa and Rushil chat through some notable signals and trends they've observed in Africa’s digital, tech and innovation ecosystem over the last month or so, then unpack issues raised by a New York Times (NYT) article entitled, More Start-Ups Have an Unfamili...

Jordanian Raneem Muqbel is the co-founder of a social manufacturing enterprise called TEENAH that works with Syrian refugees and their host communities in Jordan to produce high-quality custom printed bags for clients across the MENA region and in Europe. Raneem also happens to be a specialist in economic empowerment projects with the Jordan River Foundation, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper a...

This podcast features two separate conversations Andile Masuku had with senior executives working for the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB). Both exchanges yielded intriguing insight into the values, investment outlook and business MO of the world’s preeminent provider of sharia-compliant development finance. The first part of this episode features a brief chat with Musa Sillah, the Director of the...

South African Dylan Richts is Head of Partnerships at WeThinkCode, a Cape Town-headquartered non-profit organisation which works with public and private partners to "source and train world-class African digital talent" and provide students with a path to employment within the continent's tech and innovation ecosystem. Dylan formerly worked for the Mayor of London's promotional agency, assisting gl...

In this podcast, Andile Masuku chats with Mustafa Othman. Mustafa is the Somali Co-founder and Communications and Technology Manager of an organisation called Shaqodoon which operates in Somalia and Somaliland. Shaqodoon, which translated to English means “job seeker”, was born out of a USAID funded youth empowerment project called the Somali Youth Livelihoods Program, which was supported by the E...

This candid conversation - led by Andile Masuku - features two remarkable entrepreneurs. The first is Morris Dougba, a second-generation Liberian cocoa farmer and University of Liberia accounting graduate who fled his homeland to live in the US to escape civil war. Morris has since returned to his country to found a company called Green Gold Liberia, which produces charcoal briquettes using organi...

Academic turned startup founder and investor, Dotun Olowoporoku, is the Managing Partner at Starta, a platform that "makes it easier to build, discover and track high growth businesses in Africa through startup education, data and growth consulting". Dotun is also a General Partner at the Nigerian VC outfit, Ventures Platform and the host of the Building the Future with Dotun podcast (http://thest...

In this relaxed three-way conversation, Alexander Betts, Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs and William Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at the University of Oxford's Brasenose College, and Yannick Du Pont, the Co-founder and Director of the Dutch NGO SPARK, join Andile Masuku to discuss the awkward state-of-play within the global foreign aid industry, reference instructive l...

2018's last in-studio taping of the African Tech Roundup podcast is a two-part affair which guest features the force of nature that is Viola Llewellyn. Viola is the UK-born, Cameroonian Co-founder and President of an award-winning fintech platform called Ovamba. Ovamba relies on proprietary technologies to connect African SMEs to sources of short‐term capital to fund their growth. Viola has spent...

2018's last in-studio taping of the African Tech Roundup podcast is a two-part affair which guest features the force of nature that is Viola Llewellyn. Viola is the UK-born, Cameroonian Co-founder and President of an award-winning fintech platform called Ovamba. Ovamba relies on proprietary technologies to connect African SMEs to sources of short‐term capital to fund their growth. Viola has spent...

Lee Naik is the CEO of TransUnion Africa, a subsidiary of the giant American consumer credit reporting agency, TransUnion, that’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Prior to joining TransUnion Africa, Lee spent 18 years at Accenture, where he served as Managing Director of Accenture Digital in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since signing up to lead TransUnion Africa in January 2017, he’s been tasked with...

The third and last episode of African Tech Roundup's (https://africantechroundup.com) miniseries (http://bit.ly/atrudigitalassets) on digital assets features Viola Llewellyn, the UK-born, Cameroonian Co-founder and President of an award-winning fintech platform called Ovamba. Ovamba leverages proprietary technologies to connect African SMEs to sources of short‐term capital to fund their growth. Vi...

In this conversation with the Chief Technical Officer at MzansiSat, Bernard Greyling, Andile Masuku learns about the South African geostationary broadband satellite startup's mission to partner with African states in deploying and operating space hardware that would significantly improve public access to low-cost internet access. Listen in to hear Bernard explain the innovative public-private owne...

In this podcast - the second episode in African Tech Roundup's (https://africantechroundup.com) three-part miniseries on digital assets (http://bit.ly/atrudigitalassets) - Andile Masuku chats with two gifted distributed ledger proponents who are co-architects of the African Digital Assets Framework - ADAF (http://adaf.io). ADAF is the first open-source software platform to create transnational sta...