African Tech Roundup

George Asamani is an exceedingly well-traveled 39-year-old Ghanaian who currently calls Addis Ababa home. He is the co-founder of a music and messaging app called DooWapp-- an alumnus of Telefónica's Wayra startup accelerator in the UK.

In this conversation, taped at the Enterprise Africa Summit 2017 hosted by the British Council in Accra some months ago, George gave Andile a sense of the positive innovation vibes that he's absorbed while living and working in various African markets over the years. They also chatted about the importance of responding readily to market feedback when iterating a passion-driven 'nice-to-have' software product.

The last few weeks have seen three promising African tech startups land significant investments-- namely, the Nigerian digital payments firm, Flutterwave ($10 million), the Kenyan mobile-driven food supply platform, Twiga Foods ($10.3 million), and the South African fractional investments service, EasyEquities ($7.5 million).

In this installment of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga discuss the merits of the Flutterwave and Twiga deals, but somehow, we forgot to chat about the EasyEquities transaction on this episode (our bad). That particular transaction stands out somewhat, owing to the fact that 30% of the company was acquired by the South African financial services giant, Sanlam.

Here's to hoping that the Sanlam-EasyEquities deal signals a trend towards African institutional investors becoming savvier at identifying and financing home-grown start-ups before their overseas counterparts swoop in to snap up promising businesses from right under their noses.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Charlene Chen is the Chief Operating Officer of BitPesa-- an online payment platform founded in Kenya that leverages Blockchain settlement to lower the cost and increase the speed of business payments to, from and within sub-Saharan Africa.

In this chat with Andile Masuku, Charlene explains how BitPesa helps clients, that range from African businesses and multinational companies paying suppliers as far as China and Dubai to international remittance companies, use their API services for white-label payments to dozens of bank networks and mobile money operators across Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, and the DRC.

She also unpacks why BitPesa hasn't gotten caught up in speculation regarding Bitcoin and sheds light on the company's prospects following the successful close of their $5.7 million Series A in January 2017.

Eunice Baguma Ball is the Ugandan Founder and Executive Director of the Africa Technology Business Network (ATBN). For over 10 years, Eunice has worked at the intersection of tech and social enterprise - leveraging her engineering background to build an impressive reputation as a tech and innovation specialist.

In this chat with Andile Masuku, Eunice gives her take on the state of African women in tech, comments candidly on some of the cultural hurdles women continue to face in what is still largely an unwelcoming, male-dominated industry, and gives us the low-low on a ground-breaking book she hopes to publish in December 2018, called Founding Women.

Founding Women will put the spotlight on African Female founders who are building technology businesses across Africa and the Diaspora-- with the aim of creating visible role models to inspire young African women to reach their full potential as innovators and tech leaders.

Listen in to hear how you can contribute to an ongoing Indiegogo crowd funding campaign that will not only help the book get made but also ensure that many promising African women founders and innovators access it for free.

Eric Mugendi is the Managing Editor at PesaCheck.org. In this chat with Andile Masuku, taped on Monday, August 7th, 2017 - a day before Kenya's General Election - he factors in on how fake news has influenced public sentiment in the lead up to the highly-contested polls.

We deliberately asked Eric to weigh in on the fake news situation before his insights were clouded by the election results. We've also been intentional about waiting for the official outcome to be declared before releasing this podcast, in respect for Kenya's democratic process.

A couple of weeks ago, a think piece by Andile Masuku entitled "We simply must not allow investor bias to persist" - featured in African Independent and Business Report - caused a bit of a stir on Twitter. The hubbub surrounded the article's tackling of the sensitive issue of investor bias that appears to be prevalent in Africa's startup finance scene.

Cited in Andile's piece are research findings published in a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded report by the American VC outfit, Village Capital. According to the report, more than 90% of the funding that's gone into East African fintech startups over the past year or two has benefitted firms with expatriate founders. This has lead to some local founders complaining that their ventures aren't being fairly appraised for investibility in terms of their potential and financial viability.

In this episode of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga are joined by Tapsnapp founder and CEO, Vije Vijendranath, to unpack some of the impassioned response to the investor bias debate that's recently surfaced from certain quarters within our tech community and to chat about some possible solutions to the situation.

Then, being that Tapsnapp is surfing the "Uberisation of everything" trend, and given the current push-back Uber is experiencing in South Africa from various stakeholders, Andile, Musa and Vije decided to try and answer the question: how enthusiastically should Africans embrace on-demand marketplace platforms?

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Barbro Mutombo Ciakudia is VP for Business Development at Invest Africa. Invest Africa is a private members club based in Mayfair, London and was founded by Rob Hersov in 2013 as a means for business leaders, private investors, and entrepreneurs to gain insight into Africa and to be exposed to the continent's vast opportunities.

They offer a multi-service platform for access and investment into Africa which aims to be a link between capital and expertise into Africa, and information and opportunity out of Africa.

In this chat, Babro gives us a sense of how bullish members of their network are about investing in Africa and talks about what sort of investor support they typically need to act on their enthusiasm.

Jean-Paul Melaga is a recovering finance professional who's had a successful career in top-tier international banking. Jean-Paul worked for the likes of Standard Chartered Bank and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi before becoming co-founding the mobile market research startup, Smart Phorce.

In his last banking gig before pursuing a more personal entrepreneurial agenda, Jean-Paul served as Head of Africa at the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, where he was tasked with turning powerful people within that organisation on to Africa's investment potential-- basically, turning sceptics into believers.

In this chat with Andile Masuku, Jean-Paul reflects candidly on his corporate experience and reveals how his banking background set him up for his second career in tech.

Naija Beta is a documentary that follows a team of Nigerian and Nigerian-American MIT students who dream of shaking up education in Nigeria and head to Lagos one summer to teach technology to high-schoolers through a competitive robotics camp. As they seek to contribute to a new and better Nigeria, their ideals are tested by reality.

Arthur Musah is the film's director and hails from Ghana and Ukraine. Naija Beta premiered in 2016 at the Pan African International Film Festival in Cannes, and won Best Documentary Feature at the Urban Mediamakers Film Festival in Atlanta, an Achievement in Documentary Film Award at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival, and the High Output Director Award at the Arlington International Film Festival.

Naija Beta was also screened at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where it won Best Documentary Short Film at the Roxbury International Film Festival. Arthur continues his exploration of African identities in a globalised age through his upcoming feature One Day I Go Fly.

Arthur studied filmmaking in the MFA program at the University of Southern California as an Annenberg Fellow, and holds a bachelor͛s and a master͛s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to a ruling made by South Africa's Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), an employer-employee relationship does, in fact, exist between Uber and driver-partners. This follows Uber being dragged to the CCMA several months ago by seven driver-partners who alleged that they were unfairly deactivated by the service.

The ride-hailing service has long contended that it is simply a virtual marketplace that connects drivers and passengers and not an employer-- citing the fact that Uber doesn't own cars or have drivers on their payroll.

In this African Tech Round-up episode, Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga discuss some of the legal implications of this ruling, and how they might compromise Uber's business model.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0