Nigeria’s tech regulator targets 37 innovation hubs for fifth iHatch cohort
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the country’s tech regulator, through its subsidiary, the Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation (ONDI), has partnered with the Japan International Cooperation Agency to open applications for the fifth cohort of the iHatch Startup Incubation Programme. The iHatch programme is seeking 37 innovation hubs, one from each of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), to serve as state-level hub managers to implement incubation programmes across the country. “Nigeria’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly over the past decade, but access to structured support remains uneven outside major tech clusters,” said Victoria Fabunmi, National Coordinator, ONDI. “Rather than focusing only on startup recruitment, iHatch adopts a systems-level approach: build stronger hubs, standardise incubation quality, and improve investment readiness outcomes across all 36 states and the FCT.” The move comes at a time when Africa’s startup ecosystem is experiencing growth, raising $3.42 billion in 2025. In Nigeria, however, much of this innovation is concentrated in large cities like Lagos and Abuja, leaving founders outside those cities without structured incubation or mentorship programmes. This is the gap that the iHatch programme intends to fix. Selected hubs will serve as implementation partners responsible for delivering the incubation programme within their states for at least one year. During that time, each hub will recruit and manage about five startups, guiding them through a structured incubation process that will improve their readiness for growth and funding. While a specific monetary grant has not been disclosed, selected hubs will receive operational support and resources to enable them to effectively support participating startups. High-performing hubs may also receive rewards based on their performance during the programme, according to NITDA. “The programme’s primary focus, however, is building strong ecosystem leaders who are committed to developing their local startup ecosystems, rather than positioning the programme primarily as a financial incentive,” Fabunmi said. Eligible innovation hubs must have been in operation for at least a year and must show active engagement within their local ecosystems. They must also possess infrastructure capable of hosting incubation activities. Applications for iHatch Cohort 5 close on March 16. The iHatch incubation programme’s focus on innovation hubs rather than startups places it in a position to address structural gaps, related to geographic location, in Nigeria’s startup ecosystem. NITDA intends to strengthen support for founders at the local level and expand opportunities for founders to scale. “By equipping hubs with structured tools, curriculum frameworks, and coordinated oversight, iHatch aims to create more consistent founder outcomes across regions,” Fabunmi said.
Read MoreAga Khan’s exit hands East Africa’s largest news publisher to Tanzanian billionaire
The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) has agreed to sell its controlling 54.08% stake in Nation Media Group (NMG) to Taarifa Ltd, owned by Tanzanian billionaire Rostam Azizi, ending a 66-year ownership of East Africa’s largest independent news publisher. The stake, held through NPRT Holdings Africa, represents about 92.6 million shares in the Nairobi-listed company, which operates more than 30 media brands across four countries and reaches over 62 million digital users. AKFED owns NPRT Holdings Africa, an investment vehicle used to hold the fund’s media interests across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The companies did not disclose the value of the transaction. The deal shifts control of one of East Africa’s most influential media groups at a time when publishers across the continent are racing to turn large online audiences into sustainable digital businesses. “We are confident NMG will continue to uphold the values of independent journalism and service to the public that have defined it for over six decades,” AKFED director Sultan Allana said in the statement announcing the sale on Tuesday. Nation Media Group built its reputation on flagship newspapers such as the Daily Nation, but like many global publishers, it has spent the past decade expanding digital platforms as print revenues weaken and readers move online. Its websites, mobile apps, and streaming services now reach tens of millions of users across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. The ownership change could influence how aggressively the company invests in those platforms. NMG reported revenue of KES 6.2 billion ($48 million) in 2024, down 12.5% year-on-year, and a pre-tax loss of KES 253.6 million ($2 million), even as digital revenue rose 11%. The transaction marks the end of a relationship that began in 1959 when the Aga Khan founded East African Newspapers, the company that later grew into Nation Media Group. The publisher expanded over decades into television, radio, and regional media operations. Today, the group runs news, broadcast, and digital platforms including NTV, Nation Africa, and multiple regional publications. With more than 62 million digital users, NMG operates one of the largest news audiences in the region. Azizi, the incoming majority owner, has prior experience in the region’s media sector. He co-founded Mwananchi Communications in Tanzania, publisher of Mwananchi, The Citizen, and Mwanaspoti. Nation Media later acquired the company during its regional expansion in the early 2000s. The new owner plans to support the company’s digital growth as part of the transition, according to the statement.
Read More
Decide AI doesn’t want to be ChatGPT. It just wants to fix your spreadsheets
Spreadsheets can be humbling. They look simple on the outside, with their rows and columns. Type in a few numbers, arrange them in ascending or descending order, maybe use a summation equation to calculate a total, and that is ‘proficiency in spreadsheets’ going on my resume. Until the spreadsheet is one that has hundreds of rows and columns that spill across the screen, and then it starts to look like a puzzle. Abiodun Adetona noticed problems with spreadsheets and analysis during his four years as a software engineer at Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payments infrastructure startup. His colleagues from non-technical teams often needed help drawing insights from datasets or spreadsheets, which often required technical intervention. “I used to assist them [his colleagues] with pulling data from various sources every day for almost a year… it was hectic, and there was no easier way to do it than the technical way,” he recalled in an interview with TechCabal. In 2025, Adetona and his three-person team built Decide AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) spreadsheet analyst, to help users analyse data in spreadsheets via prompts. Inside Decide AI Decide AI landing page; Image source: TechCabal When I opened Decide AI for the first time, the interface felt really familiar, almost identical to modern AI assistants, such as ChatGPT or Gemini. The interface allowed me to choose between two AI agents to run my tasks. The Fast agent is designed for quick analysis that prioritises speed, while the Pro agent is intended for heavier tasks that require deeper analysis, such as performing complex calculations across multiple datasets. When I curiously clicked the ‘connections’ drop-down menu, I noticed that Decide AI is also designed to work with data that lives outside local spreadsheet files and allows for a connection to external sources such as Google Sheets, Metabase, Google Analytics, and Google Ads. Since I only have a Google Sheets account, I gave the AI agent permission to access my Google Drive upon request and connected my account. Connecting Google Sheets to Decide AI; Image source: TechCabal Use cases for the other connections could be a user managing marketing campaigns connecting their Google Ads account and asking the agent to analyse campaign performance, or a team using Google Analytics asking the agent to analyse traffic patterns or identify trends in user behaviour. Adetona said the agent can conduct basic tasks like cleaning datasets or performing calculations. It can also handle more analytical tasks, including scenario analysis, where users explore how different variables might affect a business outcome, and market size opportunity analysis, which involves estimating the potential value of a market based on available data. How Decide AI analyses a spreadsheet Upload files from local computer or Google Sheets; Image source: TechCabal To see how Decide AI behaves with a real spreadsheet, I uploaded a dataset from a course registration programme from my Google Sheets. This spreadsheet contained entries from participants across different parishes and deaneries in Lagos, along with other details such as when participants registered and whether they had uploaded proof of payment. Using the Fast agent, I asked the system to clean the dataset, count the number of participants who paid in each month, exclude certain entries, and group the results by benchmark. Once submitted, the agent displayed a reasoning trace that appeared as lines of its activity in a darker, code-like font. That visible execution trace reflects what happens behind the interface when an analysis is requested. Prompt given to Decide AI; Image source: TechCabal According to Adetona, the system runs a preprocessing stage that attempts to interpret the file structure to identify sheets, headers, tables, formulas, and relationships between parts of the dataset, which are then converted into a structured representation that the system can analyse more reliably. “The exact implementation is proprietary, but this step is critical because spreadsheet AI often fails when it misreads the structure of the file,” he said. He explained that once the document structure is mapped, it is passed to the AI agent along with the user’s request, which then plans how to carry out the analysis. The agent relies on frontier language models for reasoning, drawing on providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Adeotona said Decide AI is designed to be model-agnostic; the system can switch between models while its orchestration layer handles spreadsheet interpretation and computation. The system generates Python code for spreadsheet analysis and calculations, and runs it in a secure sandboxed environment. “We do not rely on prompt reasoning alone for calculations because that is more prone to hallucination,” Adetona added. Decide AI reasoning trace; Image source: TechCabal He further explained that the generated code runs against the dataset, executing tasks like filtering entries, grouping results, calculating totals, and reorganising the spreadsheet. If the initial output does not fully answer the prompt, Adetona said the system can iterate through additional computational steps until it produces a complete result. Once those calculations are complete, the platform runs a verification stage that checks the output against the provided spreadsheet data before returning the final response. For my prompt, the system produced a structured summary of the dataset in the chat window within two minutes. This summary highlighted the number of participants who had paid in January, grouped the results by deanery, and flagged registrations that did not include proof of payment. It also identified which deaneries had the highest number of incomplete payment records. Excel sheet generated by Decide AI showing categorisation of data by deanery; Image source: TechCabal Along with the summary, Decide AI generated an Excel workbook that can be downloaded, but I exported it to my Google Sheets. This workbook contained five different worksheets derived from the original dataset. One sheet summarised January registrations, another compiled a breakdown of the data as I requested, another isolated entries where proof of payment had not been uploaded, and the others listed detailed records of participants whose registrations were missing documentation. I pushed the analysis further by asking Decide AI to produce
Read MoreTwo funds, two continents: Why VC firm Satgana is doubling down on climate tech
Satgana, a venture capital firm that invests $570,000 each in African and European climate tech startups, is raising two new funds—one for each continent. The firm, named after the Sanskrit word for “good company,” has deployed capital into 30 startups across both regions, backing companies where climate efficiency drives the business model. “We are currently structuring two dedicated vehicles, one focused on Europe and one on Africa,” said Anil Maguru, a partner at Satgana. “We are not communicating final fund sizes publicly yet, as the process is still ongoing.” Maguru joined Romain Diaz, Satgana’s founder, as a founding member and partner when the fund was launched in 2020, and his unique perspective with Diaz helped build the firm’s Africa-European strategy. “The European and African positioning is less about geographic diversification and more a design principle: African markets often act as a strong filter that forces companies to build for resilience and real demand, while Europe provides industrial partners, capital depth, and exit routes,” said Maguru. Satgana invests in climate technology solutions across transportation, energy, food and agriculture, industry and construction, carbon abatement, and the circular economy. Crunchbase Some of Satgana’s portfolio companies include Orbio Earth, a Germany-based startup that uses satellite imagery and proprietary algorithms to track and quantify methane emissions from the oil and gas industry; Mazi Mobility, a Nairobi, Kenya-based mobility-as-a-service company electrifying the motorcycle taxi (“boda boda”) industry with electric bikes and battery swapping stations; and Revivo, a Nairobi, Kenya-based B2B marketplace connecting small repair shops with quality electronic spare parts, accessories, and repair tools to build a circular repair economy. For this week’s Ask an Investor, I spoke with Maguru about the fund’s strategy of backing climate-tech startups across Africa and Europe, how Satgana evaluates startups, and why the firm prioritises solutions that work under imperfect market conditions. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. You’ve been investing in startups and helping to build companies for several years now. How have the past five or six years been for you, and what have you learned? Over the last six years, it has been an intense journey. When we started, everything was a first for us: first-time team, first-time fund, first-time investments together, really, first-time everything. But now, looking back over the past five or six years, we’ve built a record we are very proud of. We manage about $10 million in assets under management. We have backed 30 companies across 16 countries. We have more than 150 investors from 25 different countries. About 90% of our portfolio is still alive, which is a very high survival rate, and close to 50% of the portfolio has gone on to raise follow-on rounds. Of course, none of it would have been possible without the amazing founders we’ve met along the way. At the same time, we’ve also experienced our first failures; some companies have started to go down. But overall, things have gone very well. The team has also grown. We now have dedicated teams looking at both regions: Europe and Africa. The impact is growing, and we still see more opportunity ahead. You talk about opportunity. What is Satgana’s next chapter? From our first fund, we were fortunate to invest in 30 amazing companies and back exceptional founders, including female founders, across Europe and Africa. We saw firsthand how much both regions have to offer. For us, it was therefore very logical to double down on this strategy. We are now launching two new funds: one dedicated to Europe and one dedicated to Africa, each with a dedicated team. The goal is to source even more founders, become even more pan-African than we were before, and build dedicated vehicles for dedicated geographies. These funds will also be larger. We will be able to write bigger tickets and have more capacity to double down on the right companies. In Africa, especially, we are looking for companies that show strong signals early—companies with paying customers, companies that do not rely heavily on subsidies, companies where adoption spreads through trust and word of mouth, and companies led by founders with real financial discipline. That, for us, is real traction. So, for companies that see themselves in that description, we would very much encourage them to reach out. We need to find them because those are exactly the kinds of businesses we want to back with these new funds. 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 Climate tech is a very broad category. It can cover everything from carbon accounting software to nuclear fusion. What is Satgana’s own definition of climate tech, and where do you draw a hard line on what you would not invest in? For us, the hard line is drawn at businesses where climate is simply a story layered on top of a normal company, rather than the engine of the company itself. For instance, if a startup’s margins improve when emissions increase, or if the impact disappears the moment subsidies disappear, then the alignment is broken. We try as much as possible not to invest in green narratives. We invest in climate economics. Working in Africa made this very clear to us very early on. Customers do not buy climate because it is good for the planet. They buy reliability, cost savings, and productivity. If climate does not translate into real economic value for the user, it does not scale. That is why we avoid solutions that depend on perfect regulation, heavy
Read MoreFor every $1 Showmax made, it lost $2.50
This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies and governments. A new edition drops every Monday. Streaming is widely seen as the present and future of television, and Africa was supposed to be the next frontier. With the continent still largely underconnected but home to a young, mobile-first population, global media companies saw a future in which millions of Africans would gradually shift from satellite television to streaming platforms as smartphone penetration and broadband access improved. For MultiChoice, Showmax was meant to capture that future. After more than a decade trying to build Africa’s answer to Netflix, the streaming platform is now being wound down as Canal+, the new owner of MultiChoice, restructures the company’s streaming strategy. The financial trail behind the experiment tells the story: between 2023 and 2025, Showmax generated $204.29 million in revenue but recorded more than $523.53 million in operating losses, while committing hundreds of millions more to rebuild its technology and content library. The platform lost $2.50 for every $1 it generated in revenue during that period Here is how the money moved. The money raised In 2023, MultiChoice brought in Comcast’s NBCUniversal, to rebuild Showmax. The partnership created a new entity, Showmax Africa Holdings Limited, incorporated in the United Kingdom and overseeing operations across the continent. NBCUniversal acquired 30% of the business for $29 million (ZAR536 million). Showmax has also received additional equity injections: $36 million (ZAR687 million) in 2024, and $85 million (ZAR1.55 billion) in 2025. These investments were meant to serve as working capital for the streaming platform. The money spent The biggest financial commitment was a seven-year technology licensing deal with NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming platform. The agreement, signed in 2024, was worth ZAR6.8 billion ($405 million). Rather than build its own infrastructure, Showmax licensed Peacock’s global streaming technology to power its relaunch. The deal covered streaming infrastructure, recommendation algorithms, product engineering, and global platform architecture By March 2025, $59.56 million had already been spent, leaving $345.44 million still outstanding over the remaining six years. Content spending also surged. Showmax significantly expanded its African originals and content catalogue: 59 original films by 2024, and 82 by 2025. Content cost between both years totalled ZAR3.95 billion ($235.26 million). Staff cost stood at ZAR1.04 billion ($61.64 million), and sales and marketing totalled ZAR1.21 billion ($72.19 million). Miscellaneous spending stood at ZAR3.71 billion ($221.14 million) for both years. The $2.50 Problem Between 2023 and 2025, Showmax lost $2.50 for every $1.00 it generated. Tap the expenses below to see how individual costs completely dwarfed the platform’s revenue. Money In (Revenue) $1.00 MONEY OUT (PER $1 EARNED) Content Creation & Licensing $1.29 Total Nominal Spend: $235.26 Million Showmax rapidly expanded its catalogue, paying for licensing and producing 82 original African films and series by 2025. This single expense was larger than their total revenue. Miscellaneous $1.21 Total Nominal Spend: $221.14 Million Unspecified operational, distribution, and corporate overhead costs incurred while trying to bed down distribution partnerships across the continent. Sales & Marketing $0.40 Total Nominal Spend: $72.19 Million Aggressive customer acquisition campaigns to push the relaunch and drive a 44% growth in paying subscribers across new markets like Kenya and Nigeria. Staff Costs $0.34 Total Nominal Spend: $61.64 Million Payroll and human resources required to run the streaming unit across multiple African territories. Technology Infrastructure $0.32 Total Nominal Spend: $59.56 Million The initial payments for a 7-year, $405M licensing deal to use NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform architecture instead of building an in-house solution. Data: MultiChoice Disclosures TechCabal Tools The revenue generated Despite the heavy spending, Showmax’s revenues remained modest. Between 2023 and 2025, the platform generated ZAR3.43 billion ($204.29 million) in total revenue and ZAR2.44 billion ($145.35 million) in subscription revenue Revenue peaked in 2024, the year Showmax relaunched with its new platform, sports streaming expansion, and increased local content. MultiChoice said the platform also recorded 44% growth in paying subscribers, expanding beyond its core markets in South Africa and Nigeria into Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda and Zambia through telecom partnerships. The losses accumulated The cost of building a streaming platform far outpaced revenue growth. Between 2023 and 2025, Showmax recorded operating losses of ZAR8.79 billion ($523.53 million). Losses peaked in 2025, which MultiChoice described as the platform’s “peak investment year.” “As a start-up business, Showmax focused on enhancing its content line-up, bedding down distribution partnerships, expanding payment channel integrations and refining its go-to-market strategy,” the company said in 2025. “As FY25 was the peak investment year, reflected by a step-up in content costs to attract viewers and platform costs to create capacity, trading losses increased by 88% YoY.” The strategy Showmax’s spending was tied to a long-term bet on Africa’s streaming future. In May 2023, the company told investors it planned to reach $1 billion in revenue within five years and break even by 2027. The strategy relied on aggressive expansion of African original content, partnerships with telecom operators and payment providers, and the Peacock technology platform to scale globally MultiChoice also planned to increase Showmax originals tenfold by 2033, betting that demand for African stories would continue to grow. “It remains clear that streaming represents the future of video entertainment,” Multichoice said in 2025. “Although the current levels of broadband and SVOD penetration across Africa are not yet at comparable levels to the rest of the world, they suggest significant long-term upside. However, data pricing would need to evolve further for this market segment to reach its full potential.” The lesson Showmax’s shutdown highlights a difficult financial reality in the global streaming industry. Streaming platforms require massive scale and continuous investment in both technology and content, and Africa’s market, however, still faces structural limits, including lower subscription purchasing power and limited broadband penetration. This has been shown in how global streaming companies have adjusted their African expectations. Netflix reduced production budgets in Nigeria, while Amazon Prime Video shut down its African operations in 2024. Streaming is still central to MultiChoice’s strategy,
Read MorePassported out: How Africa grounds its own leaders
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” It is a clever line, often quoted in boardrooms and strategy retreats. But he was also a man who, almost certainly, never had to travel the continent with a Nigerian passport. We speak the dialect of a “borderless” digital economy, yet we move across our own continent like unwelcome guests. The paradox is stark: Nigeria is projected to be the world’s third most populous nation by 2050, wielding a cultural soft power that dictates global charts. We are Africa’s largest nominal GDP engine and its venture funding magnet. Yet, we live inside aviation islands, internally disconnected, externally tethered. Mobility is not a “travel issue”; it is infrastructure revealed in boarding passes. While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU) professionals glide through open-air economies, 72% of intra-African travel still requires a visa. Now let’s consider the “Mobility Ratio”: A Singaporean passport holder accesses 4x more destinations bureaucracy-free than a Nigerian. This gap isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a Domestic-Only Penalty. Our data shows that a pan-African consultant earns 5x more than a domestic-only practitioner. The difference isn’t the CV; it’s the passport. A business trip between three African countries in five days. On a map, the route looked elegantly simple, a neat triangular loop within the continent. In my inbox, the itinerary told a different story. To make it work without losing entire days to layovers and visa queues, I had to fly into Europe three separate times, exiting the continent just to re-enter it. Lagos to Europe to Africa, then Africa to Europe to Africa. Each connection felt like a commentary. The skies above us were open, but our borders and systems were not. This friction has a specific victim: The Woman in Leadership. We often attribute the attrition of women at the senior executive level to “culture” or “unpaid care.” While true, we overlook the Infrastructure Filter. When a 48-hour deal-closing trip morphs into a three-week logistical marathon of consular backlogs and opaque rules, organisations default to the “path of least resistance.” They send the person for whom the path is smoother. The result is a persistent erosion of women’s visibility and influence in regional and global spaces. You do not publicly remove women from the table; you quietly make it harder for them to get to the table. This isn’t just a “women’s issue.” It is an economic leak. If women represent up to 70% of informal cross-border trade but face the highest barriers to formal mobility, we are capping our GDP by design. Inclusion here then becomes a transport protocol, not an HR policy. And yet this is the same continent that has launched one of the most ambitious economic projects in the world. The African Continental Free Trade Area promises a single market of over a billion people and a combined GDP of $10.8 trillion. Projections suggest that by 2035, if AfCFTA is fully implemented, income gains could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions could be lifted out of poverty. The agreement recognises not just the movement of goods, but also the movement of services, including what trade lawyers call Mode 4, the temporary movement of people to provide services across borders. On paper, we understand that ideas and expertise need legs, not just fibre optic cables. In reality, our behaviour reveals a different fact. Tariffs are discussed, negotiated, and reduced, while non-tariff barriers like visas, fragmented regulations, and underdeveloped aviation routes continue to quietly choke the arteries of intra-African trade. We are, in effect, externally connected but internally disconnected. It is easier for an African founder to meet a European investor in Paris than to meet an African customer in a neighbouring country. It is easier for foreign capital to move freely into African markets than for African professionals to move freely between those same markets. To make it worse, the perception of African travel is still questioned over Europe, a mindset engineering that only occurs when we view ourselves through a warped lens. Much less, working in Africa versus Europe/the West. We proudly call ourselves global, but remain strangely constrained at home. What might a serious solution look like? It has to be a deliberate reframing of mobility as critical economic infrastructure, as fundamental as ports, power, or digital networks, not another slogan about free movement. It must start from a simple insight: states have legitimate security concerns about migration, but those concerns can be addressed with better tools, not just tighter gates. Imagine a continental framework where businesspersons and value creators are not treated as strangers at every border, but as known, pre-vetted participants in a shared growth project. They register once, their identities and credentials are verified using modern digital systems, and their histories are checked and cross-checked. Immigration authorities across participating states can view this information in advance, make independent decisions, and issue approvals in a structured and predictable way. Once cleared, these travellers carry a recognised digital credential, secure, revocable, but trusted, that allows them to move across a network of African countries with far less friction. In such a system, the entrepreneur from Lagos could fly to Kigali, then on to Nairobi and Addis Ababa, without re-entering the same bureaucratic maze at each leg. Airlines could design routes that reflect real demand rather than old hub patterns. Time would shift from visa queues to deal rooms and factory floors. Risk would be managed not by blanket suspicion, but by data and cooperation. States would not be asked to surrender sovereignty; they would be invited to exercise it more intelligently, together. We are not starting from zero. Across the continent, serious attempts are already underway to tackle the mobility question from different angles. AfCFTA has begun technical work on making the movement of trusted businesspersons real. Regional bodies are experimenting with visa-free regimes and common passports. Development partners and international organisations are funding programmes on labour migration, skills mobility, and digital identity. Innovation platforms are
Read MoreDigital Nomads: A new visa wants to lure short-term travellers to South Africa
When Kennedy Adetayo needed to be in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the opening of his company’s new office, the hardest part wasn’t preparing presentations or coordinating the launch. It was getting into the country. Adetayo, then a regional marketing lead at global brokerage firm Exness, oversaw markets across West, East, and Southern Africa, a role that required constant travel. Within West Africa, the logistics were manageable. But crossing into Southern Africa, particularly South Africa, became a recurring obstacle. His visa applications were rejected twice. “I applied twice,” said Adetayo. “One was for the sticker visa (business), which was denied, and I missed my office opening. [The other] was an eVisa, which was approved but had very short validity.” Stories like Adetayo’s are one reason South Africa has introduced the Meetings, Events, Exhibitions, and Tourism (MEETS) visa, a new programme designed to make it easier for conference organisers to bring international delegates and short-term travellers into the country. Launched in February 2026, the MEETS visa will allow accredited event organisers to submit bulk applications for conference delegates through a digital platform, promising faster processing and fewer bureaucratic hurdles. Designed for short-term travellers, including digital nomads, tourists, and conference delegates, the scheme offers a faster route into South Africa for those entering the country for meetings, events, exhibitions, and tourism. The visa programme is part of the country’s broader plan to position itself as Africa’s leading destination for global events and to remove visa bottlenecks that have long undermined that ambition. How the MEETS visa works The MEETS programme shifts visa responsibility partly to event organisers. Accredited organisers can submit group visa applications for registered delegates through a secure digital portal, reducing paperwork and accelerating approvals. “The MEETS visa scheme will allow accredited and reputable event organisers to facilitate and submit group visa applications, subject to the risk profile of the delegates, through a secure digital platform,” the DHA said. To qualify, organisers must score at least 120 out of 140 points on a compliance scorecard, which evaluates factors such as event scale, regulatory compliance, and delegate management. Event organisers must have a minimum of 500 registered event delegates in the past two years, an online delegate register submitted 60 days before the event, and comply with the Safety, Sports and Recreational Events Act. Organisers are also required to enter a formal agreement with the DHA. Applications are reviewed by an inter-departmental committee involving the Departments of Home Affairs, Tourism, and Trade. The scheme is part of a broader immigration modernisation drive led by Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber. The conundrum at the heart of South Africa’s events industry South Africa is already the continent’s most decorated events hub. The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) ranks it as the top business event destination in Africa and the Middle East. In 2023, the country hosted 98 association meetings that met ICCA’s strict criteria, generating over R2 billion ($110 million) in economic impact. At the Meetings Africa 2026 conference in Johannesburg, Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille said the industry’s contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) nearly doubled from R371 million ($22.4 million) in 2023 to R690 million ($41.5 million) in 2025, while supporting over 2,600 jobs. Yet, beneath the rankings and figures lies a contradiction: the country that markets itself as a world-class events destination has long operated a visa system that many users say is slow, unpredictable, and often difficult to navigate without agency help. Adetayo’s experience reflects that friction. After eventually securing an eVisa for one trip, he ran into problems while travelling through Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport. “They [officials] assumed my eVisa was fake,” he said. “Their server was down and couldn’t recognise the QR [quick response] code. It was rectified just in time for my flight.” Even beyond technical issues, he says scrutiny often intensifies when officials see his passport. “Aside from the extra scrutiny when they find out I’m Nigerian—which is common in many places I’ve travelled—South Africa is a beautiful country,” said Adetayo. 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 A visa system that deters travellers For many travellers from non-exempt countries, including much of Africa, attending an event in South Africa has long meant navigating a Kafkaesque process. Applications are submitted through the outsourcing firm, VFS Global, which acts as an intermediary between applicants and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The firm submits applications to the DHA for review before a multi-layered checking process kicks in. First, a DHA verification team assesses the applications and forwards a recommendation to a Director for Quality Assurance. The Director then confirms which applications meet their rigorous compliance thresholds and those that pose risks. Final decisions are recorded in the government’s Movement Control System and sent back to the mission or the VFS centre abroad. The entire process can take weeks or months, and for some applicants, it ends up in rejection without a clear explanation. The Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA), a lobby group for sustainable tourism in the country, has said the system undermined its competitiveness as a travel destination. “Complex, slow, and unpredictable visa processes have undermined South Africa’s ability to compete with other global destinations, particularly in attracting travellers from key long-haul markets such as Europe, North America, and parts of Asia,” Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, TBCSA CEO, told local publication IOL. In 2024, a survey by Tourism Update, a South African tourism publication, noted that 71.4% of tourism service providers had
Read More“We are building on top of an immature ecosystem”: Day 1-1000 of Bujeti
Cossi Achille Arouko noticed the problem while watching someone else solve it. As tech lead at Paystack, the Stripe-owned Nigerian fintech, he watched how Divvy, a US finance management platform, handled the company’s expenses: corporate cards issued to employees, automatic spending limits, and reimbursement requests processed without anyone chasing anyone. It was clean. It was controlled. And when he looked around at the African businesses he knew, nothing existed as it did for them. “I realised there was also a market for businesses,” Arouko says. “Seeing Divvy and other platforms tackling expense management in the US and Europe — that’s when I thought we could work on that for this market.” That observation, made in 2021, became Bujeti that same year, a Lagos-based fintech that has since grown into what its founders call a finance control centre for African businesses. In practice, Bujeti works as a finance assistant; a finance manager logs in, sets spending limits on corporate cards issued to employees, approves vendor payments, tracks Value Added Tax (VAT) automatically set aside in a tax vault, and runs payroll, all without switching between tools or chasing anyone on WhatsApp. Alongside co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Samy Chiba, Arouko has spent the last four years turning a simple observation into a platform that today serves over 5,000 finance professionals across Nigeria and Kenya, with its sights firmly set on the rest of the continent. Day 1: From diaspora tool to business operating system Bujeti’s first version was a personal finance app built for the African diaspora to automate remittances back home and track how recipients spent the money. It was a real problem with a real audience. But while building it, Arouko kept bumping into a bigger one. African businesses, from small shops to mid-sized companies, had no clean way to manage how money moved internally. Expenses were tracked over WhatsApp messages. Vendor payments were approved over Slack. Reconciliations happened at the end of the month, in spreadsheets, with all the errors that imply. Bujeti pivoted to a business-to-business (B2B) model in 2022, and Chiba, who was working at Ariane Space, a commercial space transport company in France at the time, joined as a co-founder. The two had a clear founding idea: control and transparency over how money moves within a business. Not just sending and receiving, but everything in between. Getting their first serious client illustrated exactly how hard that idea was to sell. The team had demoed to a global food delivery company’s finance team in Lagos. The accountants loved it. Then, a decision-maker elsewhere in the organisation blocked adoption. Arouko found the CEO online, sent a message, suggested coffee, and demoed again. The CEO called the Nigerian office immediately, “What’s going on? Why are we not on this?” They’ve been customers since. “Unfortunately, yes,” Arouko says when asked if going over the finance team’s head has had to happen often. “Finance teams can sometimes feel threatened by it. But after a while, they end up adopting.” Day 500: YC, a crisis, and the night nobody slept In early 2023, Bujeti got into Y Combinator’s Winter cohort, one of a handful of African startups to make it into the much-coveted accelerator that year. Chiba and Arouko packed up and went to San Francisco. Then Bujeti’s payment provider went down due to operational issues. “Everything happened in 24 hours,” Chiba says. With a nine-hour time difference and their team back in Nigeria scrambling, the founders spent the night managing the crisis on one front and hunting for a new provider on another. By morning, they had found one. The new provider asked when they were ready to integrate. The answer was: now. Paperwork signed, integration started, Bujeti was back up within 24 hours. They were five minutes late for their YC office hours meeting. The YC partners weren’t happy until they heard why. “They actually ended up liking it,” Arouko says. “They realised we were in crisis and we’d fixed it.” The crisis clarified something important about what Bujeti was building. In markets like the US, a fintech can assume stable infrastructure and layer a product on top. In Africa, you can’t. Providers go down. Systems break. The businesses that survive are the ones that have built redundancy into their foundations. “We are able to build on top of a broken ecosystem,” Chiba says, or as Arouko prefers, an immature one. The distinction matters to him. Broken implies unfixable. Immature implies a direction. YC reinforced something else: the scale of what they were competing for. In San Francisco, Bujeti was in the same room as Brex, Ramp and other giants of global business finance. “It made me understand that yes, Bujeti is an African company,” Chiba says, “But our competitors, our colleagues, are the biggest players on the planet.” In December 2023, Bujeti closed a $2 million seed round led by Y Combinator, with participation from Entrée Capital, Voltron Capital, Kima Ventures, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and Mono CEO Abdul Hassan. Day 1000: Tax vaults, partnerships and the next frontier By 2025, Bujeti had expanded beyond expense management into something harder to categorise. Corporate cards. Multi-currency payments. Payroll. Automated reconciliation. And most recently, tax management, a product the team had been building before Nigeria’s 2025 Tax Act came into force, but landed at exactly the right moment when it did. “Opportunity meets preparation,” Arouko says. The platform’s Tax Vault automatically ring-fences collected Value Added Tax (VAT) and withheld taxes so that businesses can’t accidentally spend the money before remittance is due. It was a product Arouko had wanted as a business owner himself. “As a business lead, if I need it, it should be on Bujeti because other business leads will definitely need it too.” The institutional partnerships have followed the product. Bujeti says it partnered with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and, more recently, with Nigeria’s Presidential Committee on Economic and Financial Inclusion (PreCEFI) — operating under the Office of the
Read MoreKenyan court strikes down law criminalising false information online
Kenya’s Court of Appeal struck down criminal penalties for publishing “false information” online, a decision that weakens a cybercrime law rights groups say has been used to arrest bloggers, journalists, and social media users since 2018. In a ruling delivered in Nairobi on Friday, a three-judge bench invalidated Sections 22 and 23 of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, saying the provisions were vague and infringed constitutional protections for freedom of expression and media freedom. The Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), Article 19 Eastern Africa, the Kenya Union of Journalists, and other civil society groups filed the case in the Court of Appeal. “This is not just a win for content creators or journalists. It is a win for every Kenyan who uses the internet to speak truth to power,” said Kennedy Kachwanya, chairperson of BAKE. The judges, Patrick Kiage, Aggrey Muchelule, and Weldon Korir, said the offences relating to “false publications” and “false information” failed the constitutional test of clarity and risked criminalising ordinary online speech. The court found the provisions were so broad that they could capture people who share information without knowing it is inaccurate. Criminalising “falsity,” the judges said, could suppress satire, opinion, and journalistic errors. Kenya passed the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act in 2018 to address online fraud, hacking, and digital harassment. From the start, media groups and digital rights activists challenged the law, arguing that some sections created a tool for policing online speech. Several bloggers and social media users have been investigated or arrested under the law’s “false information” provisions since it came into force, drawing criticism from press freedom groups. The High Court upheld most of the law in 2020, prompting the appeal that led to Friday’s ruling. Despite striking out the false information offences, the Court of Appeal left most of the statute intact. Judges upheld provisions allowing investigators to seek court warrants to search and seize digital data, issue production orders requiring service providers to release subscriber information, and conduct real-time data collection during investigations. The court also retained offences covering child sexual exploitation material and cybersquatting, which criminalise registering domain names in bad faith using another person’s trademark or identity. Digital rights groups welcomed the ruling but said broader concerns remain about the law’s surveillance powers. “The fake news offences have been weaponized time and time again to target journalists, content creators, members of the Public and anyone who dares to speak truth to power,” said Mercy Mutemi, BAKE’s lawyer. The petitioners said they were reviewing the judgment and might pursue further legal action on sections they argue still threaten privacy and civil liberties online.
Read More69% of Africa’s biometric fintech fraud is now AI-generated, says report
African fintech startups spent the last decade building systems to stop fake users from opening accounts. But the real threat may already be inside their platforms. In a single month in 2025, one fraud syndicate used 100 stolen faces to launch over 160,000 verification attacks across Africa’s fintech platforms, according to a new report from Smile ID, a Lagos-based identity verification company. The report, titled “2026 Digital Identity Fraud in Africa Report,” analysed over 200 million identity checks conducted across 35 African countries and 37 industries last year, drawn from a cumulative dataset exceeding 400 million checks processed since 2019, according to Smile ID. The report highlights a structural shift in how fraud works in Africa’s digital economy: attacks now concentrate on logins, account recovery, and other authentication flows, making them five times more common than fraud at account registration. Rather than create fake identities to open new accounts, fraudsters prefer to hijack existing, verified ones, exposing a blind spot in systems that were built on the assumption that the main risk sits at signup, not months later inside live accounts. “The most consequential fraud attacks today are targeted account takeovers (ATOs)—not fake IDs or isolated spoofs, but coordinated operations that compromise the capture pipeline, reuse real identities at scale, and exploit moments after approval when controls are lighter through highly scalable AI-powered tooling,” Smile ID noted in the report. Over the past decade, the percentage of adults in Africa owning a financial account rose from 34% to nearly 60%, creating more than 200 million new accounts across the continent, according to Smile ID. The verification systems that secured most of those accounts were designed for that one moment of onboarding. The attackers have moved on. Authentication is now the primary battleground For years, identity verification in African fintech worked like a checkpoint: users submitted an ID document and a selfie, and if the images matched, they were granted access. That model worked when fraud attempts were rare and mostly involved fake documents or low-quality spoofing. By 2025, that environment had changed dramatically. Attackers now focus on the moments that unlock value inside financial platforms—login attempts, password resets, device changes, and withdrawal requests—where security checks are often lighter than during onboarding. These flows rely on controls like SMS one-time passwords (OTPs), email links, and security questions, which can be bypassed through SIM swaps, social engineering, or insider assistance. The overall share of verifications rejected by Smile ID for suspected fraud declined from 25% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. But the decline is misleading. The number of fraud attempts kept rising as verification volumes grew. The nature of the attacks changed. Petty onboarding fraud declined while attackers concentrated resources on sophisticated takeovers of high-value accounts. Historical rejection rates tell the same story. The share of all traffic blocked for suspected fraud rose steadily from 17% in 2020 to a peak of 29% in 2023, before falling to 22% last year. Fraud networks are reusing the same identities at scale One of the report’s most striking findings is how concentrated modern fraud attacks have become. A fraud syndicate used 100 facial identities to conduct large-scale break-in attempts, signalling that the same biometric data is being reused repeatedly across multiple fintech platforms. Some identities appeared over 12,000 times in verification attempts; another was used in more than 1,000 account registrations within 30 minutes. Smile Secure, Smile ID’s biometric deduplication tool, caught 126,000 duplicate fraud attempts in 2025, up from 52,000 in 2024 and 21,000 in 2023. That sixfold increase over two years reflects not just rising attack volumes but growing sophistication: syndicates now operate supply chains for identity assets, ageing accounts through dormancy before activating them for fraud or money laundering. These patterns confirm that fraud has deeply embedded itself in coordinated, industrialised tactics. Organised networks and syndicates are running automated campaigns against fintech platforms. Attackers build repositories of stolen identities, facial images, and documents, then deploy them across multiple financial apps simultaneously. AI is collapsing the economics of fraud The report also showed that Generative AI has altered the cost structure of identity fraud in Africa. High-quality synthetic documents, deepfake imagery, and automated biometric manipulation are no longer expensive or rare. The marginal cost of each fraud attempt now approaches zero, according to the report, which means attackers can afford to test systems continuously until they find vulnerabilities. In 2025, AI-generated manipulation drove 69% of confirmed biometric fraud cases, including synthetic faces, deepfakes, and face swaps, according to the report. Another 20% were tied to metadata from known fraud networks, while 11% were simple screen or replay attacks. Smile ID saw a 250% jump in high‑fidelity document forgeries, especially portrait tweaks where attackers swap or insert synthetic faces into otherwise normal-looking IDs, while older screen‑based tricks declined. Fraud is getting harder to spot and more technical. Attackers are targeting the infrastructure itself Beyond identity reuse, attackers are skillfully manipulating the systems used for identity verification rather than the images those systems evaluate. Smile ID saw more than 100,000 injection-style attacks every month in 2025, where fraudsters used software‑simulated phones and fake camera feeds to sneak prerecorded or AI‑generated selfies past checks. Its systems flagged 480,000 attempts that appeared to use these fake capture setups. Nearly 90% of suspicious verifications were stopped through its mobile SDKs in 2025, up from 15% in 2023 and 65% in 2024, showing how basic API checks that only see the final selfie or document often miss attacks where the capture process itself has been tampered with. West Africa is seeing the pressure most clearly The shift toward account‑takeover fraud is most visible in West Africa’s digital banks. Potential fraud attempts in retail banking rose about 50% in 2025, driven mainly by activity during logins and account recovery rather than at onboarding, and attacks grew faster than overall verification traffic, pointing to new tactics rather than simple growth. Impersonation makes up roughly two‑thirds of attempted fraud in the region, split between spoofing (33%) and no‑face‑match failures
Read More