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In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Happy pre-TGIF. Somewhere in Beijing, China, this week, a humanoid robot attempted a spinning kick, fell flat on its face, and watched its opponent celebrate with what looked suspiciously like a victory dance. The robots are competing at the World Humanoid Robot Games, which is apparently a real event and not the plot of a Pixar film we all missed. It suspiciously looks like somebody is making a case for robots to compete in the Olympics soon. Or, at the very least, get their own event. Anyway, if the robots take over, at least they’ll be entertaining about it. Let’s get into today’s newsletter. Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read previous editions here first and subscribe below. Subscribe Ventures Platform closes $84m fund Kenya’s Musalia Mudavadi wants the country to join global cyber-police Pick n Pay is making grocery shopping feel like scrolling TikTok Cameroon sets deadline to disconnect untaxed mobile phones World Wide Web 3 Events funding Ventures Platform raises $84 million to make bigger bets on African startups Image Source: Tenor Ventures Platform (VP), the Nigerian venture capital firm, has closed its second fund at $84 million, almost twice the $46 million it raised for its first fund in 2022. This time, the firm is looking to write bigger cheques to own more equity in African startups it backs—up to 12%. What happened? The VP Pan-African Fund II has brought in four new investors, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD); Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution (DFI); the Dutch family office Alphatron; and the Ashesi University Foundation, to add to the $64 million first close of the fund in November 2025. Explain like I’m new here: Ventures Platform works like a startup shopper. It raises money from investors, pools it into a fund, then uses that money to buy stakes in young companies it believes can become much bigger. Some of the companies it has invested in include Paystack, PiggyVest, Moove, Mono, Remedial Health, and Raenest. The venture capital firm invests in these companies at their pre-seed, seed, or pre-Series A stage, and makes more money if those companies become more valuable. Fund II will follow the same playbook, but with bigger cheques. Playing into the funding pattern: Ventures Platform plans to invest up to $3 million initially, with an average cheque of about $1.5 million, while targeting 10%–12% ownership in the startups it backs. While the company has not disclosed the number of startups benefiting from this fund, the strategy fits the shift in African venture capital, where investors are putting more money into fewer companies. In H1 2026, African startups raised $1.44 billion, 1.4% more than the same period in 2025, while the number of deals dropped from 252 to 174. Yet, Ventures Platform coming to the table with bigger cheques gives African founders another sizable pool of capital at a time when fundraising has become more selective. Every business owner needs to watch this. The business questions you Google, answered by experts. Watch for free. companies Pick n Pay wants your grocery app to feel more like TikTok Image Source: Reuters Pick n Pay, the South African retailer, is bringing the scroll-and-shop habit to the supermarket. Its Pick n Pay asap! delivery app has launched Pick n Pay Inspire, a shoppable video feed that lets customers add products to their basket without leaving the video. What happened? A shopper watching a recipe can tap the ingredients on screen, add them to a basket, and have the groceries delivered within an hour. The feed will also include entertainment, product demonstrations, and Pick n Pay Clothing content; clothing orders take three to five business days. Pick n Pay says Inspire is the first feature of its kind from a South African grocery retailer. Explain like I’m new here: The idea is familiar to anyone who has seen a recipe on Instagram, taken a screenshot, opened a shopping app, and then tried to remember all the ingredients. Pick n Pay has been testing this behaviour since 2024 through Unreal Deals, a live-shopping show on its website and social platforms. Inspire brings that experiment into the app, where the video, basket, payment, and delivery happen in one place. The company’s asap! service already delivers groceries to customers’ doors, so the new feature is adding a content layer to an existing online shopping and fulfillment system. Between the lines: Pick n Pay is trying to make grocery discovery feel less like a chore and more like the way many people already find things online: through videos, creators, and recommendations. In July, it launched Penny, an AI shopping companion, giving customers another route into the same basket. Penny helps someone say or show what they want; Inspire helps them tap what they see. For a retailer competing beyond South Africa’s traditional supermarket aisle, the bigger bet is that the app can become a place where people discover dinner, not just pay for it. Zoom out: Grocery delivery is becoming a fight over more than speed. Retailers also want to control the moment when a customer decides what to buy. Pick n Pay is betting that the best grocery app may not feel like a catalogue at all; it may feel more like a feed that happens to end with a basket. Moonshot is back! Moonshot 2026 is coming! Join us at the National Theatre, Lagos on October 28 & 29 for two days of tech and innovation. Grab your early bird tickets now and get 15% off. cybersecurity Kenya wants to join a global cybercrime fight club Image Source: Tenor Kenya is preparing to join 76 countries in a treaty created to make it easier for investigators to chase cybercriminals across borders. What happened? In February 2026, Kenya’s Cabinet approved the country’s accession to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime; Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi is now asking Parliament
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Cell C is out. Electricity is in for Blu Label Blu Label, the South African digital distribution group, built its business around airtime, vouchers and payments before making a major push into telecoms through Cell C. Now, it is moving into a much bigger infrastructure market: electricity. The company is positioning Blu Energy, its energy unit, across the electricity value chain, from trading and wheeling power to renewable generation, battery storage, and municipal billing. In February 2026, it was granted a multi-year electricity trading licence from the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) and says it has identified about 400MW of potential capacity, with plans to deploy up to 180MW in the near term. Blu Label wants to use the payments, vending and municipal infrastructure it has built over decades to become a middleman between power producers, municipalities and large electricity users. “We have got trading, we’ve got wheeling, and then the bigger concentration for us is how do we start deploying green energy on this side of the municipal grid, where we plug directly into the municipal grid,” Mark Levy, Blu Label’s co-chief executive officer (CEO), told TechCabal. He said the company plans to participate across the broader power supply chain, from trading and wheeling to “nodal production”, battery storage and dispensing power at different times of the day. Blu Label is Cell C’s largest shareholder, owning 49.53% of the mobile operator. The company’s latest results, released on Wednesday, show that the strategy builds on an existing electricity business. Electricity revenue generated on behalf of utilities rose 11% to R24.3 billion ($1.52 billion) during the year, although commissions fell 10% to R144 million ($9 million) as margins came under pressure. That pressure is part of why Blu Label is moving further up the electricity value chain. Levy said the company wants to capture value beyond vending commissions. It has already contracted 28MW of rooftop solar capacity, while its wider pipeline includes ground-mounted projects, with some deployments expected to begin in the third or fourth quarter of 2026. Blu Label also sees an opportunity on the other side of the electricity equation: making sure municipalities bill and collect the money they are owed. The company says it has deployed more than 50,000 meters and has another 10,000 to 15,000 in its pipeline. Levy described municipal revenue assurance as a “sleeping giant”, pointing to an estimated R30 billion ($1.9 billion) in revenue that is not being billed or collected correctly. But the energy push comes as the company emerges from one of the most disruptive periods in its history, following its long and costly attempt to turn around Cell C. The listing and restructuring of Cell C simplified the group’s balance sheet and left Blu Label with a 49.53% stake in the listed operator. It also created a major accounting hit. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed group recorded a R5.19 billion ($324.4 million) net loss related to Cell C, including a R6 billion ($375 million) loss on the disposal of its investment, partly offset by an R841 million ($52.6 million) remeasurement gain. That pushed reported Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation (EBITDA) to a loss of R4.77 billion ($298.2 million), compared with a profit of R1.60 billion ($100 million) a year earlier. Net profit attributable to shareholders also swung to a loss of R4.88 billion ($305 million), from a profit of R2.48 billion ($155 million). Strip out Cell C and restructuring effects, however, and the picture looks markedly different. Blu Label reported normalised revenue of R9.4 billion ($589.6 million), EBITDA of R923 million ($57.7 million) and core headline earnings of R681 million ($42.6 million). Brett Levy, the group’s other co-CEO, said the company is now focused on using its technology and data more aggressively. He also identified data monetisation as a major opportunity, arguing that Blu Label has spent about 20 years building proprietary technology and data capabilities. The Cell C separation gives that strategy more room to develop. Blu Label received R2.7 billion ($168.8 million) from selling down a 30% stake in Cell C, while cash and cash equivalents increased by R1.8 billion ($112.5 million). The company’s next chapter is therefore less about rescuing a telecoms operator and more about finding new ways to monetise the infrastructure it already owns. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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In January 2026, one of Africa’s most ambitious clean cooking companies shut down operations. KOKO Networks had raised over $100 million and was backed by a $180 million World Bank guarantee designed to shield investors from losses caused by government actions. It had reached more than 1.5 million households across Kenya with a clean cooking business built to displace charcoal. KOKO had built the business. What it could not secure was the Kenyan government’s approval to sell the carbon credits its business model depended on. The Letter of Authorisation that Article 6 of the Paris Agreement requires never arrived, and the revenue that would have funded KOKO’s subsidies disappeared with it. A carbon credit is, in plain terms, a tradeable certificate. Each one certifies that somewhere in Africa, a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that would have entered the atmosphere did not, because a forest was protected, a cleaner stove replaced a dirtier one, or a solar plant displaced a diesel generator. Governments and companies buy them to offset emissions they cannot yet eliminate, either to meet regulatory obligations or to satisfy net-zero commitments made to investors and customers. A credit’s price and legitimacy depend on whether the reduction is real, additional, permanent, and, critically, counted only once. That last requirement is why national registries exist. On August 11, 2026, the Government of Zambia launched a fully operational national carbon registry, becoming the second African country after Ghana to combine live registry infrastructure with a signed bilateral agreement and a completed transaction. That combination now exists in two African markets. What a registry actually does, and why it matters To understand why Zambia’s launch is consequential, it helps to understand what a national registry actually does. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement allows countries to trade emissions reductions internationally, but only if those reductions are formally authorised, tracked, and adjusted in the host country’s national accounting so they cannot be counted twice. A national registry is the digital infrastructure that makes all of this possible. Without one, a project developer can generate perfectly legitimate carbon credits and still be unable to sell them, because there is no institutional mechanism to authorise the transaction. That is precisely the gap KOKO fell through, and it is precisely the gap Zambia has just closed. The registry is already anchored by a live transaction. In January 2026, Zambia signed a Mitigation Outcome Purchase Agreement with Norway under the Carbon Feed-in Premium programme, a mechanism designed to trigger up to 300 megawatts of new solar and battery storage capacity in Zambia and reduce up to 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over a decade. The same programme is now drawing local and international power developers into a business model where every tonne of carbon they help avoid is bought by the Norwegian government at a pre-agreed price. That combination, a signed agreement between two governments, a working national registry to track the credits, and a pipeline of developers ready to build, is what Ghana pioneered and Zambia has now replicated. For a Zambian solar developer, it means a second, guaranteed revenue stream on top of the electricity they sell, one predictable enough that a bank can lend against it. For Norway, it means credits that will hold up under scrutiny. The private-sector pipeline extends beyond solar. BioCarbon Partners has been running the 1.2-million-hectare Luangwa Community Forests Project since 2014. Pro Green Earth is developing the Barotse Rangelands Restoration Project across an additional 1.2 million hectares in Western Province, with validation of the project design document expected this year. Between them, forestry and rangelands account for more than 2.4 million hectares under active carbon project development. The continental picture is evolving Zambia is not moving alone, and this is where the market is being repriced. Ghana has signed at least ten Article 6 cooperation agreements in 2026 and operates a live Ghana Carbon Registry under its Environmental Protection Act 2025, and in July 2025 completed the first-ever ITMO transfer in Africa; nearly 12,000 verified units moved to Switzerland under their bilateral agreement. Access Bank Ghana was authorised as a carbon-credit broker in August 2026, an early sign that a financial intermediation layer is forming around the market. Eight southern African countries launched a regional carbon market alliance in April. In West Africa, ECOWAS is validating a regional framework designed to close a $294 billion climate finance gap. What has been a fragmented policy ambition for a decade is beginning to consolidate into functional market infrastructure. The scale of what this unlocks is significant. The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative projects the continent’s carbon market could scale roughly nineteen-fold by 2030, generating around $6 billion in annual revenue and supporting up to 30 million jobs. Some industry sources project that the market could exceed $50 billion in high-demand scenarios driven by compliance with the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) and tightening corporate net-zero commitments. Whether the market reaches the lower or upper end of that range depends almost entirely on whether the institutional infrastructure Zambia has just launched becomes the norm rather than the exception across the continent. What still has to go right An operational registry is a precondition for transactions, not a guarantee of them. Four risks sit between the architecture Zambia has built and the market it hopes to convene. Macroeconomic risk is the first. Zambia defaulted on its sovereign debt in 2020 and completed restructuring only in 2024. Buyers underwriting ten-year credit streams denominated in a volatile kwacha will price that in. Government-to-government agreements with Norway and Sweden partially cushion this; private developers raising commercial finance will not. Demand-side risk is the second. The Article 6 market is unproven at a commercial scale. The first-ever credit issuance under the new Article 6.4 mechanism was approved in February 2026 for a single clean-cooking project in Myanmar, and as of mid-2026, only 13% of legacy CDM credits requesting transition had been approved. Whether corporate buyers will pay the prices needed
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