Starlink wants to wire Francophone Africa. Regulators hold the switch.
24 mars 2026 Hello , Welcome back to Francophone Weekly by TechCabal, your weekly deep dive into the tech ecosystem across French-speaking Africa. Previous editions have been published on the website, but email versions of the newsletter will land directly in your inbox every Tuesday at noon. By default, this newsletter is in French. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, click the “Read in English” button below to switch to the English version. If you’re reading on our website, you can either click the button below or toggle the language selector at the top right-hand side of the page to view the English edition. Read in English Starlink, le réseau Internet par satellite d’Elon Musk, est en train de redessiner le paysage numérique à travers l’Afrique francophone. Pourtant, le rythme et la forme de cette transformation dépendent autant de la politique et de la réglementation que de la technologie. L’expansion dans la région se déroule comme un processus négocié, dans lequel les gouvernements, les opérateurs de télécommunications et les réalités du marché local définissent activement comment, où et pour qui cette connectivité sera mise en place. Les écarts de connectivité restent importants dans les zones rurales et mal desservies, ce qui met en évidence à la fois le potentiel de l’Internet par satellite et les défis liés à sa généralisation. Pour comprendre ce qui change réellement et ce qui ne change pas, il faut commencer par les fondamentaux : qui n’y a toujours pas accès, pourquoi la connectivité reste inégale, et pourquoi l’Internet par satellite arrive à un moment où les infrastructures traditionnelles n’ont pas encore comblé le fossé. Plongeons-nous dans le vif du sujet. 1. Un continent qui lutte encore pour la connectivité Starlink et Airtel Africa annoncent un partenariat. Source de l’image : TechCabal Malgré des progrès notables en matière de pénétration de la téléphonie mobile sur les marchés africains francophones au cours de la dernière décennie, la connectivité reste un défi persistant, tant en termes de coût que de disponibilité. Pour des millions de personnes réparties sur de vastes territoires ruraux, un accès Internet haut débit fiable reste hors de portée. C’est dans ce contexte que Starlink, le service Internet par satellite en orbite basse (LEO) de SpaceX, s’est imposé comme un acteur susceptible de changer la donne. La promesse est claire : une constellation de satellites capables de diffuser un accès Internet haut débit à faible latence vers pratiquement n’importe quel point de la planète, sans avoir recours à des infrastructures terrestres coûteuses. Mais le chemin vers la concrétisation de cette promesse en Afrique francophone a été tout sauf simple. De la menace au partenariat : un pivot stratégique Lorsque Starlink s’est intéressé pour la première fois au continent africain, les opérateurs de télécommunications en place l’ont considéré avec une profonde méfiance, y voyant un perturbateur étranger bien financé, prêt à éroder leurs parts de marché. Cette perception est en train de devenir rapidement obsolète. L’évolution la plus significative dans la région est l’adoption par Starlink de partenariats stratégiques avec les principaux opérateurs de télécommunications africains, notamment Airtel Africa et le groupe Vodacom. Plutôt que de les concurrencer de front, Starlink s’intègre aux réseaux existants en tant que couche d’infrastructure complémentaire. Le partenariat avec Airtel : Direct-to-cell La plus transformatrice de ces collaborations est l’intégration par Airtel Africa de la technologie « direct-to-cell » de Starlink, un système qui permet aux smartphones ordinaires de se connecter directement aux satellites sans aucun matériel spécialisé. Cela élimine le besoin d’antennes paraboliques qui, historiquement, rendaient l’Internet par satellite prohibitif pour la plupart des consommateurs. Le déploiement d’Airtel est prévu sur 14 marchés africains en 2026, sous réserve de l’approbation des autorités réglementaires, avec des pays francophones clés tels que la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) parmi les cibles prioritaires. Le service est spécialement conçu pour étendre la couverture mobile dans des zones où la construction d’une antenne-relais traditionnelle n’est tout simplement pas rentable. Le partenariat avec Vodacom : backhaul et revente Vodacom poursuit un modèle différent mais complémentaire. Plutôt que de s’adresser directement aux consommateurs (DTC), l’opérateur agit en tant que revendeur agréé des équipements Starlink tout en déployant le réseau satellite comme « backhaul », utilisant Starlink pour connecter ses stations de base mobiles isolées au réseau plus large. Les principales cibles sont les entreprises, les PME, les écoles et les établissements de santé dans les zones mal desservies. Ensemble, ces partenariats traduisent une reconnaissance stratégique claire : pour surmonter les défis réglementaires et de distribution en Afrique, il vaut mieux travailler aux côtés des acteurs locaux établis, et non contre eux. Où en est Starlink ? Un aperçu pays par pays La situation en Afrique francophone est loin d’être homogène. Les pays en sont à des stades très différents : certains ont adopté cette technologie avec enthousiasme, d’autres l’ont totalement bloquée, et plusieurs restent dans l’expectative. Pays Statut Informations clés Sénégal Opérationnel Lancement prévu en février 2026. La licence comprend une clause sociale visant à fournir un accès Internet gratuit à 1 million de personnes. Les forfaits mensuels commencent entre 22 000 et 30 000 FCFA (~36–49 $). République démocratique du Congo Sous licence et opérationnel Après une interdiction de 14 mois liée à des préoccupations de sécurité liées à la rébellion du M23, une licence a été accordée en mai 2025. L’accent est mis sur les zones rurales où le taux de pénétration de l’Internet fixe n’est que de 0,024 %. République centrafricaine Opérationnel Lancement officiel le 16 mars 2026, marquant l’une des arrivées les plus récentes sur le continent. Côte d’Ivoire Prévu Pas encore officiellement lancé. Des discussions de haut niveau sont en cours entre le gouvernement et des partenaires américains. Les régulateurs et les opérateurs historiques comme Orange (Sonatel) suivent de près les précédents établis au Sénégal. Cameroun Interdit/sans licence L’importation, la vente et l’utilisation des kits Starlink sont officiellement interdites depuis 2024, pour des raisons de sécurité nationale et de réglementation. Les autorités douanières saisissent activement les équipements aux frontières.
Read More‘We could deploy $80 million a year through angel investing’ — ABAN CEO on fixing early-stage capital
Before the venture capitalists write the big cheques and the headlines follow, someone has to take the first bet on a startup. Angel investors, often with less capital and certainty but more risk, make these bets. Across Africa, this early risk has increasingly been organised and amplified by the African Business Angel Network (ABAN), a pan-African non-profit that has helped build the backbone of the continent’s early-stage investment infrastructure. Founded in 2015 by six pioneer angel networks, like the Lagos Angel Network and Ghana Angel Investor Network, ABAN has grown into a community of over 5,000 investors organised across over 60 angel networks in 37 African countries. Together, they have deployed $35 million into more than 1,200 startups spanning fintech, agritech, health, clean energy, and the creative economy. Its flagship vehicle, Catalytic Africa, a matching fund run with AfriLabs, mobilised $2.5 million from 200 angels in just 12 months. Even as global VC funding in Africa slows down, ABAN’s local networks keep deals moving. At the centre of all this is Fadilah Tchoumba, ABAN’s CEO and the fund manager for Catalytic Africa. Her conviction is simple. Africa must fund Africa. The angels who backed Flutterwave and Paystack before anyone else were Africans operating on the continent, she likes to point out. Without that foundational capital, Tchoumba argued, global investors have nothing to follow. Tchoumba and I met in Kigali during the Innovative Fintech Forum (IFF), and in our short conversation on the sidelines, we talked about the problems with angel investing in Africa, what ABAN does to help early-stage investing in Africa, the importance of local investors, and Kigali’s compelling case as a fund domiciliation platform for angel networks in this edition of Ask an Investor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. How many startups have benefited from ABAN’s network? From late 2021 to 2025, angel investors across the continent that are part of the ABAN network have invested in more than 5,000 companies. The ticket size varies between $5,000 and can go all the way to $250,000. A small portion are growing quite well, some of which have attracted additional funding from VCs. Why do you think local venture capital is still very thin compared to the capital that flows in from outside? There are many reasons. If we look at capital flow within the whole capital value chain, it always starts with angel investors, and then from angel investors, you hit the line of commercial capital, which mostly starts with VCs and eventually PE, and so forth. Right now, we have structural challenges. A group of angel investors will come together, and the moment they are ready to deploy capital, they hit setbacks which are related to the legal framework that would be most appropriate to protect the interests of the startup, especially since they’re investing for the future. The second is the speed at which capital is deployed. Since 2015, angel networks have deployed more than $32.5 million across the continent. But when you look at the figures for 2025, it’s about $4.5 million that was deployed by angel investors. People ask me: ” Do you think we can do more? The answer is yes. But why didn’t we do more? It takes an angel group two or three months to deploy capital in a startup on the continent, versus a European group taking 20 minutes. The question is, why is it taking us so long to deploy $50,000 or $200,000? We have to go back to structural issues. Do we have adequate policies that can consider cross-border transactions or the diversity of our currencies? Do we have the infrastructure that can take into account the cost sensitivity of deploying early-stage capital? Do we have the legal framework to support the diversity of angels coming from various African countries? One thing we’ve been focusing on since last year is how we actually make angel capital deployment as seamless as possible. If we solve that issue, I can almost guarantee you that on this continent, we would be able to deploy between $50 million and $80 million a year through angel investing, which is very much needed to build the foundation that startups need to attract commercial capital, starting with VC. How do you think these problems can be solved? What has ABAN done? At ABAN, to truly identify the problem, we had to test it manually first. Today, apart from Mauritius, where we operate, we have an SPV based in Rwanda. The role of the SPV is to pool capital from various African countries and then deploy and invest it in a selected company. One of our recent examples: Legendary Foods, based out of Ghana, received investment participation from multiple investors coming from multiple African countries. Pooling that capital requires KYC, getting money into the account in Kigali, and then deploying that money into the company’s bank account. And to do that, the KYC itself can take you two months. The first question is: can we make KYC as light as possible without compromising international standards? If it’s a yes, you have to speak to policymakers, to key stakeholders in Kigali—which we have done. We’re still in discussion on how to safeguard and protect everyone involved without compromising the regulators, the startup, or the investors. Banks are also one of our key stakeholders. We’re speaking with banks to understand what infrastructure we can leverage to pool and push capital seamlessly. That’s also going well. We hope that before the end of this year, we’ll have a practical infrastructure that will make angel investing very easy. You’ve noted that limited participation of local corporates in the investment cycle diminishes exit prospects. But there’s also a liquidity problem in African startups. If there’s a liquidity problem, why should a high-net-worth individual put money in a startup instead of real estate or treasury bills? We all recognise that there are competing asset classes. We know that. But we also have to acknowledge that to grow our
Read MoreNigerian crypto startup Roqqu draws 30,000 users to its futures product
Roqqu, a Nigerian cryptocurrency startup that allows users to buy and sell digital assets and access crypto-backed loans, drew more than 30,000 users to its futures derivatives product during beta testing, according to Emmanuel Peter, the company’s Head of Trading and Markets. The locally-built futures contract, which launched in beta in December 2025 and is now out of beta, continues Roqqu’s push beyond its core buy, sell, and swap offering into a broader suite of advanced trading tools. Peter said the beta numbers were a signal that products built within Roqqu’s own ecosystem could hold their own. “We already have [over] 30,000 accounts that started testing and using it during the beta period,” he said. “It’s reassuring to us that things developed within our ecosystem are appealing to users.” Roqqu is preparing to launch crypto cards and a locally-built prediction market, positioning itself against competitors like Luno and Busha, which are also widening their product stacks. The startup is betting that lower fees and increased functionality will drive adoption among traders. During beta, futures trades were free, but Roqqu has since introduced a 0.1% fee after formally launching the product. “Futures is a high-frequency market, so if the fee is not low, [users] end up paying a lot just to trade,” Peter said. “[Our users] are liking the experience, and it’s cheap to use.” The renewed focus on cards marks a return to a product Roqqu previously shelved. The company launched virtual cards in 2022 but discontinued them amid reliability challenges, according to Peter. “We needed cards that actually work everywhere,” Peter said. “Not cards that decline when you try to make payments. We’re coming back with something way better; cards you can use in any market, local or international.” The new card product, expected within weeks, will be powered by crypto and built with multinational partners, according to Peter. Roqqu’s product expansion reflects a broader shift in how crypto startups are positioning themselves in an industry that is evolving beyond simple trading. Busha, a Nigerian crypto startup, is rebranding itself as a broader digital finance platform, adding loans and cards, while Luno has begun exploring products like prediction markets. Globally, exchanges like Bitget and Bybit, which operate in Nigeria, have evolved into “super apps,” offering everything from derivatives trading to payments and savings products, including a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) feature. “It’s like evolve or die,” Peter said. “If you’re not able to evolve fast, the industry may change so rapidly that you’ll be playing catch-up.” That philosophy underpins Roqqu’s product roadmap. Beyond futures and cards, Roqqu is building a prediction market, a derivatives marketplace that allows users to take a view on real-world events and earn money. The startup is also exploring tokenisation and reward-based products, all developed in-house with a product-first ideology, said Peter. In 2025, Roqqu acquired Flitaa, a Kenyan-based crypto exchange, as part of its expansion strategy, but the startup continues to run independently. Peter declined to comment on Flitaa’s operations, noting that “operationally, it’s not the same company,” though Roqqu retains ownership. Roqqu’s aggressive product push comes as crypto firms in Nigeria navigate a changing regulatory landscape. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), the country’s tax authority, now oversee payment-based digital assets, while the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulates assets that behave like securities under the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA) framework introduced in February 2026. Peter said the pace of innovation in crypto—from stablecoins to new trading instruments—is forcing companies to adapt quickly. Roqqu’s push is a response to that pace.
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Digital Nomads: Samuel Odeloye left Lagos. He never stopped building for it.
For eight years, Lara.ng, the WhatsApp-style chatbot that told you which bus to take, what the fare should be, and which backroad to avoid, was Lagos’s unofficial transit oracle. Samuel Odeloye, the founder behind that chatbot, now lives in the United States. But the data Lara.ng has collected never left Lagos. From an office thousands of kilometres away, he is working on something harder than giving bus directions: building the invisible pipes to make last-mile delivery in Nigeria reliable and effective. That tension, building deeply local infrastructure from abroad with local data, is what defines this chapter of his life as a digital nomad. 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 Act I: Leaving home to build for home Odeloye left Nigeria in 2011 for what he describes as ‘a better life’: access to an environment that inspired his entrepreneurial drive. There was better access to United States banking, corporate structures, and a dollar‑denominated fundraising environment that was almost impossible to replicate from Lagos. It was on a flight from the US that he conceived the idea for Lara.ng. “I like to introduce myself as an engineer, sometimes an entrepreneur, but in most cases, a problem solver,” Odeloye said. “I’ve refused to wait for someone else to build infrastructures in cities where I see things being needed.” Fresh out of the University of Lagos with a mechanical engineering degree, he was more obsessed with design thinking than oil‑and‑gas paychecks. A flight in 2012 made the problem he wanted to solve feel painfully obvious. On a New York–London leg en route to Lagos, he found himself seated next to an American who had never left the US and was panicking about getting around London. Odeloye talked him through Transport for London’s (TfL) system, which his cousin had shown him once. With TfL, you typed in a postcode and got step‑by‑step directions. On that flight, they laughed about how “Nigeria can never have something like that.” But the joke landed with a sting. “I had this strong call in my heart that this is something I could do,” he recalled. The question that refused to leave him was: What happens when it’s the American flying into Lagos with no cousin and no TfL? The obsession followed him into business school. In 2014, he joined Stanford Graduate School of Business for an executive master of business administration (EMBA) in innovation and entrepreneurship, hoping to add structure to his instincts. That same year, with partners Opeoluwa Bada and Nnamdi Nwanze, he started RoadPreppers (RP), a localised public transit intelligence system for Nigeria that worked like Google Maps but tried to keep up with Lagos’s ever‑shifting bus routes and fares. RoadPreppers attracted about 10,000 registered users and then grew. It was a culture misalignment, said Odeloye, as he noticed that Nigerians found it difficult to do away with inborn navigation instincts. “I was building for the Nigerian user with a Western understanding,” he said. Nigerians might appreciate a map, but they grew up asking conductors, shopkeepers, and strangers for directions. “[Nigerians] reach out to have conversations. And if [they] don’t know how to get somewhere, [they] will ask on the road.” He stopped fighting the culture and leaned into it. Act II: The chatbot that thought like Lagos In 2017, Odeloye launched Lara.ng after sunsetting his previous city navigation-based attempt, RoadPreppers. This time, he wasn’t trying to teach Nigerians how to use or love maps, he said. He taught a chatbot to talk like a Lagosian: a simple digital friend that answered navigation questions, for the shy users who weren’t bold enough to walk up to strangers on the street. He and his co‑founders took the routing intelligence they had built and wrapped it in a WhatsApp‑style interface. Users could type “from Oshodi to Ikeja” the way they would text a friend. Lara.ng would respond with the exact danfo to take, where to drop off, and how much to pay. Lara.ng sharing directions. Image Source: Bolu Abiodun via X According to Odeloye, the growing user traffic told them they were onto something: the app pulled in 10,000 users within days of going live. Just before the COVID‑19 pandemic, Lara.ng had more than 250,000 users navigating Lagos and Abuja’s transport networks. Before ChatGPT and the current wave of AI hype, a bot built by a Nigerian founder in the diaspora had become a daily companion for people trying not to get lost—or extorted—on their commute Yet, popularity didn’t translate into profit. Keeping Lara updated meant constant fieldwork, hitting the streets to map new routes, track fare hikes, and keep pace with transport unions. The business model never fully clicked, even though the need was clear. COVID‑19 exposed that fragility. As lockdowns and remote work shrank mobility, Lara’s usage dipped, and the economics stopped making sense. “For most of 2020, it was hard,” he admitted. Teammates left, and all that was left was a messy roadmap and a mountain of hard‑won data. Odeloye at the RP office in 2020. Image Source: Samuel Odeloye Eight years into the experiment, Lara.ng was taking a break. But the information it had collected—on how people move, where they get stuck, and how much they pay—was too valuable to abandon. 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
Read More“I wasn’t sure I could make money from the industry”: Day 1-1000 of Space in Africa
If Orpheus had loved Eurydice with the same conviction that Temidayo Oniosun brought to the space industry, he might not have looked back. As a teenager preparing for his university entrance exam, he was deeply interested in the space sector. “I’ve always wanted to start a company in the space industry,” he said. He meant it then. He still means it now. In 2011, Oniosun was a student at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), in Ondo State, Southern Nigeria, trying to find his way into an industry that barely existed around him. He wanted to study aerospace engineering, but no Nigerian university offered it at the time, so he chose the next closest thing: Meteorology. He didn’t wait for the space industry to find him; he went looking for it. While at FUTA, he joined global space communities and research circles, started a space club in his second year, and gathered students who were just as curious. Together, they searched for asteroids using software, launched high-altitude balloons, and ran projects that made space feel local. In 2017, he travelled to Colorado Springs in the United States for a space congress. He already understood how the space world worked, but at that conference, he realised how little that world knew about space activities in Africa. “There was some space activities going on in Africa, and nobody was talking about them,” he recalled. “The people outside of Africa and most Africans were also very unaware of this.” He came to Lagos after completing his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in Akure in 2017, and in February 2018, started Space in Africa, a space and satellite intelligence company, to make an invisible industry visible. Day 1: The $3,000 dilemma Space in Africa began as a website that published articles about Africa’s space industry. On the day Oniosun decided to start the company, he went looking for a domain name and found that spaceinafrica.com—the name that said exactly what he was building—cost $3,000. He bought a cheaper alternative, africanews.space, and got to work. It would take three years before he returned to buy the name he had wanted from the beginning. On that first day, he built a WordPress website, opened social media pages, and began writing articles on everything he could find about Africa’s space activity, from satellite launches to national space initiatives. Space in Africa was generating no revenue at the time. “It felt like I was doing something right,” he said. In October 2018, he hired his first employee. The question of how to make money from what he had built became harder to ignore. “Just writing and publishing articles was not going to make money, and the traffic was not that much,” he said. “We were getting important views, but that’s not something that would generate a heavy amount from Google Ads.” He looked outward, studying media companies like SpaceNews and SpaceWatch Global, that served European and American audiences on a subscription model. In early 2019, Space in Africa introduced a paywall with monthly, biannual, and annual subscription plans that ranged from $100 to $150. The first few months brought in only a handful of subscribers, maybe two or three, Oniosun said. Some paid for the monthly plan and never renewed; the option was scrapped with the hope that longer commitments would stick. But that did not solve the problem. “One of the lessons that I learned is that subscription business is extremely hard to sell in Africa… it doesn’t matter the product you’re trying to sell,” he said. “The same subscription business that would sell in the US or Europe, and will make you a lot of money, if you try it in Africa, it’s not going to work.” Still, the subscription plan was not discontinued, and the small revenue it brought in was folded into everything else the team was trying to figure out. By then, it was obvious that the model would not sustain the company; it would have to be something else. The answer came from something Oniosun said no one had done before. The industry report that changed everything If people wouldn’t consistently pay for articles, maybe they would pay for something deeper that they could actually use. In 2019, Oniosun and his team began working on their first industry report about the state of Africa’s space sector. “No one had ever quantified what the African space industry looked like,” he said. The report detailed which African countries had satellites, the structure of their national space agencies, ongoing space projects, and funding sources, Oniosun said. The report, priced at $2,000 at the time, was built for companies trying to understand the market. It was a risk because there was no guarantee that anyone would pay that much for information about an industry many people barely knew. “For some reason, it actually worked,” Oniosun added. Companies bought it, with some wanting higher-tier packages that included presentations and strategy sessions. A global licence costs $5,000, allowing large organisations to share the report across their multiple offices. At the same time, a premium offering included a two-hour session in which the Space in Africa team would break down the market and answer questions. According to Oniosun, in 2019, the company generated roughly $20,000 in revenue driven largely by report sales, and positioned Space in Africa as a source of truth about the space sector. “Pretty much everybody in the industry knew about us.” The 2020 pandemic slowed momentum and left the company’s revenue nearly unchanged. Oniosun wasn’t done chasing growth. In 2021, the company expanded into consulting, using its data expertise, network, and market understanding to advise governments, institutions, and private companies. Its first major project was a baseline study for the African Union Commission, focused on the establishment and operationalisation of the African Space Agency. That year, according to Oniosun, Space in Africa generated $300,000 in revenue. “With everything that we were doing, we were basically at the centre of this industry,” Oniosun said.
Read MoreM-PESA to stop sharing full phone numbers with merchants, banks by year-end
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecoms operator, plans to extend data minimisation across its mobile money service M-PESA by late 2026, expanding controls that limit the exposure of customer phone numbers in mobile money transactions. The change will cover bank transfers and merchant payments, according to the telco’s chief financial services officer, Esther Waititu, who spoke on Wednesday at the company’s Nairobi headquarters. “Later in the year, we will be working with banks to make sure that that data is also masked, because we can’t be doing it in one area and then omitting the other,’ Waititu said. The move targets one of the most common ways personal data is misused in Kenya’s payments system, where phone numbers shared in transaction alerts are later reused for spam, marketing and fraud. Extending masking to merchant payments and cross-platform transfers cuts off a major source of such data at scale. The rollout builds on an earlier update scheduled for March 24, when Safaricom will begin masking part of a sender’s phone number in peer-to-peer M-PESA transactions. The next phase targets merchant payments, one of the main areas where customer data is still widely exposed. Buy Goods and Paybill, Safaricom’s cashless payment services that handle a large share of everyday transactions, typically send merchants SMS confirmations that include customers’ full phone numbers. Small businesses rely on these alerts to track sales and confirm payments. The same numbers are often reused to send promotional messages or shared beyond the original transaction, making merchant payments a key source of unsolicited marketing. Customers will still complete payments and merchants will continue to receive confirmation, but full phone numbers will no longer appear in SMS alerts. This limits how easily personal data can be collected and reused outside the transaction. The expansion will also include cross-system payments. Transfers between M-PESA, banks, and other mobile money services, such as Airtel Money, pass through several platforms, each of which creates a point where data can be viewed or stored. Applying the same limits across these flows will reduce exposure at each stage and establish a common standard for providers handling the transaction, Waititu said. The scale of M-PESA means the change will be widely felt, as the service processes 37 million daily peer-to-peer transactions worth KES 27 billion ($209 million), out of a total of 137.9 million transactions valued at KES 118 billion ($914 million). Safaricom’s data minimisation push has developed over several years. It began in 2020 with Pochi La Biashara, a product designed to allow small traders receive payments without exposing full customer details. In 2021, the company reduced internal access to customer data. A year later, it trimmed personal information from M-PESA statements. By 2023 and 2024, similar controls had been added to merchant-facing APIs used by large organisations, before extending to peer-to-peer transactions in 2026. Extending the same approach to merchant payments closes one of the main remaining gaps. It also creates new operational pressure for businesses that rely on phone numbers to reconcile transactions or follow up with customers. Without that identifier, merchants may need to depend more on transaction codes or internal systems to match payments. “If you think about security and safety, there is always some level of inconvenience. People have built habits around how they interact with each other, but it is more important to keep everyone safe,” said Peter Ndegwa, Safaricom CEO. Waititu said dispute management is likely to be the biggest risk as the change rolls out, as businesses adjust to resolving payment issues without full access to customer phone numbers. “The main risk will be dispute management. The process will require an additional step, which could introduce some friction. We are working to address that by ensuring access to information where all parties are able to consent,” Waititu added.
Read MoreAfrican startups are ‘over-mentored, over-trained.’ Rwanda wants to fix that.
On March 12, Rwanda’s Ministry of ICT and Innovation (MINICT) launched Innovate Rwanda, a digital platform designed to connect startups, investors, talent, and ecosystem support organisations across the country, on the sidelines of the recently concluded Innovative Fintech Forum in Kigali, the country’s capital. “We want it to be a platform where startups can discover who else is playing in the field they want to play in,” Esther Kunda, the director general of the innovation and emerging technologies directorate at MICINT, told TechCabal. For a young tech ecosystem like Rwanda, the platform hopes to fix the information scarcity problem. The country has over 70 active startups and several incubators and hubs, like Norrsken, but information about these startups and investors has been fragmented because the ecosystem has yet to mature. “Entrepreneurs starting an idea were not able to find out who is providing the right support for the stage they are at, whether it’s ideation or scaling, or who is offering the right support or funding at their particular stage,” Kunda said. Founders can create profiles to showcase their ventures, discover relevant support programs, access funding and partnership opportunities, and connect with ecosystem organisations that can help them grow, she added. Outside of Innovate Rwanda, the government is also positioning itself as a direct buyer and often the first customer for Rwandan-based companies through a new public procurement regulation. In our conversation, Kunda explained how MINICT wants to fix the fragmentation that holds back the country’s startup ecosystem with Innovate Rwanda and why the government would rather let companies test emerging technologies than wait until it has all the rules figured out. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What inspired the creation of Innovate Rwanda? From the ICT Ministry’s perspective, one of our key roles is to enable collaboration and coordination of our innovation ecosystem. One of the key issues we kept hearing from ecosystem players was the ecosystem’s fragmentation and a lack of information across it. For ecosystem support organisations, one of the issues was being able to know what different programmes exist in the ecosystem. It is one thing to know that there’s an innovation hub called XYZ, but information that goes deep into the type of programmes they provide is not readily available. For the different startups that apply to their programmes, what other programmes have they been part of so that they don’t duplicate efforts or even over-train them, which is one of the biggest issues that entrepreneurs in Africa have. They are over-mentored, over-trained, and with little support in other meaningful ways. That’s why we created Innovate Rwanda. We want it to be a platform where startups can discover who else is playing in the field they want to play in. We want people to be able to see what ecosystem support organisations (ESOs) are doing, the kind of programmes they’re running, who else they’re supporting, and how they’re supporting them. We’ve also been able to aggregate investor data around who has invested in companies that are either based in Rwanda or have operations in Rwanda. So you might have big global companies with operations here. We’re trying to get and perfect the information around who’s investing in those companies so that if you’re a startup in a sector, you can target the right investors and say, ‘Investor XYZ is interested in this sector, so if I’m currently raising, these are who I should be targeting.’ When you run a directory like Innovate Rwanda, getting accurate data is a challenge. How do you think about getting data, verifying it, and putting it up on the platform? We have done a couple of things, and as we launch, the data is going to improve much better than what we have done so far. One, we are aggregating data from the different programmes running in our ecosystem. We are working with ESOs, but also with the programmes that the government is running, to get that information. Two, we have partnered with a global platform that has an algorithm and has perfected some of these ways of finding investment data and information across ecosystems globally. In the last few years, they have done very specific insights into a couple of African countries, and we are starting from that. The last one confirms that the companies on the platform are actually registered and operating in Rwanda. Some of them today we’re not going to classify as startups, but they feature because they’ve raised funding in the last couple of years, mentioning Rwanda as one of their operations. We’ll be cleaning the data, making sure it becomes reliable. It’s really going to rely on how we, as an ecosystem, share data as we go along. It’s a journey, and it’s going to take some time. What specific outcomes will you be measuring to determine whether Innovate Rwanda is succeeding? Let me put it in plain words. If I get a lot of conversation from startups asking me, ‘Where should we go for an innovation hub?’ or ‘We’re raising this amount of money, where should we go? ‘ If this process becomes very easy because of this platform, that’s one metric of success. The other one: if we can measure the quality of the programmes provided in our ecosystem and start being very ruthless on the quality of innovation programmes in our market, that’s another metric we’ll look at. Third, and very specifically: increased funding in our ecosystem. That’s very crucial. And also job creation. What other things is your ministry working on to help startups in Rwanda? Other than the platform, we have been running our flagship programme. It’s a national startup competition where we crown the best startup every year. Around that, we have several sub-programmes: funding programmes in agriculture and funding and support programmes for startups in sexual and reproductive health. We also have, together with one of our development banks, a grant programme for startups that are starting, and we fund between $50,000
Read MoreWhen tech calls it waste, Nairobi calls it Tuesday
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 wants more than crypto trading. Prediction markets are the first move.
Luno, 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 to move Showmax content to DStv Stream by April 1
MultiChoice, 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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