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CarePay Group, a Kenya-based healthtech connecting insurers, healthcare providers, and members via mobile technology, has appointed Moses G. Kuria as acting CEO of Care International and M-TIBA. Irene Nafula has been named acting managing director of M-TIBA Kenya. The leadership changes follow the departure of Pieter Prickaerts, who stepped down after nearly seven years in the company, serving as Group CEO for two years. The company said Prickaerts played a key role in shaping its growth and expanding its presence across the region. “The Board thanks Pieter for his remarkable leadership and contribution to building the organisation and the foundation for its next phase of growth,” CarePay said in a statement on Wednesday. Kuria, a 10-year CarePay veteran and former Group CFO, previously served as managing director of M-TIBA and holds an MBA from the University of Nairobi. He will oversee the group’s strategy and the regional expansion of its health insurance technology platform, according to the company. Nafula, previously Commercial Director at M-TIBA, brings more than 15 years of experience in healthcare operations, product development, and delivery. She holds an MSc in Organisational Development from the United States International University and will manage Kenya operations, including strategic partnerships, operational performance, and client delivery, CarePay said. CarePay, which started in Kenya in 2015 as M-TIBA, connects individual members to payers and providers in the healthcare ecosystem. It also operates in Nigeria and Tanzania. Last year, TechCabal reported that M-TIBA was hit by a cyberattack that went undetected for 10 days, exposing the personal and medical information of nearly five million Kenyans.
Read MoreFintech dominated Africa’s startup funding landscape in 2025. But early data from 2026 suggests investors may be widening their focus. African startups raised $575 million across 58 deals between January and February 2026, according to TechCabal Insights, with logistics, transport, and energy startups capturing a growing share of the capital as investors increasingly back companies building mobility and infrastructure systems. In January, fintech maintained its lead, raising $131.6 million, with major rounds from Egypt’s ValU and NowPay helping drive funding activity during the month. The logistics and transport sector followed with $27.1 million. The turning point, however, came in February 2026. The logistics and transport sector emerged as the top-funded sector for the month, raising $119.6 million. The surge was driven by notable rounds from Spiro, an e-mobility startup that raised $57 million, and GoCab, which secured $45 million. Fintech dropped to the fourth most-funded sector, raising $54.1 million, as energy and water startups overtook it with $94 million in funding, largely driven by SolarAfrica’s $94 million raise. The shift in momentum, highlighting growing investor interest in these sectors, appears to be intensifying in 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, where early signs of this trend were already visible. In January 2025, fintech led funding activity while energy and water came a close second, raising nearly half of fintech’s total for the month. By February 2025, fintech still held the lead, but logistics and transport emerged as a stronger contender, raising more than half of fintech’s funding that month. So far in 2026, Africa’s funding landscape has seen the presence of deep-tech startups in the investment mix. Nigerian defence-tech startup Terra Industries raised over $33 million across two deals so far this year alone to scale its advanced manufacturing operations. The continued fundraising suggests a growing willingness among investors to back startups building technology-driven industrial infrastructure. Meanwhile, the agritech sector, which struggled to hold investor interest in 2025, is beginning to show tentative signs of recovery. Funding in agritech startups across Africa declined to $168.1 million in 2025 from $206.9 million in 2024. The slow pace continued into January 2026, when agritech startups collectively raised $200,000. February brought renewed activity. Egypt’s Breadfast raised $50 million, while Lovegrass Ethiopia secured $5 million, pushing total agritech funding for the month to about $55 million. While still modest compared with sectors such as logistics, fintech, or energy, the rebound suggests investors may be reassessing opportunities in agriculture. The first two months of 2026 paint a picture of a more diversified funding environment where fintechs continue to attract capital, but other sectors tied to mobility, energy, infrastructure, and food are gaining ground. If this momentum continues through the rest of the year, Africa’s venture capital ecosystem could see a gradual rebalancing across sectors. While the fintech sector is unlikely to lose its importance, funding may begin to favour startups operating in other sectors, particularly at this time when investors are concentrating capital across fewer deals. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe
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It’s been two days of back-to-back panels at the Inclusive Finance Forum (IFF) in Kigali, but Wednesday’s main event, a panel session that featured James Mwangi, the managing director and CEO of Equity Group Holdings, Mary Ellen Iskenderian, the CEO of Women’s World Banking, and Serge Dioum, the CEO of MTN FinTech Group, tried to deliver an answer to one of the most pressing questions in African fintech: Who will own Africa’s financial future and build the rails? While the three executives laid out competing visions for Africa’s next financial era, they all agreed on one thing: that financial inclusion alone is no longer enough. They also agreed that the next phase for African finance is about wealth creation, independence, and infrastructure. The infrastructure argument Mwangi opened with a sweeping thesis. The future of financial services, he argued, will not be defined by apps or products, but by the digital public infrastructure on which everything else sits. Digital IDs will replace physical passports. Remote account opening is already replacing branch visits. Finance is embedded so deeply in daily life that it functions less like a service and more like a utility. “I see digital public infrastructure as a new business airport and port that we will have in the future as the hub of economic development. The modern economy will be built on digital public infrastructure,” said Mwangi. He argued that for this infrastructure to function, two things must follow: interoperability standards that allow systems to trust each other across borders and a citizen-owned digital wallet not tethered to a bank or a telco, but one that belongs to the individual, allowing them to connect to whatever services they choose. The implication of his statement was clear: whoever controls the wallet controls the relationship, and Mwangi was suggesting that neither the banks nor the telcos should. Iskenderian, who leads the world’s largest nonprofit focused on women’s financial inclusion, brought the conversation back to a stubborn reality. Africa has the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs globally, with over 58% of the continent’s self-employed population being women. Despite this, access to credit for these women has barely budged, even as technology has advanced dramatically. The problem, she said, is structural. Banks are still making lending decisions based on 19th-century ideas about collateral, which women have historically never owned. The data that could transform credit decisions—transaction histories flowing through mobile money platforms, repayment patterns, and business activity—is sitting right there, largely unused, she said. “Why isn’t what you know about the way women pay back, the way rural people pay back, and how their businesses are structured being incorporated into credit decisions?” said Iskenderian. She also flagged a regulatory bottleneck that she said was quietly undermining progress. Credit guarantees have expanded across Africa, enabling banks to lend more freely to small businesses, but in many countries, banks still don’t get capital charge relief for loans backed by those guarantees—a technical gap that effectively cancels out the policy’s intent. Image Source: IFF 2026. The small business finance gap in emerging markets and developing economies stands at $5.7 trillion, rising to $8 trillion when informal enterprises are included. This gap grew by over 27% between 2015 and 2019, more than double the rate of GDP growth over the same period. Dioum, who oversees MTN’s fintech operations across 14 African markets, pitched a different model altogether. Where Mwangi spoke about public infrastructure and Iskenderian about policy reform, Thiemele spoke about the language of platforms. MTN FinTech, he said, has connected 70,000 partners to its platform through an Open API system. Anyone with an idea can build on top of MTN’s infrastructure, access its customer base, and launch services without requiring any direct intervention from the company. The result: a partner who connects to MTN’s platform gets access to 70 million customers from day one. “Financial inclusion is not enough,” said Dioum. “We need to create wealth for our people so that they can be independent financially and they can have a good life.” Dioum’s vision follows a familiar arc — loans first, then savings, then insurance — with the telco as the enabling layer throughout. The playbook is not new; it is the logic that built mobile money across Africa. The ambition, though, is a full-stack financial ecosystem. He also addressed cross-border interoperability directly: a customer using mobile money in Zambia should be able to pay for goods in Rwanda in real time while in transit. That kind of seamlessness, he argued, is what the next generation of infrastructure must deliver. Will banks survive? Mobile money and fintech have helped to revolutionise African finance, but one pertinent question has been, will banks be part of the future of finance? Mwangi’s response was notably candid. Financial services will always be needed, he said. But who provides them is a more complicated question. The bulk of mobile money, arguably Africa’s most transformative financial product, was not built by banks. Mwangi said Equity Group has been asking itself the same question. On the IFF stage, he announced that the lender is launching an innovation studio in Rwanda, bringing together a team of about 10 innovators at the intersection of capital, technology, and entrepreneurship. The group, Mwangi said, is backed by Equity’s $16 billion balance sheet and designed to co-create with African innovators and stakeholders. “The future is the intersection of knowledge, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and capital, where they meet opportunity, and that’s what we are seeing Rwanda provide us with,” he said. The panel surfaced a tension that runs through Africa’s financial services landscape right now. Banks, telcos, and development institutions all agree on a financially empowered African population transacting seamlessly across borders, but the route is contested. Mwangi wants citizen-owned infrastructure. Iskenderian wants gender-responsive policy reform. Thiemele wants open platforms anchored by telcos. What they all agreed on, and this may be the most consequential shift, is that the language of inclusion is giving way to the language of wealth creation. The question is no longer whether
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