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Kenya has gazetted the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, 2026, finalising the country’s legal framework for licencing and supervising cryptocurrency exchanges, wallet providers, stablecoin issuers, and other digital asset businesses. The regulations were published in Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 185 under Legal Notice No. 134 on Friday, completing implementation of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, which President William Ruto assented to in October 2025. The regulations mark the final step in Kenya’s effort to bring cryptocurrency businesses under formal regulatory oversight. They create, for the first time, a licencing framework that allows Kenya’s regulators to approve and supervise firms operating in the sector. Kenya is one of East Africa’s largest cryptocurrency markets, recording about $19 billion in crypto inflows between July 2024 and June 2025, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. It ranked second in the region by transaction value, behind Ethiopia. The rules require firms serving Kenyan customers, including those without a physical presence in the country, to obtain licences, meet governance and capital requirements, implement anti-money laundering and cybersecurity controls, safeguard customer assets, and comply with ongoing reporting and consumer protection obligations. It is Kenya’s most consequential provision for all virtual asset service providers operating in, or from, the country. The regulations follow a four-month public consultation process launched in March, during which the National Treasury invited comments from industry participants, consumers, and other stakeholders. During the consultation, crypto firms argued that some proposed capital and compliance requirements risked pricing smaller operators out of the regulated market. Government officials continued engaging crypto firms through industry consultations before finalising the regulations. The framework also sets rules for stablecoins, initial coin offerings, tokenised real-world assets, digital wallets, advertising, market conduct, and enforcement. It also extends to foreign providers that actively target Kenyan customers or derive economic benefit from the country, even without a physical presence. Under the framework, licenced firms must maintain governance frameworks, conduct customer due diligence, retain transaction records for at least seven years, submit regular regulatory reports, and implement cybersecurity and business continuity measures. Oversight is split between Kenya’s financial regulators. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) will supervise virtual asset-to-fiat conversion services and stablecoin issuers, while the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) will regulate exchanges, token issuance platforms, initial coin offerings, and tokenisation activities under the VASP Act and accompanying regulations. The CBK had already begun preparing for the new regime in April, when it advertised vacancies for roles covering licencing, product approval and compliance for virtual asset service providers. With the regulations now gazetted, crypto firms can begin the process of seeking approval to operate under the new regime. 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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The battle for artificial intelligence (AI) talent has reached South Africa’s universities. Facing a shortage of engineers and researchers, Vodacom Group, an African telecoms operator, the University of Johannesburg (UJ), and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global cloud provider, launched the Vodacom AI Lab to train postgraduate students by placing them on practical AI projects drawn from the telecommunications industry. The initiative reflects a growing recognition that Africa’s AI challenge is not only about access to technology but also about building the workforce capable of using it. Rather than confining AI education to lecture halls, the partners said students will work alongside researchers and industry experts on problems using commercial applications, from network optimisation to customer service and data-driven decision-making. For Vodacom, the investment addresses a business challenge as much as an education one. Telecommunications companies are adopting AI across their operations, including network management, fraud detection, predictive maintenance and customer support. Those systems require engineers, data scientists and machine learning specialists who remain in short supply across South Africa and the continent. “The future of AI in Africa depends on developing local talent that understands the continent’s unique challenges,” Shameel Joosub, Vodacom group chief executive officer (CEO), said during the launch. He described the lab as a platform for responsible and practical AI innovation. AWS said it will provide the cloud infrastructure and AI services underpinning the lab. “This partnership is designed to create the next generation of AI talent for South Africa, and by extension, for Africa, by giving postgraduate students access to the same AI tools used by enterprises,” stated Prabashni Naidoo, AWS South Africa director. The collaboration also aims to bring universities closer to the tech industry through giving postgraduate students experience on commercial AI projects before they graduate. “We can change that by putting real-life problems to the universities and develop the necessary muscle that we need,” said Joosub. The initiative builds on a broader push to strengthen AI skills through higher education. In March 2025, Google partnered with the Department of Higher Education and Training to provide 5,000 AI, cybersecurity and data analytics scholarships across selected public universities and colleges across South Africa. Vodacom’s model goes a step further by embedding postgraduate students in commercial AI projects as part of their training. Joosub stated that the mobile operator wants to recruit more AI talent directly from universities. “We are building a model for collaboration that connects education with industry, research with real applications, and innovation with opportunity,” he noted. Naidoo said AWS will ensure that students in the programme move beyond classroom learning to develop AI systems on enterprise-grade infrastructure. “Students will not study AI in theory. They will work on live Vodacom cases running on AWS infrastructure,” she said. “This is the bridge between learning and doing.” UJ believes the partnership will narrow the gap between academic research and commercial deployment. “This collaboration reinforces the bridge between theory and application,” said Prof. Tankiso Moloi, executive dean of UJ’s College of Business and Economics. “This is how we close the gap between qualification and application, between research and implementation, and between academia and transformative careers.” The partners said the model is intended to extend beyond a single university. Joosub described it as “a blueprint for AI capability development across Africa.” Naidoo said the lab was designed to be replicated, with the talent pipeline serving as “a blueprint for the continent” through future university-industry collaborations. 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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Africa’s startup ecosystem has mastered the art of the launch. Accelerators and incubators have achieved exactly what they were designed to: help founders bring ideas to life, find early traction, and secure that first institutional check. But design has limits. When those same companies are ready to scale, the support that carried them begins to thin. This is the messy middle—and it’s where too many promising companies quietly stall or die. As companies move from startup to scaleup, the challenge shifts to building systems that allow a business to grow beyond its founder: robust financial management, structured hiring, institutional governance, and distributed leadership. Scaling without this infrastructure is like accelerating without steering; growth may come, but it is difficult to control or sustain. Closing this gap means moving from instinct-led execution to structured, scalable growth. In practice, this means stronger financial health, decentralised leadership, good governance, and capital matched to strategy. Ensuring founders are ready to absorb capital Before looking to fundraise, founders must answer a fundamental question: who is actually driving revenue, and is it the right customer? Many growth-stage founders can tell you their total customer count. Fewer can articulate which segment is the most valuable: which generates the highest lifetime value, at an acquisition cost the business can sustain? Customer retention tells the real story: strong retention signals something worth scaling. Weakening retention is an early warning that growth is filling a leaking bucket. The risk is scaling before this picture is clear: pouring capital into the wrong customer. Getting this right reorients everything that follows. A company can also be growing, profitable on paper, and still die. Cash cycles—the gap between earning revenue and collecting cash—can pose an existential threat. Rapid scaling worsens this; without continuous working capital modeling, a company risks insolvency despite its growth. Currency fluctuations also add complexity for companies that often operate across multiple currencies. Founders must develop treasury discipline, mastering conversion timing, reserves, and hedging. They also need fluency in unit economics to ensure growth builds, rather than erodes, enterprise value. More importantly, on the organisational side of the business, founders need to learn how to delegate. Africa’s most resilient founders have survived on resourcefulness, navigating funding winters, currency crises, thinning talent pools, and unforgiving markets. That scrappiness is a genuine superpower, until it becomes the ceiling. Growth-stage founders are rarely taught organisational design or effective delegation. Many become the bottleneck, a key reason why 90% of African startups fail. Securing top talent requires unfamiliar skills: identifying exceptional candidates, selling the vision, and crafting creative compensation packages. Equity, deferred pay, part-time experts, and advisory boards can bridge talent gaps when the salary budget isn’t there yet. Governance is also a cornerstone for growth and one of the most underleveraged tools in the growth-stage founder’s kit. Early boards often consist of family, friends, and early believers – not through neglect, but because no one had shown them what a growth-stage board should look like or how to evolve it. The stakes compound with scale. A startup can operate informally early on, but at the growth stage, they face real contractual liability and closer regulatory scrutiny that require higher legal and compliance frameworks. A board can feel like oversight a founder didn’t ask for. But that framing undersells what good governance actually offers: accountability that sharpens the founder, plus expertise, connections, and counsel a founder couldn’t yet afford to hire. Aligning capital to strategy Africa’s funding ecosystem has defaulted to frameworks developed in Western markets – Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) notes and equity raises as the standard instruments of growth. But capital should be chosen with intention, matched to what the business actually needs. Debt funding hit a record $1.64 billion across the continent in 2025, up 63% year-on-year, suggesting founders are increasingly exploring a broader range of financing options. As more founders and lenders develop the track record and instruments to make debt work in African market conditions, equity should increasingly be reserved for what it is actually designed to fund: risk, not timing. Scaling requires evaluating the full capital stack: balancing equity dilution against debt covenants while exploring strategic partnerships, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), and revenue-based structures. Catalytic or concessional capital can further bridge the gap to commercial readiness. An early-stage company with no revenue history, collateral, or track record may have no choice but equity, while a growth-stage company with recurring revenue can hold a fundamentally different credit proposition. The ecosystem must meet founders with capital matched to strategy. Africa’s founders have proven they can build. Helping them scale will shape far more than individual companies; it will shape African economies. Success will require an ecosystem designed to support founders beyond the early stage, with the same quality of guidance, resources, and institutional support they received at the start. It is time to build the infrastructure for scale. ___ Oyin Solebo is the COO at Cascador, an Africa-focused platform for growth-stage founders building businesses that make an impact. She also serves as Advisor at Cone Ventures Studio, co-founding and scaling Africa-focused ventures, and as Senior Advisor at Ventures 54. Previously, she was Managing Director of the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator, Techstars’ flagship Africa-based programme. 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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