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Every evening in Nairobi, a transaction happens that no algorithm has ever improved upon. Njeri watches the day thin out. The sukumawiki that was KES20 (roughly $0.15) at noon becomes KES10 ($0.08) at dusk. The bread that didn’t sell moves quietly to the woman two stalls away. The pig farmer swings by on Tuesdays. The broker takes the remainder at a price that has a thin margin but wastes nothing. No app. No notification. No ESG carbon offset report. What the tech industry calls food waste, Nairobi’s informal economy calls secondary inventory. The pig farmer on Nairobi’s periphery, documented by the International Livestock Research Institute as dependent on urban surplus feed, is not a beneficiary of food waste. He is part of the supply chain. The broker redistributes near-expiry produce to the city’s price-sensitive consumers. Mama Mboga, too, with her handwritten credit book, sells single eggs to customers who cannot afford six. This is not a broken system waiting to be fixed. It’s a fifty-year-old circular economy that has functioned without an app. Yet a growing number of digital platforms are arriving to disrupt it without understanding the system they are entering. The assumption behind surplus-food platforms launched in Africa is simple: food waste is a market failure, and technology is the correction. It makes sense if you are looking at the problem from Copenhagen, London, or San Francisco, where unsold food at the end of the day goes into a bin. In Nairobi, it goes into a network. A 2024 study by Jeremy Wagner for the Hungry Cities Partnership found that the ‘supermarket revolution model’ fails to account for Nairobi’s reality. Informal vendors remain central to food security for low-income residents. Supermarkets cater to middle and upper-income groups. The informal economy is not a primitive version of the formal one. It is a parallel system with its own logic, trust infrastructure and way of finding a fair price before sunset. Every platform that has attempted to digitise it has learned this at a high cost. Twiga Foods raised over $60 million but restructured in May 2025, cut more than 300 jobs and retreated to an asset-light model after years of friction with the informal supply chain it was trying to formalise. Marketforce, built to bring digital tools to small-scale food traders, shut down in 2023 after burning through its runway against the same wall. The wall is not logistics. It’s not connectivity. It is an assumption that arrived before the product did. When a digital platform enables a supermarket to push near-expiry bread at 60% off, something happens that the carbon metrics will never capture. The supermarket absorbs the discount as a loss leader, a rounding error against its monthly revenue. The kiosk owner next door runs on a 10% daily margin. Njeri does not absorb anything. She loses a customer to a platform she cannot join. India watched this play out in real time. Between 2024 and 2025, quick commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto grew by 280%. 82% of buyers shifted at least a quarter of their purchases to these apps. Nearly $1.28 billion in annual sales moved from small traditional retailers to digital platforms in a year. Nearly 200,000 Kiranas closed. The Indian government built an open digital commerce network (ONDC) to bring informal traders onto a level playing field. There is a third option. It is hiding in plain sight. Njeri the Mama Mboga is the infrastructure they need to build on, if they are willing to see her that way. Any platform touching the informal economy needs to do what Systems Architects do: study the terrain. The behaviour of the buyer. The logic of the supply chain. The trust networks that have sustained it for fifty years. You cannot onboard a new system into a complex environment and call it disruption. You are just adding chaos with better branding. Njeri already has the last-mile presence in neighbourhoods formal retail has never entered, a trust network built over decades and a surplus problem of her own. M-Pesa did not ask Kenya to behave like a Western banking customer. It asked what Kenya trusted and built from there. Formalisation was the outcome, not the premise. That’s the architectural lesson every platform entering this space should inherit. Disruption and displacement are distinct concepts. Kenya’s next five years of food tech will depend on whether founders know the difference. The informal economy will not announce the verdict. It will simply route around every platform that was not designed for its terrain, the way it always has. The food is not wasted in Nairobi. It is moving. The question is whether the next generation of platforms moves with it or against it. ____ Carolyne Manyeki is a Nairobi-based Learning and Development Practitioner and writer who tracks what happens when global models land in environments they were never designed for. She is also a lecturer in Communications who publishes Strategic Insights on LinkedIn.
Read MoreLuno, the UK-born digital asset firm that allows users to trade tokenised US stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and buy, sell, and earn yield for holding cryptocurrencies, has launched prediction markets for users in South Africa and Nigeria, two of its four operational markets in Africa. Launched in partnership with Limitless, a US-based prediction market infrastructure provider, the new feature will allow Luno users to place short-term bets on whether major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana will finish above or below a target price within 24 hours, with payouts for correct predictions. The rollout marks the first step in Luno’s derivatives strategy, advancing the company’s push to become an ‘all-in-one’ investment app for users, following earlier launches of staking and tokenised US equities in both countries. The company plans to add other derivative products, including perpetuals and potentially futures, for Nigerian users later this year. “Prediction Markets are a natural evolution of how our customers already engage with cryptocurrency, and there is a strong customer demand for this product,” Ayotunde Alabi, Luno Nigeria Country Manager and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), told TechCabal. “Many of our customers closely follow price movements, form views on where markets are headed, and look for structured ways to act on that knowledge.” The feature sits alongside existing crypto trading, staking, and tokenised equity products on Luno. Prediction markets are a form of derivatives that let users speculate on the outcome of specific events—in this case, short-term crypto price movements—without directly owning the underlying asset. Each market has a fixed settlement window and a pre-defined payoff structure, so users either earn a payout if their prediction is correct or lose their stake if it is wrong. According to Alabi, customers can participate using USD Coin (USDC), a dollar‑pegged stablecoin, and must first fund a separate USDC predictions wallet to join. The Prediction Markets product is open to KYC‑verified users, with participation starting at 3 USDC and capped at 10,000 USDC per prediction. Customers can cancel their positions before the one-day window closes, but once a market settles, they either lose their stake or claim a payout based on the outcome. “Prediction Markets provide a mandatory risk disclosure, which customers have to accept before they can participate in and before any funds can be committed,” Alabi said. “A customer is prohibited from holding on both sides of the same market simultaneously, and there is a clearly defined maximum exposure per prediction. These are features of a structured financial tool.” Luno’s prediction market product operates a peer-to-peer (P2P) model; customers are betting against other users, not against Luno, and the company only earns fees for running the market. Each prediction has another user as a counterparty on the other side of the trade, so when a customer loses, their staked USDC goes to that counterparty, not to Luno, said Alabi. Luno and its partner Limitless charge buy and sell fees for every trade, and these fees form their take rate for providing the market. Users pay a buy fee when they take a position in a trade, ranging from 0.03% to 3% of the staked amount. They also pay a sell fee, up to 1.5%, when they exit a position or trade. The launch comes as African regulators, including Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, step up efforts to regulate the broader digital asset sector. Luno’s classification of its prediction markets and its approach to worst-case loss scenarios will determine how much risk retail traders ultimately face and the intensity of scrutiny from financial and betting regulators. Prediction markets are often likened to gaming products because of their inherent risk–reward structure. In 2025, the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LSLGA), the state’s gaming industry regulator, listed Bayse Markets (formerly Gowagr), a Nigerian prediction markets platform, among illegal gaming operators. The classification of such products remains an open question for operators seeking to launch them. Prediction Markets is also a way for Luno to deepen engagement with active digital asset traders who are already familiar with the technology. Luno says its new product will focus only on crypto price prediction and not encroach on other real-world events typically seen on platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi. “Our focus is on crypto-based prediction markets, and we do not have plans to expand the product beyond crypto-related events,” Alabi said. “The product today is built around short-term price predictions on leading cryptocurrencies, being Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Dogecoin, and XRP.” Several local competitors have moved into derivatives, including South Africa’s VALR and Nigeria’s Roqqu, which offer futures trading, but no major crypto exchange serving Nigerian and South African users currently offers a dedicated prediction markets product. Luno will also compete for mindshare with local prediction market platforms, such as Bayse Markets and MevsYou, which enable crypto price prediction events. Luno’s prediction markets product, an early test of its derivatives ambition, is a direct answer to competition from both ends of the market and a litmus for what truly scales in Africa’s digital asset sector beyond buying, selling, and holding cryptocurrencies.
Read MoreMultiChoice, a subsidiary of French Media giant Canal+, has announced that subscriptions on Showmax will end from April 1, 2026, as it moves content to its sister platform, DStv Stream. The timeline, communicated to users via email on Wednesday, puts a concrete date for a restructuring first reported by TechCabal on March 5, months after the $3 billion takeover of MultiChoice by the French broadcaster. All Shomax subscriptions will end on March 31, and users will be required to subscribe afresh for DStv Stream. The migration of Showmax Original and its library to DStv Stream is the first major integration since the takeover in September 2025, signalling cost-cutting measures to come as the media giant seeks sustainable growth in Africa’s competitive but rice-sensitive market. On March 5, MultiChoice said the decision to close Showmax aligns with its goal of “strengthening our overall digital offering and ensuring long-term sustainability in an increasingly competitive streaming environment.” Wednesday’s announcement means the pay-TV operator plans to consolidate technology stacks, cut duplication, and redirect investment into a single platform. “Showmax is starting a new chapter, and your favourite shows are getting a shiny new home on DStv Stream,” MultiChoice said. “Even better, they’ll be joining a bigger world of entertainment, all in one place.” As part of its restructuring efforts, the parent company also plans to cut staff through a voluntary severance package to employees in support roles as part of a $115 million turnaround investment. The consolidation comes after years of financial struggle for the streaming platform. In the three years leading up to the Canal+ acquisition, Showmax accumulated losses of approximately €370 million ($429 million). Even a high-profile relaunch in early 2024, backed by a $309 million investment from Comcast’s NBCUniversal and leveraging the technology powering Peacock, failed to reverse its fortunes. Final annual results before the takeover showed trading losses widening despite declining revenues, underscoring the immense difficulty of building a profitable streaming business in Africa’s price-sensitive markets.
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