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In a 2,000-square-metre facility in Nsukka, Enugu State, in southeastern Nigeria, engineers assemble airframes, test control systems, and fine-tune battery modules to prove a point: Nigeria can build hard tech. Arone Technologies, founded in 2018 by AI engineer Emmanuel Ezenwere, is one of the few Nigerian startups attempting to manufacture drones and modular solar energy systems locally. The company is betting on hardware, from autonomous aerial logistics to portable solar systems, built largely in Nigeria. That ambition is set to scale through a ₦12.95 billion ($9.52 million) partnership with the state-owned Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu. Over the next four years, both partners plan to establish what they describe as Nigeria’s first tech manufacturing plant dedicated to defence, aerospace, robotics, AI, and renewable energy, an entire industrial hub built within the IMT campus. “We’re building solutions that enable energy security and enable smart living,” Ezenwere told TechCabal in an interview. “Our primary focus is energy security and artificial intelligence.” Arone was founded “way before AI became sexy,” as Ezenwere puts it. The company’s early mission was practical: solving Nigeria’s last-mile healthcare delivery problem. Arone’s journey began in 2018 with a ₦3 million ($2,200) grant from Roar Nigeria, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka’s tech hub, alongside a $5,000 angel investment. It later raised a $100,000 seed round from Energia Ventures and AfriClim Accelerator, as well as investments from angel investors. For a company that once watched its capital evaporate in a drone crash, the ₦12.95 billion ($9.52 million) manufacturing partnership marks a dramatic evolution. Solving the last-mile problem Nigeria has more than 30,000 primary healthcare centres, many located in rural communities with poor road infrastructure. Deliveries of blood, vaccines, and emergency medication can take hours, sometimes too long. Arone’s answer was autonomous drones capable of carrying up to 5kg of medical supplies over distances of up to 200 kilometres. Through a network of “Avports”, autonomous vehicle ports stationed at blood banks and distribution hubs, drones can take off, deliver to remote clinics, and return without human intervention. A trip that might take one hour and fifteen minutes by road can be completed in about 15 minutes by drone. The company’s early cargo drone, capable of carrying 20kg, was among the first of its kind in Nigeria. Its maiden flight in 2019 was successful. The next one crashed. “We were thrilled with the accomplishment,” Ezenwere recalled. “But the reality was that the crash cost was greater than the capital we had raised.” The setback forced the team to rethink how to build hardware in Nigeria. Instead of chasing perfect, finished products, Arone began breaking systems into manageable modules, refining and iterating gradually. It also pivoted toward niches that could sustain revenue, including security applications. Today, Arone claims it works with the Nigerian Defence Research and Development Bureau and the Air Force, supplying drones for surveillance and security use cases. Manufacturing in a difficult environment Arone engineers at work in the Nsukka factory. Image source: Arone Building hardware in Nigeria is not for the faint-hearted. Ezenwere describes a landscape where every layer must be questioned: talent, materials, capital, and market readiness. “It’s not just manufacturing,” he said. “It’s the full food chain, research, development, manufacturing.” When asked what “manufacturing” means for Arone, Ezenwere is careful. No modern hardware company builds everything from scratch. But Arone says over 50% of its drone systems are indigenous. The company designs and builds its airframes locally, develops its control systems and software in-house, and owns its AI models. Motors and batteries are still sourced externally, though the company says it is working toward deeper localisation. For its AI surveillance platform, QView AI, Arone owns the entire software stack. The models combine custom-built systems with open-source components, but without third-party ownership of the final product. For enterprise clients, including government institutions, the system can be deployed on-premise, scaling from a few gigabytes of RAM to terabytes, depending on requirements. The strategy reduces exposure to currency fluctuations and import markups, though not entirely. “We are exposed,” Ezenwere admits, “but the level of exposure is reduced.” The cost advantage is significant. Arone’s Aurora drone, equipped with thermal imaging capabilities for night surveillance, costs around ₦3 million ($2,190). Comparable foreign drones with similar specifications can cost upwards of $10,000. “Why would someone interested in security applications choose to spend $10,000 when they can get the same capability locally?” he asked. Powering beyond drones As Arone scaled its drone operations, it encountered another Nigerian constraint: electricity. That constraint birthed its second division: modular energy systems. Its flagship product, Luminar 2.0, is a portable, suitcase-sized solar energy system designed to power appliances and critical equipment during outages. The largest Luminar model delivers 3KVA and 2000 watt-hours, enough to power a microwave, television, and fan, sufficient for a middle-sized household. The systems use lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries with smart thermal management, designed to withstand temperatures up to 45°C and operate for five to seven years. Arone’s drones. Image source: Arone. As of late 2025, Arone says it has deployed over 1.35 MWh of modular energy systems across all 36 states in Nigeria. Vaccine refrigerators are among the critical appliances powered by the systems during blackouts. Energy security, Ezenwere argues, is inseparable from technological independence. “It’s a mission for us to build an ecosystem that will transform Nigeria from a consuming nation to a producing nation.” Under the partnership with IMT, Arone will provide intellectual property and product designs, while IMT provides funding and infrastructure. Production targets include 5,000 Aurora drones per year, over 30,000 Luminar energy systems annually, and more than 200 QView AI servers. Beyond manufacturing output, the partnership aims to train more than 20,000 students. The goal is not merely to produce factory workers but future industrialists. “The objective is not just to train production workers,” Ezenwere said. “It’s to train people who will eventually build other industries.” Arone’s facility, located near the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, initially had to transport students by bus daily to build practical
Read MoreJumia’s international sales, largely driven by China, grew 82% in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to its financial results, as the e-commerce giant strengthens its 2027 profitability strategy. After more than a decade of losses, Jumia has shifted its business model from chasing Africa’s aspirational middle class to repositioning itself for Africa’s lower-middle-income consumers, where 85% of the population lives on less than $5.50 a day, according to the World Bank. The company is rebuilding its business around affordability and mass-market volume, using Chinese supply chains as the engine, with a simple bet: cheaper goods move faster, generate more orders, improve unit economics, and create a clearer path to profitability than premium brands. That shift is now visible in the numbers. As of September 2025, Jumia had about 24,000 China-based sellers on its marketplace and roughly 2.2 million China-sourced items in warehouses across Africa. Of its more than 25,000 international merchants, Chinese partners dominate. In Q3 2025 alone, items sold from China grew 55% year-on-year. By Q4 2025, items sold from international sellers grew 82% year-over-year, driven by expanded direct sourcing capabilities. Jumia strengthened this pipeline by opening a new office in Yiwu, China. Overall, Jumia’s 2025 revenue grew 13% to $188.9 million, while gross merchandise value (GMV) jumped 13.59% to $818.6 million. However, despite topline growth, operating losses only declined marginally by 4.24%, underlining how fragile its path to profitability remains. “We closed 2025 with clear momentum across the platform, delivering strong GMV and revenue growth, improving customer engagement, and continued progress on our path to profitability,” Francis Dufay, Jumia Group chief executive officer, said in 2025’s full-year results. This growth is reflected in orders, which grew 32% year-over-year, and quarterly active customers ordering physical goods, which rose by 26% year-over-year in Q4, 2025. Nigeria continues to play a leading role, with orders up 33% and GMV up 50% year-over-year. For 2026, Jumia says it will focus on scaling usage across its existing markets and deepening customer engagement by improving availability, affordability, and reliability. “A more stable macro environment and local currencies provide a supportive backdrop for both consumers and vendors,” Dufay said. “We remain focused on unlocking operating leverage, optimising our cost structure, and refining our market footprint.” The profitability push is also reshaping Jumia’s geography. The company exited Algeria in February 2026, following earlier exits from South Africa and Tunisia in 2024. It is now operational in only eight countries. Jumia expects to break even and achieve positive cash flow in Q4 2026, with full-year profitability targeted for 2027, a goal now increasingly tied to how effectively it can turn Chinese supply chains into African consumer volume.
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On school mornings across Kenyan cities, transport handovers happen fast and mostly on trust, yet when something goes wrong, schools often lack verifiable records of who arrived, when, and through which entry point, a gap that creates risk for pupils, parents, and administrators and turns routine logistics into a safeguarding and accountability problem. Many school transport routines still rely on paper registers, phone calls between drivers and teachers, and scattered text messages, even as the new Traffic (School Transport) Rules, 2025, and National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) notices require proper records and reporting. Meanwhile, GPS‑based school‑bus apps and communication platforms raise questions under the Data Protection Act 2019 about children’s location data and consent. For most schools, the practical need is not a full‑day trace of a child’s movements but a reliable, auditable record of key handover moments where legal duty of care changes. TerraGO, a Kenyan school operations startup, built its system around logging these predefined handover actions rather than continuously following children. The platform focuses on creating time- and place-based records tied to specific school-defined touchpoints rather than producing a stream of location data. Each logged action answers a narrow question: did a registered band or tag interact with an approved reader at a known location within an expected time window? This gives schools a way to confirm that a pupil passed through a set checkpoint without building a full movement history. The hardware in the child’s bag or on their wrist Children carry a wearable in the form of a wristband or bag tag that uses near field communication (NFC), while schools install readers at bus doors, gates, and key entrances. Once students arrive in school, a tap on one of these readers creates a record linked to that device, that location, and that moment. According to co-founder Collins Muriuki, schools decide where those readers sit, whether at the bus step, the main gate, or reception, and the system treats each tap as a discrete entry in the school’s transport and arrival log. “NFC tap confirmations at school-defined touchpoints,” Muriuki said. How a school morning plays out A typical bus journey starts with a child tapping the reader as they board, which logs the boarding event. During the trip, the school can activate a temporary link that shows the bus route to both the school and the parent. The journey also includes a map tied to the vehicle rather than an individual child, which expires when the journey ends. On arrival, the child taps again when getting off the bus and once more at the gate or entrance, and each of these actions can trigger a notification if the school and parent have chosen to receive them, while children who walk or arrive by car tap at the entrance to create a single arrival record. The system stays focused on those taps, so if a registered band interacts with a known reader in the expected time band, the platform can report that the pupil was present at that point, without relying on a phone in the child’s pocket or a chain of GPS signals. What parents see and what they do not Parents can view confirmations for arrival and pickup events, and turn notifications on or off. Live map visibility appears only during an active bus trip and ends when the route ends, with no replay of past journeys and no scrollable route history inside the app. Image: Terra GO Outside those time-bound journeys, the parent view centres on event records rather than maps, which keeps the focus on handovers rather than continuous tracking. Pickup without biometrics At pickup, parents generate a short term code and name the adult allowed to collect the child, then share that code with the guardian, and at the gate a staff member checks the string and sees either a match with the child’s details and expected adult or a warning if the code has expired, is presented by an unlisted person, or appears at an unusual time. Codes reset daily and cannot be reused, and the system avoids facial recognition or fingerprint scans, relying instead on these time-limited digital passes. How schools use the dashboard Inside the school, administrators see a morning view that compares expected and confirmed arrivals by route and class, helping them spot pupils who boarded a bus but have not yet checked in at the gate, those who are late, and flagged exceptions. Staff open individual records when the dashboard signals an issue, and alerts go out only when set conditions match, such as the right band, reader, and time window, while unclear or partial data does not trigger a message. Data scope and control The system’s records depend on physical taps at registered readers, not on continuous location feeds. Schools control their operational data, while parents see only records tied to their own child. Access to past data is time-limited and linked to specific uses, such as reviews. The company says it does not sell child data, Muriuki insisted, and that access to live and historical records inside its systems is logged and restricted by role. “Even internally, Terra staff cannot casually explore a child’s historical data. Access is tightly controlled and logged,” Muriuki said. The process of onboarding a school Bringing a school onto the platform starts by mapping its classes, routes, gates, and policies, then importing student, guardian, and transport details into that structure. After that, staff run test scenarios such as mock bus runs and trial pickups before any live use. Rollout then takes place in stages, by route, grade, or entry point, which allows staff to adjust processes in smaller groups rather than changing everything at once. How much does the product cost? The product has a wearable and a subscription. Each child uses a Terra GO band, an IP68-rated wrist device, which the company claims can last for one year without recharging. The band costs KES 2,500 ($19). Parents pay KES 500 ($4) monthly for the software, which covers
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