African Tech Roundup Podcast

Following a sunny Johannesburg lunch al fresco, Nendo (https://nendo.co.ke) Founder and CEO Mark Kaigwa and Andile Masuku chat about a few consumer tech issues that are currently trending in their lives. Listen in to learn why the music streaming service Boomplay is thriving in Africa, how Transsion's African digital domination strategy seems to be coming together nicely, why Xiaomi's Pocophone F1...

This podcast is the first instalment of a three-part miniseries (http://bit.ly/atrudigitalassets) produced by African Tech Roundup (https://africantechroundup.com) to spark a broader debate about the nature and value of African digital assets within the context of the world’s emerging digital economy. Joining Andile Masuku for this conversation are two distinguished Cape Town-based innovators. Fir...

Joining Andile Masuku and guest co-host Rushil Vallabh of Secha Capital on this African Tech Roundup podcast is Grant Phillips. Grant is the Founder and CEO of PhilTech Consulting and has partnered with both Convergence Partners and Stockdale Street (the Oppenheimer Family’s South African private equity outfit) to "build out technology ecosystems across Africa". He was previously the CEO and Chair...

Paul Kent is Co-founder and Managing Director of Sureswipe, a South African payments solutions startup dedicated to making card payment acceptance easy and accessible for small and medium-sized retailers and service providers. Sureswipe started out as a business division of the cloud-based clinical and billing practice management software firm, Healthbridge, before it evolved into the Point-Of-Sal...

South African Lyndsey Duff is the South Africa Country Manager at What3Words— a British startup which provides a precise physical location solution that has broken up the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique 3-word address. Prior to joining What3Words, Lyndsey oversaw inward investment at the South African High Commission UK, following stints at the Palace of Westmin...

On this podcast, Andile Masuku chats with two exceptional, Cape Townian entrepreneurs who are both actively involved in a youth-focused tech hub initiative called the Masakhe Techville Creative Technology Center in KwaLanga township, where they both grew up. The project is an initiative of the Masakhe Foundation. Mpilo Ngcukana co-founded the Simon Deporres men’s clothing brand in 2007 - while stu...

This podcast features two South African startup founders working the trenches of the emerging gig economy. Human geneticist-turned-entrepreneur Aisha Pandor is the Co-founder and CEO of SweepSouth, an on-demand booking platform for home cleaning services. SweepSouth is quite notably the first South African start-up to be accepted into the 500 Startups Accelerator in Silicon Valley. Velani Mboweni...

Anita Mendiratta is the Canadian Founder and Managing Director of Cachet Consulting, a firm which services governments, multinational corporations and global NGO’s. Anita has over two decades of tourism and economic development experience gleaned on almost every continent and possesses an enviable grasp of the economic, social, political and environmental dynamics impacting nations grappling with...

This super-chill conversation, taped at the fringes of Africa Tech Summit 2018, features Google South Africa’s Head of Communications and Public Affairs, Mich Atagana. Mich is an exceedingly well-travelled former-journalist who, as Editor of Memeburn and Ventureburn, previously covered emerging tech and startups on the continent. Mich was a GSMA Global Mobile Awards judge for 4 years (from 2014 to...

Honourable Najib Balala is Kenya’s Minister of Tourism and Wildlife. After previously serving in that cabinet position once before, from 2008 to 2012, and subsequently serving as Chairman of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, Hon. Balala was re-appointed as Kenya's Tourism Minister in 2015. Following the establishment of Kenya’s new Constitution in 2012, Hon. Balala was responsible for...

Stephan Ekbergh is the Founder and CEO of Travelstart. He is a Swedish entrepreneur who is probably best known for growing Travelstart from a provocative online travel startup in Scandinavia to one of the world’s largest online travel agencies servicing emerging markets in Africa and the Middle East. Prior to founding Travelstart, Stephan was a touring DJ and entertainment entrepreneur who perform...

Pearl Boshomane Tsotetsi is the Lifestyle Editor at the Sunday Times (South Africa). Pearl was voted one of Mail and Guardian's Top 200 Young South Africans in 2015 and assumed her current role in 2017. She previously served as Editor of Daily Planet, an intersectional pop culture and social commentary website covering the arts, feminism, racism, social media and digital consumer trends. In additi...

Chris Lehane is Airbnb’s Head of Global Policy, Public Affairs and Communications. Chris engages with policymakers around the world to safeguard the rights of people who have bought into the travel industry giant's home sharing proposition. He also frequently contributes to public discourse around the societal hazards, economic benefits and democratisation potential of the new "experience economy"...

Mark Mwongela is the Co-founder and CEO of Pesapal, a leading Kenyan mobile, online and point-of-sale (POS) payment platform operating in seven African countries including Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Kenya. Previously, Mark served as Technical Director at Pesapal— overseeing the firm's product development efforts, and prior to that, he was Managing Director of Variant Technology Managem...

According to a recent World Bank report, it's more costly to send money to Africa than to anywhere else in the world. On average, a 12% remittance fee is charged for every USD200 sent to the continent. Just last year (2017), African Diasporans reportedly sent home USD38 billion, and doubtless, a solid chunk of that sum served to line the pockets of financial incumbents who are only too happy to pr...

You might recall that in September 2017 the Cameroonian former Founder & CEO of Afrostream and current Chief Brand Officer of African Leadership Academy's Anzisha Prize, Tonjé Bakang, published a heavily-publicised Medium post in French announcing that his VOD streaming service was shutting down. Here is Tonjé's letter in English— translated by Audrey Lang: http://bit.ly/tonjéokayafrica. Our v...

Congolese Jean-Claude Tshipama is the CEO of Eutelsat's Konnect Africa subsidiary which delivers satellite broadband connectivity services in Africa. Jean-Claude has over 16 years’ experience in telecommunications, computer and Pay TV industries’. He holds an MBA from HEC-Montreal in Canada and a Master’s degree in Economics from the Protestant University in Congo. Jean-Claude was formerly the Com...

South African Simon Dingle has worked with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies since 2011, designing products that make it easier to engage in an increasingly digital world. He has proved to be especially gifted at using his broadcasting, writing and speaking talents to make complex crypto-related matters simple for audiences all around the world Simon previously led the product team at one of the...

At the fringes of Afrobytes Tech Marketplace 2018, Andile Masuku caught up with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) evangelist, founder of the Lagos-based Ìmísí 3D and co-founder of the We Will Lead Africa initiative, Judith Okonkwo, to take in her compelling arguments for why VR tech ought to be more enthusiastically embraced across Africa. Listen in to hear how Judith and her team at...

As Managing Director of Thomson Reuters Africa, Kenyan-born Sneha Shah oversees the firm's Financial, Risk, Tax and Legal businesses across the continent. Initially founded as a news agency in 1851, today Thomson Reuters is frequently cited by media watchdogs as an "invisible information giant" worth monitoring closely as it delivers unprecedented amounts of data, along with automation and digitis...

aKoma Media Co-founder and COO Chidi Afulezi is "a Naija boy true and true". Chidi is an electrical engineer with product-development experience earned working in America's digital wireless network industry. Chidi's resume also features executive stints at top media and entertainment brands such as Time Warner, Sony Music and CNN. While at CNN, Chidi met and began plotting a media coup with one th...

This year's Afrobytes Tech Marketplace event attracted a large, impressive Ethiopian delegation of tech innovators sporting some serious swag. Ethiopia boasts a solid track record of meaningful digital innovation in spite of the fairly insular political and economic outlook that prevailed in the past. Today, tech ecosystem heavy-hitters like the Ethiopian founder of investment advisory firm Ibex F...

BongoHive Co-Founder and Director of Entrepreneurship, Simunza Muyangana reckons that Lusaka has what it takes to become one of Africa's choicest tech and innovation hubs. When it launched in May 2011 BongoHive was Zambia's only technology and innovation hub. Today, no small thanks to Simunza and his team's context-relevant ecosystem upliftment efforts, the early-stage startup scene in Zambia is m...

On Tuesday, June 5th, 2018 the international African Tech Roundup LIVE Tour launched with a live podcast event in The Netherlands dubbed #VillageDiariesAmsterdam. For the second (and final part) of the evening's programme, hosts Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga were joined by a stellar lineup of African tech and innovation ecosystem insiders who have past and present links to Amsterdam. Namely, Tani...

South African Rushil Vallabh and American Brenden Mullen are the co-founders and co-managing directors of a Johannesburg-based, venture capital outfit called Secha Capital. Secha’s mission is to “provide patient capital to established African SMEs” - primarily within FMCG and agri-business industries - and to support them by providing access to best-in-breed, hands-on business consulting. In this...