Built in Africa

Narrator: In 2008, Funke Opeke, a former executive with Verizon Communications in the USA had a vision.

She had just moved back to Nigeria three years earlier and, while working with MTN Nigeria, one of the country’s leading telecommunications companies, she noticed the low internet penetration in the country. Internet cafes were popular but very few smartphones were available.

Her plan? To bridge the digital divide in West Africa with the provision of enabling infrastructure. That vision gave birth to MainOne, one of Africa’s biggest telecom infrastructure providers.

In this episode of Built In Africa, Funke takes us 10 years inside MainOne’s journey of building West Africa’s Internet infrastructure

On Thursday, July 1, 2010, MainOne officially launched the first ever private submarine cable in West Africa. 10 years on, Funke Opeke looks back at that moment in time with fondness.

Funke Opeke: “Putting a cable in operation 10 years ago today. First private cable, on time, on budget, we were a startup company. It was a big bet and we succeeded. So, yeah, that was a high moment”

Narrator: The launch heralded a massive boost to Internet speeds in the country. With a large presence in Lagos, one could draw links between the rise in Internet speeds and the proliferation of startups in the city.

Funke Opeke: “You kinda look back and see what’s happening with startups in Yaba, and the entire tech space in Lagos. Each time any of the founders reaches out and I see the appreciation, the recognition of what we have done, that truly touches me because I feel like I’ve really made an impact, helping people achieve their dreams”

Narrator: For Funke, the rising levels of Internet penetration in Nigeria, being invited to chair the Nigerian National Broadband Plan 2020 – 2025, and the White House invitation to discuss Internet connectivity for the globe and to unserved populations in Africa, show admirable level of recognition for the company’s work.

But the journey hasn’t been without its fair share of challenges

Funke Opeke: “MainOne has been more successful in having impact than we have been commercially successful. A lot of people don’t realise that “

Narrator: One of the biggest challenges has been raising funds in such a capital-intensive endeavour as telecommunications. 

Funke Opeke: “We capitalised the company with $240m to start and it takes significant amounts to run this infrastructure and keep it performing at a world-class standard while continuing to invest in local distribution, infrastructure, and data centres”

Narrator: Of course, like every company with a base in Nigeria, stable power is also an issue

According to Funke, MainOne has invested a lot in power. With privatisation, they were able to make a private connection to the national grid. This meant they’ve had better power than most.

Despite this, the company’s distributed operations still face the same power challenges as others. Apparently, they still have to invest in backup power, colocation facilities, and other power solutions.

Besides the working environment’s challenges, she still looks back on the company’s impact with some longing.

Funke Opeke: “I look back and I never imagined that ten years after we launched, every school in Nigeria would still not have access to the Internet. What does that say about us as a society, about how much value we place on the education of our young people? So those kinds of things are still low moments for me, to see how far we’ve come and how much there is still to do

Narrator: When the MainOne cable was first laid in 2010,  the concept of private submarine cables was very new to a lot of regulators. Though the company was in a hurry to bring Internet access, they could not secure the permits to connect the countries along the way, between Nigeria and Europe. But they found a way to solve this

Funke Opeke: “So we put up branching units which are just connectors on the cable, which we could extend to those markets. As we continued exploring the opportunities, a fabulous one came up with Orange, which was already present in 2 markets as a major provider, to expand their international capacity.

And it just made sense commercially, business-wise and also we had a good technical, compelling solution for them. It was a win-win for both sides. We gave them access to additional cables, they gave us access to new markets to bring more traffic onto our cable which is still not fully utilised.”

Narrator: In November 2019, MainOne expanded its submarine cable to Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal in partnership with French telecom company Orange Group. A move Funke says was in line with the company’s vision for the west coast of Africa.

MainOne is looking at more expansions in Africa and has recently signed an agreement to extend its services to Burkina Faso.

Funke Opeke: We just recently signed an agreement to extend services into Burkina Faso. We continue looking at extending services into more land-locked countries, taking more capacity in there, investing with our partners in infrastructure to do that. 

And also, entering into a market does not necessarily make the traffic happen overnight. So, you have to continue taking all the necessary steps into connecting various networks, bringing people onto the backbone, so to speak, so that they can actually get access to services.

Narrator: Also, MainOne has struck a partnership with Vertiv for the expansion of its data centre services.

So, what does the future hold for MainOne?

Funke Opeke: “We stepped up the data centre business and we’ll continue to invest. We are building a data centre in Ghana as we speak. We’ll expand our data centre footprint in Lekki, Nigeria. 

We are starting to look at development of a data centre property we acquired in Sagamu. We will likely expand our data centre in Côte d’Ivoire. So, expanding our services across regions, delivering more managed services to large enterprises. What we see, especially post-COVID, is that everyone is trying to reduce the operational intensity of their business. They can offload those infrastructure services to us, so we’ll continue to grow there.”

Narrator: And how about that possibly overdue IPO?

Funke Opeke: “Um.. you’ll have to ask the shareholders [laughs]… It’s not a time to go public anyway”

Narrator: Of course, MainOne still has a lot to do. Africa still has a long way to go in deepening its Internet penetration to unserved and underserved areas of Nigeria, and MainOne looks set to be a big part of that future.

Thank you for listening to the Built In Africa podcast.

This script was adapted by Muyiwa Matuluko

Research and interview by Emmanuel Paul

Sound design by Oghenekaro Obrutu

This is a production of Techpoint Africa

I am Emmanuel Paul

Please subscribe, share and drop a review of this podcast by searching for ‘Built in Africa’ on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also email us feedback at [email protected]

For ad placements: [email protected].

For more stories on startups and innovation in Africa, please visit Techpoint.africa

Narrator: Around the world, most farmers have suffered different sets of challenges in scaling and growing their farms. Although lending and crowdfunding platforms have popped up over the past years, it’s still very difficult for smallholder farmers to access financing.

Some banks and other financial entities have employed unsavoury and predatory tactics that affect these agricultural businesses in the long term.

In this episode of Built In Africa, we’ll be taking a look at how Kenyan startup, Apollo Agriculture, is solving the credit problem small-scale farmers face with technology.

In 2015, Geneva-based policy advisory firm, Dalberg Global Development Advisors conducted some research about small-scale farming. From its findings, $450b was required to meet the needs of smallholder farmers around the world. But these farmers only got $31b, which was less than one-tenth of the supposed financing.

Coming closer to home, The World Bank reported that while agriculture made up 18% of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP, lending to the stakeholders in the agricultural sector represented only 1%.

If there’s anyone who understands the struggles of smallholder farmers in Africa, it is Kenyan entrepreneur, Benjamin Njenga.

Benjamin Njenga: “I grew up on a farm and my mother, a smallholder farmer, used to plant with low quality seeds, no fertiliser, harvested only 5 bags per acre each year”

Narrator: That was Benjamin Njenga recalling his mother’s experience running her farm

Benjamin Njenga:  “We knew if she would have been able to access fertiliser and hybrid seeds, her production would double but she couldn’t access the credit to buy these tools.”

Narrator: The experience motivated Benjamin’s desire to solve the problem he faced with his mother. He would go on to study agribusiness and management at the university. He also spearheaded smallholder agriculture insurance at ACRE Africa in Nairobi, helping to insure over half a million smallholder farmers against weather risks.

In 2017, Benjamin officially launched Apollo Agriculture with his co-founders, Eli Pollak and Earl St. Sauver, whom he met through a mutual friend. Benjamin serves as the Chief Customer Officer while Eli and Earl serve as CEO and COO respectively.

Benjamin Njenga: “Eli and Earl used to work for a company called Climate Corporation, a US company that uses machine learning to provide optimised recommendations to help US farmers increase their yield, which was later on sold for $1bn in 2013. 

We got connected, I and my founders, with the same mission. With my background and knowledge working with farmers and their technical skills from the US, it was a perfect match to develop a company to support farmers”

Narrator: The goal with Apollo Agriculture was simple: To use machine learning and automated operations technology to help small-scale farmers with everything they need to maximise their profitability. They believed this was a necessary solution in a market where most farmers are producing 10% of what US farmers are producing.

The vast majority of small-scale farmers in Africa still cannot access tools like hybrid seeds, fertilisers, and insurance that can increase their yield and income. This boils down to two reasons.

Benjamin Njenga: “One, smallholder farmers are very rural, remote and difficult to reach. But second, they lack access to credit and, therefore, cannot afford the affront cost of well understood, high return investments like hybrid seeds and fertilisers.”

Narrator: Till date, approaches to smallholder financing have relied on human-driven and manual processes. The problem is these processes are costly and slow to scale.

This is where Apollo comes in, by digitising and simplifying these processes. 

First, they build credit profiles for unbanked small-scale farmers using machine learning models that process large volumes of customer data, including satellite data of fields.

Next, the data obtained is then used to build automated digital processes for each step in a farmer’s lifecycle from customer acquisition, to training, to collecting the payment. This is in a bid to reduce the cost of generating actionable data throughout the customer’s lifecycle

Benjamin Njenga: “We are collecting insights on a demographic in a way that hasn’t been done before. We have to do this in a very super challenging environment where farmers have no financial records like bank statements and impact of climate change. 

We have been able to develop tools that enable us to rate these customers and still be able to extend loans to them which they would otherwise not be able to access because of these challenges”

Narrator: Additionally, the company helps the farmers access increasing levels of their investment over time.

Benjamin Njenga: “This year only, we have been able to reach 25,000 customers and cumulatively since we started in 2017, we’ve been able to serve over 40,000 customers.”

Narrator: However, the team isn’t resting on its oars. It has plans to rapidly scale by partnering and securing more farmers

Benjamin Njenga: “We just recently closed $6m Series A funding as well as working capital funding to finance our loans and grant funding which primarily supports our research and development project.

Narrator: The $6m Series A round Benjamin mentions was led by Anthemis Exponential Ventures. Also in participation were The Omidyar Group’s Flourish Ventures, Leaps by Bayer, and Sage Hill Capital, among others.

After bringing its total capitalisation to $7.6m, the chief customer officer says Apollo is focused on growth in the year ahead.

Benjamin Njenga: “We have got a great product that farmers love and we want to continue to scale it.”

Narrator: To drive home its mission of maximising farmers’ productivity and profitability, Apollo is looking to transition its customers from subsistence farming to commercial farming so that they can make more money.

Benjamin Njenga: “We are also exploring new ways to support our customers and build resilience. Particularly, with the challenges around food security as a result of COVID-19. We are piloting a variety of options to best support our customers through these challenging times.”

Thank you for listening to the Built In Africa Podcast.

This script was adapted by Muyiwa Matuluko

Research and interview by Heritage Kene-Okafor

Sound design by Oghenekaro Obrutu

This is a production of Techpoint Africa

I am Oluwanifemi Kolawole

Please subscribe, share and drop a review of this podcast, by searching for ‘Built in Africa’ on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also email us feedback at [email protected].

For ad placements: [email protected].

For more stories on startups and innovation in Africa, please visit Techpoint.africa

Soundtrack credit: Spark Of Inspiration by Shane Ivers – https://www.silvermansound.com.

Narrator: Have you ever contacted a customer care centre to lodge a complaint and heard this?

SFX: Phone ringing… click.. “This call may be monitored and recorded for quality assurance”.

Narrator: In this episode of Built in Africa, we’ll be taking a look at how South African startup, Voyc, is working to improve how call centres handle customer experience with its AI-based software

Narrator: Almost every organisation, especially in the finance space, that runs a call centre has to record and save all calls that come in. Later, a team of quality assurance professionals replays the recordings to study whether call centre agents are doing their job properly and resolving customer complaints satisfactorily.

But there’s a problem. An average call centre with about 50 call agents can accumulate up to 7000 hours of calls a month. Can you imagine having to replay 7000 hours of calls in a month? Even with a team of 10 quality assurance professionals listening round the clock, it’d still take another month to get through them.

Lethabo Motsoaledi: “In actual fact, only 2% of those calls are monitored. So they manually listen to only 2% of the calls. Meaning 98% of the time, if something wrong happens in that call, they only find out about it when you complain as a customer or when something terrible happens”.

Narrator: That’s Lethabo Motsoaledi, co-founder and CTO of Voyc. Voyc, spelt V-O-Y-C, is a South African AI software company that helps businesses automate monitoring of contact centre interactions and extract valuable insights.

At its core, what Voyc is doing isn’t necessarily new.

Lethabo Motsoaledi: “The call centre environment is very much full of large incumbents that pretty much do call recording software and technologies. If you run a call centre, you have traditionally very archaic software that does your call recordings. So they can do up to like 2 million recordings a month, never lose a call. 

In the previous years, those incumbents have started trying to look into speech analytics. They said ‘we store all your calls so we might as well start offering analytics for those calls’. Except the way in which they approached it  was similar to the way they approached a lot of things; it was very complex software, users don’t typically know how to use it and the analytics is not always as sharp as it needs to be, and it’s very much like a 6 to sometimes 18-month process before any of the analytics that you put into the system starts making sense for your company”.

Narrator: But Voyc has a different approach

Lethabo Motsoaledi: “So we approached it as, ‘we built some very easy, lightweight software that does some serious heavy lifting of machine learning and AI to analyse conversations.

Narrator: First, Voyc’s artificial intelligence automatically transcribes recorded calls to text. During the transcription, the software identifies any anomalies in a call, for example, a threat from a caller.

Lethabo Motsoaledi: “We use machine learning to pick up any key topics in the conversation so that.. An interesting example is a customer of ours that sells travel insurance. When Coronavirus hit, our unsupervised machine learning approach was able to pick up Coronavirus as a topic, to show that people were starting to be confused about the messaging around Coronavirus. So that’s what our unsupervised machine learning approach does.

We then also analyse emotion. That is, we look for politeness, impoliteness, frustration, anger, sadness, so that managers can escalate. So we found that a lot of customers were typically frustrated with pushy agents; agents forcing them to buy products they don’t wanna buy, or frustrated about customer service, or frustrated around the policies that they’ve received. So we make it a lot easier for customers to find that.“

Narrator: Lethabo says the software can go through 250 hours of calls in a matter of minutes.

Voyc didn’t start out as a company or product to monitor call centre conversations. Around 2016, Lethabo and her long-time business partner, Voyc CEO, Matthew Westaway had a challenge.

Lethabo Motsoaledi: “Just before launching Voyc, we had a user experience agency that analysed a lot of different interviews and at that time in 2016/2017, we were looking for software to help us quickly analyse these interviews. And failing to find any software, we built our own software that would help use analyse interviews and also use speech -detecting technology and natural language processing.

And so we went to market with a product that did exactly that. The more companies we engaged with, the more people asked, ‘why aren’t you in the call centre business?’ because call centres would drastically need this kind of technology”. 

Narrator: Voyc kicked off as a company in 2018. But in spite of the apparent demand, Lethabo says it took them a year and some months to figure out a product-market fit. 

In early 2019, they had a short stint in Nigeria via the Google Launchpad network. Though the startup was in conversation with telecom operator, MTN Nigeria and a few other companies, none of the talks yielded anything. Also, via Standard Bank, one of its clients in South Africa, Voyc got access to its affiliate in Kenya.

Eventually, they came to settle for the insurance industry as their primary market. Lethabo gives some insight:

Lethabo Motsoaledi: “The business of insurance is typically, usually conducted over the phone. So you can’t walk into an insurance company and buy insurance. You can only usually buy it over the phone and for that reason, the call recording is the contract. This means that they have to almost go through a hundred per cent of the sale so that if they need to claim later on, they can 100% know that ‘we sold the right thing to the customer’.

And so typically, insurance companies have a team of QA people that listen to the call… That’s their job description, like they go to work everyday to listen to those calls… So it means that they have an existing budget for quality assurance. So when we approach them and we say ‘we are automating this process so that your quality assurance team can essentially cover a hundred per cent and focus on the most important things’, it’s a no-brainer in terms of the conversation. 

We have seen other companies, such as those retail, want to engage, yet the need for it is not as urgent as insurance”. 

Narrator: However, there’s another challenge, this time a regional one. 

In most parts of Africa, insurance is still a fledgling industry which means there are only a handful of companies that Voyc can work with. Also, due to minimum wage disparity across Africa, pricing is difficult

Lethabo Motsoaledi:  “Our business model used to charge per hour and then we also moved on to charging per agent. But the challenge that we faced in South Africa, and Africa (which we have expanded to through South African companies), is that typically, the quality assurance person is paid minimum wage, which is lower than the cost of running Voyc an hour. 

So if we look at how much call centre people are paid in Africa, that amount is so much lower that we are more expensive than people so… because we automate the role”

Narrator: This means that the price Voyc charged per agent per hour was higher than the minimum wage of agents per hour so some clients found it difficult to pay.

So what do you do as an African startup that isn’t solving a continental problem? You solve a global one by treading international waters.

 Lethabo Motsoaledi: “So if we were really to put ourselves as are we solving an African, I would say ‘no’ because we are an African startup, we are fully an African-born solution but are we solving an African problem? It’s a no because the financial industry, the insurance industry and the problem we are solving is not set up exactly the same way in the different markets in Africa’; South Africa being the unique one, a few other markets, we’ve seen the case with Malawi and Nigeria but the majority of the population don’t buy insurance in that way or they don’t operate over the call centre in that way.

So, in a sense, you would say ‘no’, we are not solving an African problem per se but a more global problem that happens to have pockets in Africa”.  

Narrator: Voyc moved its headquarters to the Netherlands from where it plans to serve the UK, US, Australia and other international insurance markets similar to South Africa’s.

With this mindset, the startup has been able to secure a dozen clients including names like 1Life Insurance, Bryte Insurance, Momentum, and Stangen Insurance. The amount charged per enterprise starts at $2,000 per month or $25,000 per year.

So far, Voyc has been able to raise a significant amount of capital from angel investors and US-based seed accelerator, Techstars, but the company isn’t big on announcing its funding.

Now that Voyc has figured out its market, the startup is focused on growing its customer base while solving other existential challenges like diversity and fair treatment of companies and customers, not just in Africa, but around the world.

Thank you for listening to the Built In Africa Podcast.

This script was adapted by Muyiwa Matuluko

Research and interview by Heritage Kene-Okafor

Sound design by Oghenekaro Obrutu

This is a production of Techpoint Africa

I am Oluwanifemi Kolawole

Please subscribe, share and drop a review of this podcast by searching for ‘Built in Africa’ on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also email us feedback at [email protected].

For ad placements: [email protected].

For more stories on startups and innovation in Africa, please visit Techpoint.africa