African Tech Roundup

Ismael Rachdaoui is the young, Moroccan founder of nextwi, a marketing platform that leverages Wi-Fi technology to help small and large business owners (primarily in the the hospitality industry) engage their clients/guests more intuitively based on their social profiles and online preferences and behaviour.

Brian Ondari is both the co-founder and Chief Operations Officer at AirKlip, a promising Kenyan startup that aims to become every university student’s personal assistant by creating a simple collaborative environment (app) for students and administrators.

Harry Hare is the founder and publisher of CIO East Africa, an ICT information platform that has a monthly print publication (CIO East Africa), an online ICT portal (www.cio.co.ke) and a series of events including the CIO Executive Breakfast Series, the CIO Golf Series and the CIO 100 Awards and Symposium.

He is also the founder and Director of African eDevelopment Resource Centre, as well as the founder of DEMO Africa 2012, a flagship initiative of LIONS @frica which has showcased over 150 startups that have gone on to raise over US$11 million in venture capital.

The French e-commerce startup, Afrimarket, has raised €10 million from the Global Innovation Fund and the private sector arm of the French Development Agency (AFD), Proparco, as well from as a handful of individual investors such as the co-founder of PriceMinister, Olivier Mathiot, who’s been granted a seat on Afrimarket’s board.

At a glance, the company seems to have it made-- except that growth within the e-commerce sector across the continent has consistently failed to meet expectations, and foreign-owned, foreigner-run e-commerce copy-cat plays backed by the likes of Rocket Internet continue to have precious little to show in terms of solid success.

The bottom line is that this is Africa, and Afrimarket’s founder and CEO, Rania Belkahia, better have a few good tricks up her sleeve, including a tonne of patience and access to a lot more cash, if her company is to achieve its ambitious aspiration of dominating the French-speaking West African e-commerce market.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, we share a conversation Andile Masuku had with Ernesto Spruyt, the founder of Tunga, an online market network that provides international clients access to African coding talent. He also happens to serve as Chief Mentor for Telegraph Media Group’s DigitalX accelerator program in Amsterdam.

Ernesto explains what prompted him to come to Africa looking for coding talent, and shares a few key things African coders who aspire to having international careers ought to be keeping top of mind.

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Lexi Novitske is the Principal Investment Officer for Africa at Singularity Investments. Lexi is based in Lagos and has interesting insights on picking winning investments as an outsider working in a continent with a notorious dearth of data. She strongly believes that Africa could very well deliver the world’s next unicorn.

Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicised trip to the continent spawned dozens of think-pieces in the blogosphere this past week.

Many pundits clearly view Mark’s 'surprise' visit to Nigeria and Kenya as an affirmation of the continent’s importance as a valuable source of under-utilised tech talent, and as a hot-bed of home-grown innovation. Others read it as a pre-cursor to a massive wave of foreign investment that's expected to wash over the continent’s technology industry. We, on the other hand, can’t help sensing the calculated profit motive wrapped up in Mark’s impeccably orchestrated African safari.

'Connecting Africa’ is no doubt a huge priority for Facebook, given the growth of the continent’s increasingly affluent middle class, the availability of relatively cheap labour, and the hundreds of millions of impoverished Africans who are prime for education— read monetisation. Now, on some level Mark Zuckerberg must care about humanity and all, but it is curious how readily many of us have fallen for the man's trademark charm and humility without questioning his obvious self-interest.

In this week’s African Tech Round-up episode, Andile Masuku shares more insights gleaned from DEMO Africa 2016. Look out for snippets of conversations he had with the Publisher of CIO East Africa magazine and CEO of DEMO Africa, Harry Hare, the Principal Investment Officer for Africa at Singularity Investments, Lexi Novistke, as well as two promising startup founders who made it to the final pitching phase of this year’s competition (but didn’t win a spot in the top five), Ismael Rachdaoui of nextwi (Morocco), and Brian Ondari of AirKlip (Kenya).

Music Credits:

Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Farouk Jivani is a business consultant-turned angel investor who has invested in a couple of Kenyan startups-- one of them being the music downloads platform, Mdundo.com.

In this chat, Farouk describes the allure of African markets to angel investors based abroad, and shares on what it's like to be a hands-on investor in early-stage businesses that have the potential to be the next big thing.

Tsholo Mogotsi in the Director for Economic Development Facilitation at the City of Joburg. In this chat with Andile Masuku Tsholo talks about the City of Joburg's commitment to lead the continent in providing it's citizens with the most advanced web-enabled infrastructure. He also sheds light on the role of public institutions in promoting innovation on the continent.

Amrote Abdella is the Director for Venture Capital & Start-ups and Africa Initiatives (Microsoft 4Afrika) at Microsoft.

In this chat with Andile Masuku, Amrote shares what it’s like to be embedded in one of the world’s largest tech companies, and being deployed in arguably the world’s fastest growing tech market(s).

Listen in to hear Amrote’s take on how Microsoft is responding to next generation tech biggies like Google and Uber’s disruptive ambitions and what Microsoft might consider their next big play.

Stephen Ozoigbo is the CEO of the African Technology Foundation and the Managing Partner of the US State Department-backed Lions @frica initiative.

In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Stephen talks about his journey from investment banking to being one of Africa's foremost tech and innovation evangelists.

Stephen's high-profile community-building efforts within the continent's burgeoning tech ecosystem allows him to eloquently address the challenge of keeping up with global innovation faced by African startups, VC's, angel investors, legacy enterprise players, as well as government agencies.