“The problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be”: Day 1-1000 of Mida
Before Mida had a name, it existed as three separate ideas inside Renmoney, a Nigerian digital microfinance bank, where its three founders worked as colleagues, each unknowingly trying to solve the same problem. Mayowa Anibaba, Okeroghene Egbi, and Adija Uzodinma held senior leadership roles at the lender. Anibaba led engineering, Egbi headed product and marketing, and Uzodinma oversaw IT and operations. They called themselves “the trio.” From their respective roles, they saw the same weakness in digital lending. A lender could streamline the onboarding process, automate credit checks, and approve loans within minutes. But unless borrowers repaid those loans, none of those efficiencies mattered. As they spoke with lenders beyond Renmoney, they realised the problem extended well beyond a single institution. Anibaba, who had begun consulting for other lending businesses, found that many were grappling with the same challenge: recovering overdue loans. The trio officially left Renmoney within months of one another in 2023. In November that year, they launched Mida, a startup that builds software and recovery services for lenders, including debt collection, borrower onboarding and loan recovery tools. The opportunity was significant. Nigeria’s digital lending market is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion, while the number of licensed digital lenders grew from 173 in April 2023 to 461 by August 2025. However, as more Nigerians borrowed through digital platforms, defaults also increased. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s Q2 2025 Credit Conditions Survey reported rising default rates across both secured and unsecured lending. For Mida, the gap between issuing loans and recovering them represented a business opportunity. Day 1: An experiment becomes a company Around July 2023, four months before Mida formally launched, Anibaba began building what would become the company’s minimum viable product (MVP) as a side project. He wanted to test whether the low recovery rates he had observed could be tackled differently. “I had been helping some other organisations that were trying to solve the same problem,” he said. “Apart from the fact that we’ve been working internally to solve this problem, this problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be.” Months later, while discussing a startup idea with Uzodinma, Egbi realised Anibaba had already begun building almost the same solution. Rather than pursue three separate ideas, they combined their strengths. Anibaba brought the product he had already developed, while Egbi and Uzodinma contributed commercial, product and operational experience from their years in lending. In November 2023, users of Anibaba’s MVP migrated to Mida Collect, the company’s first commercial product. According to the founders, Mida officially launched after raising $50,000 from family and friends. Its first customer was Sofri, the digital lender platform operated by Links Microfinance Bank. The company says Sofri used Mida’s platform to improve collections, reduce missed repayments, and integrate collection workflows directly into its lending operations. Mida’s launch was, in Egbi’s words, equal excitement and apprehension. “But we were very excited because we had a vision and a path that we were going to get there,” she said. Day 500: Software wasn’t enough Mida’s original assumption was that lenders primarily wanted better tools to approve and disburse loans. Customer conversations quickly challenged that view. “When we started, we weren’t planning on doing recovery,” Anibaba said. “But we realised that the biggest voices in the market at the time were saying, ‘I have so much bad debt. How do I recover this?’ That accelerated our recovery roadmap.” This forced Mida to rethink what it was building. In March 2024, the startup launched Mida Omni, an enterprise platform that combined digital collections, call-centre operations, portfolio segmentation, and reporting into a single system. The company launched MidaX two months later to help recovery agents plan visits, locate borrowers through digital skip tracing, record field activity, and feed those updates back into lenders’ recovery operations. “That’s how we evolved from thinking as a pure technology startup to realising we also had to offer services,” Anibaba said. The founders explained that the evolution and growth of Mida exposed a weakness. Mida’s customer base kept expanding, but the business remained heavily dependent on people-intensive recovery operations. “Revenue was unpredictable, while payroll, technology infrastructure and operating costs had to be paid every month,” the company noted. “The hardest question was whether Mida could become a scalable technology company rather than simply a larger collections agency.” Still, less than a year after launching, the startup stated that it signed on OxygenX, Access Holdings’ digital lending arm, as a customer. In July 2024, the company raised a $400,000 pre-seed round from Founders Factory Africa to expand its products and operations. Day 1000: Becoming infrastructure In the third quarter of 2025, Mida completed the MVP of Mida Forms, allowing lenders to configure customer onboarding, KYC checks, credit scoring, loan applications, offer letters and approval workflows without lengthy technical integrations. By then, Mida began weaving AI throughout its credit infrastructure. The company noted that it first used AI to enrich borrower data and improve lending decisions before introducing an autonomous AI telecollector capable of calling borrowers and following up on overdue accounts. Over time, the company said it wants AI to predict which borrowers are likely to default, recommend the best recovery strategy for each account, personalise customer engagement, and give lenders real-time recommendations across their portfolios. As enterprise technology revenue began to grow, Mida’s economics started to change. Collections and recoveries increased without a matching rise in headcount, gross margins improved, and in the first quarter of 2026, the startup became EBITDA positive, according to the company. Three years after an experiment became a company, Mida said it has managed more than ₦100 billion ($73 million) in debt portfolios and recovered over ₦1 billion ($731,000) in bad loans. It is now targeting a $1 million to $3 million seed round to deepen its AI capabilities and expand its API and embedded credit infrastructure. The company added that conversations are underway to establish a presence in Ghana and Kenya. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered
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Digital Nomads: Eseandre Otomiewor built a $100,000 business. Then started over in the US.
Somewhere in Eseandre Otomiewor’s memory is an alternate version of his life in which he is, by his own joking estimate, a billionaire. It began years ago when a client on Fiverr offered to pay him in Bitcoin instead of cash. Otomiewor declined. He wanted dollars, not a volatile cryptocurrency that, at the time, most of his family, friends, and clients barely understood. It was not an isolated offer. He said other clients proposed the same arrangement, and he turned each of them down. “I think [my] story should be [about] the man who should have been a billionaire [and] accepted Bitcoin; I said no,” he told TechCabal, laughing at his own expense. “In hindsight, maybe I would have a lot of money by now. But you know, we’re still good. When you’re where you are right now, it’s easy to look back—but it’s never easy.” By his own admission, it remains his biggest regret. It is also, in an unexpected way, the quickest route to understanding him: someone who has spent the past decade making uncomfortable bets on himself—underpricing his work as a freelance writer to build a reputation, walking away from a company he built from a single tweet, and leaving a comfortable life in Lagos, Nigeria, for the United States (US)—and, more often that not, seeing those bets pay off. Today, Otomiewor is far removed from his early days as a freelancer. After securing a fully funded scholarship, he moved to the US in 2025, where he is pursuing a dual master’s degree. His career had crossed borders long before he did. From Nigeria, he built a client base spanning China and the US without ever setting foot in either country. Now, he is building the next chapter of his career from the latter. Long before the passport, there was a market in Lagos Otomiewor graduated from Delta State University in Abraka, southern Nigeria, in 2014 with a degree in international studies after his original ambition, to study law, “did not pan out.” Although international studies was not his first choice, he said the discipline gave him “a much broader perspective to life, creating, and writing,” a foundation that helped him build a freelance writing career that afforded him a comfortable life in Lagos, Nigeria, before eventually taking him abroad. His first job after university was at WuraTV, a US-based streaming platform owned by a Nigerian entrepreneur that distributed Nigerian and African content to audiences in the diaspora. Otomiewor recalls that the company saw itself as the leading competitor to Jason Njoku’s IrokoTV at the time. From there, he moved into a business strategy role at Maliyo Games, a Nigerian independent game studio. The job occasionally took him beyond the office. To promote Maliyo’s mobile game “Aboki Run”, Otomiewor said he visited Computer Village and Alaba International Market in Lagos—two of the city’s largest electronics and phone-repair hubs—and persuaded phone vendors to pre-install the game on customers’ devices before they left with newly purchased or repaired phones. According to Otomiewor, his manager at Maliyo Games doubted the idea and declined to allocate a budget for it. But the strategy proved successful enough that, he says, the company’s founder eventually drove him to Alaba to watch the pitches himself before later attempting to recruit him to another company. “I’m not someone to just sit down and watch things happen,” Otomiewor said. “Sometimes you’ve got to try things that are not conventional to make a change.” By December 2017, he had moved again, this time to Digital Raves, a company that helped businesses expand into diaspora and Middle Eastern markets. That same month, almost as an afterthought, he created an account on Fiverr, the global freelancing platform. A tweet, fifty replies, and an agency he never planned to start Otomiewor had been writing since university, mostly producing academic papers for other students, and Fiverr felt like a natural way to turn that skill into income. What he did not anticipate was how quickly demand would outgrow his capacity. Client requests began arriving faster than he could handle. One day, he posted what he describes as an “innocent” message on X, asking whether anyone wanted to take some of the overflow. He expected two or three replies. According to him, more than 50 people responded. A direct message sent to Otomiewor on X (formerly Twitter). Image source: Eseandre Otomiewor “It wasn’t pre-planned,” he said. “It was something that just happened and became very big.” He named the business “JDI,” short for “Just Do It,” a phrase loosely inspired by Nike. What started as a way to outsource a handful of articles became a content agency that, over eight years, trained and paid more than 8,000 African writers, according to Otomiewor. He said many alumni went on to work at Nigerian and international media organisations, while others secured roles at global companies, including Amazon. Having helped Nigerian writers access overseas clients also exposed what he believes was the industry’s biggest obstacle. “It was not a skill thing,” he said. “Nigerians here in the US, globally, have the same skill set. [But] we have to work ten times as hard as another person just to get the same opportunity.” According to Otomiewor, Nigerian freelancers on platforms such as Fiverr were sometimes overlooked in favour of equally qualified Western writers for reasons unrelated to the quality of their work. Even competing internationally required significant upfront investment: a virtual private network (VPN) to bypass geographical restrictions, an international payment solution and a reliable laptop—costs that many aspiring freelancers could not afford. Rather than compete on prevailing Western rates from the outset, Otomiewor deliberately charged less to establish credibility. “If [it’s a gig] an American would charge $20 for, I’d charge $5,” he said. “Do not look at what someone in America or the UK earns. Ask yourself how you can build a reputation to scale.” He said the strategy worked. Repeat business became common, new clients continued to arrive through referrals, and the
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Kenya finalises crypto licencing framework for exchanges, digital asset firms
Kenya has gazetted the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, 2026, finalising the country’s legal framework for licencing and supervising cryptocurrency exchanges, wallet providers, stablecoin issuers, and other digital asset businesses. The regulations were published in Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 185 under Legal Notice No. 134 on Friday, completing implementation of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, which President William Ruto assented to in October 2025. The regulations mark the final step in Kenya’s effort to bring cryptocurrency businesses under formal regulatory oversight. They create, for the first time, a licencing framework that allows Kenya’s regulators to approve and supervise firms operating in the sector. Kenya is one of East Africa’s largest cryptocurrency markets, recording about $19 billion in crypto inflows between July 2024 and June 2025, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. It ranked second in the region by transaction value, behind Ethiopia. The rules require firms serving Kenyan customers, including those without a physical presence in the country, to obtain licences, meet governance and capital requirements, implement anti-money laundering and cybersecurity controls, safeguard customer assets, and comply with ongoing reporting and consumer protection obligations. It is Kenya’s most consequential provision for all virtual asset service providers operating in, or from, the country. The regulations follow a four-month public consultation process launched in March, during which the National Treasury invited comments from industry participants, consumers, and other stakeholders. During the consultation, crypto firms argued that some proposed capital and compliance requirements risked pricing smaller operators out of the regulated market. Government officials continued engaging crypto firms through industry consultations before finalising the regulations. The framework also sets rules for stablecoins, initial coin offerings, tokenised real-world assets, digital wallets, advertising, market conduct, and enforcement. It also extends to foreign providers that actively target Kenyan customers or derive economic benefit from the country, even without a physical presence. Under the framework, licenced firms must maintain governance frameworks, conduct customer due diligence, retain transaction records for at least seven years, submit regular regulatory reports, and implement cybersecurity and business continuity measures. Oversight is split between Kenya’s financial regulators. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) will supervise virtual asset-to-fiat conversion services and stablecoin issuers, while the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) will regulate exchanges, token issuance platforms, initial coin offerings, and tokenisation activities under the VASP Act and accompanying regulations. The CBK had already begun preparing for the new regime in April, when it advertised vacancies for roles covering licencing, product approval and compliance for virtual asset service providers. With the regulations now gazetted, crypto firms can begin the process of seeking approval to operate under the new regime. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Why Vodacom is taking its AI talent search back to university
The battle for artificial intelligence (AI) talent has reached South Africa’s universities. Facing a shortage of engineers and researchers, Vodacom Group, an African telecoms operator, the University of Johannesburg (UJ), and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global cloud provider, launched the Vodacom AI Lab to train postgraduate students by placing them on practical AI projects drawn from the telecommunications industry. The initiative reflects a growing recognition that Africa’s AI challenge is not only about access to technology but also about building the workforce capable of using it. Rather than confining AI education to lecture halls, the partners said students will work alongside researchers and industry experts on problems using commercial applications, from network optimisation to customer service and data-driven decision-making. For Vodacom, the investment addresses a business challenge as much as an education one. Telecommunications companies are adopting AI across their operations, including network management, fraud detection, predictive maintenance and customer support. Those systems require engineers, data scientists and machine learning specialists who remain in short supply across South Africa and the continent. “The future of AI in Africa depends on developing local talent that understands the continent’s unique challenges,” Shameel Joosub, Vodacom group chief executive officer (CEO), said during the launch. He described the lab as a platform for responsible and practical AI innovation. AWS said it will provide the cloud infrastructure and AI services underpinning the lab. “This partnership is designed to create the next generation of AI talent for South Africa, and by extension, for Africa, by giving postgraduate students access to the same AI tools used by enterprises,” stated Prabashni Naidoo, AWS South Africa director. The collaboration also aims to bring universities closer to the tech industry through giving postgraduate students experience on commercial AI projects before they graduate. “We can change that by putting real-life problems to the universities and develop the necessary muscle that we need,” said Joosub. The initiative builds on a broader push to strengthen AI skills through higher education. In March 2025, Google partnered with the Department of Higher Education and Training to provide 5,000 AI, cybersecurity and data analytics scholarships across selected public universities and colleges across South Africa. Vodacom’s model goes a step further by embedding postgraduate students in commercial AI projects as part of their training. Joosub stated that the mobile operator wants to recruit more AI talent directly from universities. “We are building a model for collaboration that connects education with industry, research with real applications, and innovation with opportunity,” he noted. Naidoo said AWS will ensure that students in the programme move beyond classroom learning to develop AI systems on enterprise-grade infrastructure. “Students will not study AI in theory. They will work on live Vodacom cases running on AWS infrastructure,” she said. “This is the bridge between learning and doing.” UJ believes the partnership will narrow the gap between academic research and commercial deployment. “This collaboration reinforces the bridge between theory and application,” said Prof. Tankiso Moloi, executive dean of UJ’s College of Business and Economics. “This is how we close the gap between qualification and application, between research and implementation, and between academia and transformative careers.” The partners said the model is intended to extend beyond a single university. Joosub described it as “a blueprint for AI capability development across Africa.” Naidoo said the lab was designed to be replicated, with the talent pipeline serving as “a blueprint for the continent” through future university-industry collaborations. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Why Africa’s growth-stage companies need more than capital to scale sustainably
Africa’s startup ecosystem has mastered the art of the launch. Accelerators and incubators have achieved exactly what they were designed to: help founders bring ideas to life, find early traction, and secure that first institutional check. But design has limits. When those same companies are ready to scale, the support that carried them begins to thin. This is the messy middle—and it’s where too many promising companies quietly stall or die. As companies move from startup to scaleup, the challenge shifts to building systems that allow a business to grow beyond its founder: robust financial management, structured hiring, institutional governance, and distributed leadership. Scaling without this infrastructure is like accelerating without steering; growth may come, but it is difficult to control or sustain. Closing this gap means moving from instinct-led execution to structured, scalable growth. In practice, this means stronger financial health, decentralised leadership, good governance, and capital matched to strategy. Ensuring founders are ready to absorb capital Before looking to fundraise, founders must answer a fundamental question: who is actually driving revenue, and is it the right customer? Many growth-stage founders can tell you their total customer count. Fewer can articulate which segment is the most valuable: which generates the highest lifetime value, at an acquisition cost the business can sustain? Customer retention tells the real story: strong retention signals something worth scaling. Weakening retention is an early warning that growth is filling a leaking bucket. The risk is scaling before this picture is clear: pouring capital into the wrong customer. Getting this right reorients everything that follows. A company can also be growing, profitable on paper, and still die. Cash cycles—the gap between earning revenue and collecting cash—can pose an existential threat. Rapid scaling worsens this; without continuous working capital modeling, a company risks insolvency despite its growth. Currency fluctuations also add complexity for companies that often operate across multiple currencies. Founders must develop treasury discipline, mastering conversion timing, reserves, and hedging. They also need fluency in unit economics to ensure growth builds, rather than erodes, enterprise value. More importantly, on the organisational side of the business, founders need to learn how to delegate. Africa’s most resilient founders have survived on resourcefulness, navigating funding winters, currency crises, thinning talent pools, and unforgiving markets. That scrappiness is a genuine superpower, until it becomes the ceiling. Growth-stage founders are rarely taught organisational design or effective delegation. Many become the bottleneck, a key reason why 90% of African startups fail. Securing top talent requires unfamiliar skills: identifying exceptional candidates, selling the vision, and crafting creative compensation packages. Equity, deferred pay, part-time experts, and advisory boards can bridge talent gaps when the salary budget isn’t there yet. Governance is also a cornerstone for growth and one of the most underleveraged tools in the growth-stage founder’s kit. Early boards often consist of family, friends, and early believers – not through neglect, but because no one had shown them what a growth-stage board should look like or how to evolve it. The stakes compound with scale. A startup can operate informally early on, but at the growth stage, they face real contractual liability and closer regulatory scrutiny that require higher legal and compliance frameworks. A board can feel like oversight a founder didn’t ask for. But that framing undersells what good governance actually offers: accountability that sharpens the founder, plus expertise, connections, and counsel a founder couldn’t yet afford to hire. Aligning capital to strategy Africa’s funding ecosystem has defaulted to frameworks developed in Western markets – Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) notes and equity raises as the standard instruments of growth. But capital should be chosen with intention, matched to what the business actually needs. Debt funding hit a record $1.64 billion across the continent in 2025, up 63% year-on-year, suggesting founders are increasingly exploring a broader range of financing options. As more founders and lenders develop the track record and instruments to make debt work in African market conditions, equity should increasingly be reserved for what it is actually designed to fund: risk, not timing. Scaling requires evaluating the full capital stack: balancing equity dilution against debt covenants while exploring strategic partnerships, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), and revenue-based structures. Catalytic or concessional capital can further bridge the gap to commercial readiness. An early-stage company with no revenue history, collateral, or track record may have no choice but equity, while a growth-stage company with recurring revenue can hold a fundamentally different credit proposition. The ecosystem must meet founders with capital matched to strategy. Africa’s founders have proven they can build. Helping them scale will shape far more than individual companies; it will shape African economies. Success will require an ecosystem designed to support founders beyond the early stage, with the same quality of guidance, resources, and institutional support they received at the start. It is time to build the infrastructure for scale. ___ Oyin Solebo is the COO at Cascador, an Africa-focused platform for growth-stage founders building businesses that make an impact. She also serves as Advisor at Cone Ventures Studio, co-founding and scaling Africa-focused ventures, and as Senior Advisor at Ventures 54. Previously, she was Managing Director of the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator, Techstars’ flagship Africa-based programme. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Mercy Erhiawarien left Africa. She returned convinced it is the future
The maître d‘s phone rings every few minutes. Maybe a reservation, dinner enquiry, or just someone asking if the terrace is open. We choose a quiet table tucked behind the reception desk at Somerset Westview Restaurant in Nairobi’s leafy Kilimani neighbourhood, but the restaurant has its own flow. Mercy Erhiawarien, Director of International Programmes at Halcyon, a nonprofit startup accelerator, hardly notices. She sits upright, almost intimidating at first glance, with the kind of posture that makes you instinctively straighten your own back. But the seriousness dissolves quickly. She laughs easily, often at herself, and answers questions with long pauses, not because she is searching for the right words, but because she seems determined not to waste them. Over nearly an hour, our conversation wandered from Lagos and Nairobi to venture capital, village life, housing, artificial intelligence (AI) and why she believes Africa’s greatest shortage is not entrepreneurial talent but patient capital. “I believe opportunity exists in places where people rarely look,” she tells me. It is perhaps the closest thing to a personal philosophy she offers. That belief is rooted in a life lived across continents. Born in Nigeria’s Delta State and raised largely in the United States, Erhiawarien grew up moving between two worlds. The contrast in infrastructure, opportunity and public institutions sharpened rather than weakened her attachment to Africa. Stories from her father, who grew up in a rural village before becoming an accountant, reinforced a conviction that where someone is born should never determine what they can become. She dreams of financial instruments that give founders the confidence to take risks, neighbourhoods protected from speculative capital, and an Africa whose greatest export is opportunity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Lagos or Nairobi? I’ll say both. But it depends on the weather. When it’s cold in Nairobi, I’ll prefer Lagos because it’ll be warm, and when it’s too hot in Lagos, I’ll prefer Nairobi because it’s cool. I love the way Nairobi is set up. I love the greenery. I love the vibrancy it has. I love that you guys have a solid Kizomba dance culture. And I am seeing more and more that Nairobi is a city at the centre of ideas for how we can grow the continent, or one of the centres. Kenya has done a solid job of centering itself in that way. Lagos is home. Lagos is in my blood. Although I’m not from Lagos, it’s definitely Nigeria. Lagos is the heartbeat, the energy, of Nigeria. It’s a place where things happen. It’s the New York of Africa—and I’ll say it: not Nairobi—and I’ll even say it’s more New York than New York. Erhiawarien with her colleagues at a past function. Image source: Halcyon If I visited the neighbourhood where you grew up, what would explain the investor you have become? I don’t know if the neighbourhood actually shaped the investor I’ve become. I can’t say I feel like an investor yet, but I am one in the making. My background has shaped how I view different things. I’m Nigerian, born in Delta State, but raised in the U.S. I spent the first few years of my life in Nigeria, and then we moved. Going back and forth between the U.S. and Nigeria, the disparities in quality of life and infrastructure always weighed heavily on my mind. My father grew up in a village. I don’t know if many in today’s generation know what the village looks like, but learning from his experiences shaped my perspective on the need for people to have access to opportunity and for us to find ways to support underserved communities so they can actually thrive economically. So, in terms of how it’s shaped me as a future investor, I believe in opportunities in places where they’re least sought out. I believe in opportunities for African people globally. I believe in ensuring that the poorest communities have a chance to thrive. And I have a risk tolerance for ideas that don’t come from capital cities all the time. You mentioned your dad. What is the one thing that he taught you that has stuck with you to date? Some of the things are unspoken. He’s generous and values education. He prioritised making sure that all of us were educated to the level we wanted to be. He championed the education of many of his nieces and nephews, and even people who were not related to him. He’s someone who has invested in people. I’ve taken that away from watching him operate. The way he knows people, and the way he’s always cared about young people, means so many of my friends and younger friends speak of him as one of the adults in their lives they can talk to about different things. I’ve learned that it’s important to invest in people. What was money like in your childhood? Was it discussed openly, hidden, or always scarce? My dad was an auditor and an accountant. So to an extent, it was discussed. We would have budgets for school expenses. Secretly, some of us learned to manage what was provided because you’d usually submit your budget and then get less than you asked for, because he’s like, “You don’t need the money.” But it was discussed, and I think that was important because it taught you, in a way, the value of money. What part of your younger self have you deliberately refused to outgrow? I think it’s probably a problem, but I am very idealistic about the continent. Some people would say I’m idealistic about the continent. I would say I’m deeply optimistic about Africa’s future, and I have not yet outgrown that, and I hope I never do. Sometimes there’s this perception of Nigeria as a country that will break your heart. But I feel like it’s a toxic relationship worth being in, even through the heartbreak, because we have to build the thing that matters to us. What breaks your heart
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“I’m an African”: Why MTN says migration matters to South Africa’s digital future
As South Africa’s migration debate intensifies, MTN Group, Africa’s largest telco, is warning that anti-immigrant sentiment could have consequences beyond politics, affecting the movement of skills and businesses across Africa. The telecoms giant has built one of Africa’s largest telecommunications businesses, connecting 312.7 million customers across 19 markets in Africa and the Middle East. With most of its growth coming from outside South Africa, the company is concerned that rising hostility targeting African migrants runs counter to the regional integration on which its business depends. The developments have resonated across MTN’s footprint. Nigeria and Ghana, its largest markets, have joined Zimbabwe, Malawi and Eswatini in evacuating citizens from South Africa after the March and March Movement, an anti-immigration activist group, issued undocumented migrants with a June 30 deadline to leave the country. At the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation’s Winter Seminar on Thursday, which focused on migration, MTN executives made the business case for open borders. They argued that Africa’s future depends on creating economic opportunity, expanding digital connectivity and allowing skills and talent to move freely across the continent. “If our discussion ends with the language of crisis around migration, we will have treated the symptom and missed the deeper challenge,” MTN Group President and chief executive officer (CEO) Ralph Mupita said. “People move because opportunity is unevenly distributed. The defining question is whether we can build economies in which mobility is matched by opportunity.” The message comes as South Africa has witnessed months of attacks on foreign-owned businesses, forced evictions of migrants and growing anti-immigration rhetoric ahead of November’s local government elections. For a company that has built its growth on connecting Africans across borders, those developments have become impossible to ignore. Mupita deliberately framed his own migration story as part of MTN’s identity. “I also want to admit that I’m a migrant, 35 years in South Africa,” he told the audience. “I’m from Zimbabwe… My surname, Mupita, means ‘the one who moves from place to place.’” He described having relatives across Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Angola before concluding: “So that’s who I am. I’m an African.” For Mupita, the personal story reflected MTN’s own pan-African journey. “I happen to be an African who is a steward… of an organisation that was born in South Africa,” he said, recalling that one of Nelson Mandela, the global democracy icon’s, earliest decisions after democracy was issuing the mobile licences in September 1993 that led to MTN’s creation. Today, that company has become Africa’s largest telecommunications operator. Its success, Mupita argued, is inseparable from Africa’s prosperity. “The future of Africa will not be determined by the borders that separate us, but by the economic opportunities that connect us,” he said. “Governments must set predictable policy and regulations. Businesses will follow and allocate resources and capital. Together, we can build a continent where opportunity is more evenly shared, and prosperity is more widely created.” Mcebisi Jonas, the MTN Chairman, said immigration has become a convenient political scapegoat for South Africa’s deeper economic problems. “Our markets are in Africa. Our opportunities are in Africa. Our future is in Africa,” Jonas said. “South Africa cannot present itself as open for investment while treating African workers and traders with hostility. It sends a contradictory message: Africans are welcome as customers and investors, but not as people.” Jonas stated that removing migrants would do nothing to solve South Africa’s economic challenges. “South Africa’s economic crisis is a product of weak growth, poor governance, inadequate education outcomes, infrastructure failures and structural inequality. If every foreign national left the country tomorrow, those problems would remain,” he said. He added that South Africa continues to lose skilled citizens through emigration while making it difficult for skilled foreigners to stay, a contradiction he believes undermines the country’s competitiveness in a technology-driven economy. The seminar’s broader message was that migration cannot be separated from Africa’s economic transformation. Dr Ishmael Yamson, chairman of MTN Ghana’s board, said Africa’s demographic boom will only translate into prosperity if governments invest aggressively in digital capabilities. “Africa’s future competitiveness will depend on how successfully we equip young people with digital skills, entrepreneurial skills, technical skills and leadership capabilities,” noted Yamson. “The demographic dividend must become a skills dividend.” True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
Read MoreQuick Fire 🔥 with Zubair Timilehin
Zubair Habib Timilehin is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Bitoshi, a fintech startup building the infrastructure that makes digital assets and stablecoins practical for everyday payments across Africa. Under his leadership, Bitoshi has grown to serve nearly 100,000 users, delivering financial solutions that bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology while enabling individuals and businesses to transact in Africa’s digital economy. With a background in product strategy, product development, and growth, Zubair has led the creation of user-centric financial products that simplify crypto adoption and expand access to digital finance across emerging markets. His work is driven by a commitment to removing barriers to financial inclusion through practical innovation, with a particular focus on the future of digital payments, stablecoins, and blockchain-powered financial infrastructure in Africa. Explain your job to a five-year-old. Imagine you have two toys. One is really fun, but every time you want to play with it, you have to read a big instruction manual first. The other is so simple that you can pick it up, start playing straight away, and discover all the fun things it can do on your own. My job is to help build money tools that feel like the second toy. I want people to be able to send, save, and use their money—whether it’s cash or digital—without needing to think about the technology behind it. If we’ve done our job well, people won’t think about how it works; they’ll simply know it works. Why are you bullish about merging traditional finance (TradFi) and blockchain technology? What will that change about how we use financial products today? I’m bullish on the merging of traditional finance and blockchain because I don’t think the future of finance is choosing one over the other. It’s combining the strengths of both. Traditional finance has built trust, regulatory frameworks, and products that billions of people rely on. Blockchain brings global accessibility, user ownership, and the ability to move value instantly at a fraction of today’s cost. I believe we’re moving toward a future where people won’t choose between “banking” and “crypto.” They’ll simply choose the best financial experience. The technology powering that experience will become invisible. Just as most people don’t know whether a website runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud, future users won’t care whether a payment runs on a bank’s rails or a blockchain. They’ll care that it’s instant, affordable, secure, and works anywhere in the world. That vision is what we’re building at Bitoshi. By combining the familiarity and trust of traditional finance with the speed and accessibility of blockchain technology, we’re creating financial experiences that feel effortless for everyday users. Blockchain isn’t replacing finance. It’s becoming the infrastructure that makes finance more open, more efficient, and more accessible. What’s the hardest part of being a founder in the digital asset space that people outside crypto don’t understand? I think the hardest part is building in an industry that’s evolving in real time. The technology moves incredibly fast. New blockchain networks and upgrades, security standards, and infrastructure are constantly emerging, so you’re always learning. What was considered best practice a year ago may no longer be the best approach today. But the bigger challenge is trust. Digital assets have unfortunately been associated with scams and bad actors over the years. As a result, legitimate businesses have to work twice as hard to earn customer trust and maintain regulatory compliance. You’re not just building a great product. You’re building a secure, compliant, and trustworthy business in an industry that’s still maturing. That’s a challenge most people outside the space don’t fully appreciate. If being a crypto startup founder was a warning label, what would it read? Don’t get too comfortable. Expect the best, but always prepare for the worst. You said Bitoshi bridges traditional finance and blockchain for nearly 100,000 users. What was your hack for achieving that scale? The biggest driver of our growth has been word of mouth. We never set out to build a product that people would talk about; we simply set out to solve the complication and fragmentation of cryptocurrency transactions. By staying focused on solving a real problem and delivering a seamless user experience, people naturally began recommending Bitoshi to their friends, family, and colleagues. That organic advocacy has been our biggest growth hack. I’ve always believed the best marketing isn’t advertising; it’s building something people genuinely want to tell others about. What’s one product-building lesson you learned the hard way? I lost about ₦4 million ($3,000) in the early stages of Bitoshi because I didn’t pay attention to a little tiny detail about the product. I quickly learned that I needed to live and breathe the product, especially in the early stage, since we didn’t have much of a team in the beginning. Even though it’s not the same case now, as I no longer have to be involved in the nitty-gritty of building, but in the beginning it was important, and I learnt that the hard way. What’s one skill every aspiring founder should develop before starting a company? I think every aspiring founder should develop strong problem-solving skills. And I’m not just talking about solving a customer problem with a product. I’m talking about solving the countless problems that come with building a business. Every founder will face challenges, whether it’s funding, regulation, hiring, technology, or acquiring customers. The difference is that successful founders don’t see those challenges as dead ends; they see them as problems waiting to be solved. You have to build with the mindset that every problem has a solution. It may not be obvious, and it may require you to rethink your approach, but there’s almost always a way forward. Many founders don’t fail because their idea wasn’t good. They fail because they gave up when they encountered the first major obstacle.
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👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – Mr Price, Mr Europe
In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية TGIFCDEUTWSWGANW. Who’s hiring this week? We did a bit of snooping around on Elon Musk’s Internet. Chowdeck, Pesa, Binance, and ARM are all hiring this week. Check the updated list on our job board. Let’s dive in. —Emmanuel Get smarter about Francophone Africa with our newsletter, Francophone Weekly—the startups, tech policies, and institutions building the pipelines for ecosystem growth. Subscribe Quick Fire with Zubair Timilehin Mr Price takes over German retailer Airtel Money sets sight on London Who secured the bag? World Wide Web 3 Job Openings FEATURES Quick Fire with Zubair Timilehin Image: Zubair Timilehin, chief executive officer of Bitoshi Zubair Habib Timilehin is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Bitoshi, a fintech startup building the infrastructure that makes digital assets and stablecoins practical for everyday payments across Africa. Under his leadership, Bitoshi has grown to serve nearly 100,000 users, delivering financial solutions that bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology while enabling individuals and businesses to transact in Africa’s digital economy. Explain your job to a five-year-old. Imagine you have two toys. One is really fun, but every time you want to play with it, you have to read a big instruction manual first. The other is so simple that you can pick it up, start playing straight away, and discover all the fun things it can do on your own. My job is to help build money tools that feel like the second toy. I want people to be able to send, save, and use their money—whether it’s cash or digital—without needing to think about the technology behind it. If we’ve done our job well, people won’t think about how it works; they’ll simply know it works. What’s the hardest part of being a founder in the digital asset space that people outside crypto don’t understand? I think the hardest part is building in an industry that’s evolving in real time. The technology moves incredibly fast. New blockchain networks and upgrades, security standards, and infrastructure are constantly emerging, so you’re always learning. What was considered best practice a year ago may no longer be the best approach today. But the bigger challenge is trust. Digital assets have unfortunately been associated with scams and bad actors over the years. As a result, legitimate businesses have to work twice as hard to earn customer trust and maintain regulatory compliance. You’re not just building a great product. You’re building a secure, compliant, and trustworthy business in an industry that’s still maturing. That’s a challenge most people outside the space don’t fully appreciate. You said Bitoshi bridges traditional finance and blockchain for nearly 100,000 users. What was your hack for achieving that scale? The biggest driver of our growth has been word of mouth. We never set out to build a product that people would talk about; we simply set out to solve the complication and fragmentation of cryptocurrency transactions. By staying focused on solving a real problem and delivering a seamless user experience, people naturally began recommending Bitoshi to their friends, family, and colleagues. That organic advocacy has been our biggest growth hack. If being a crypto startup founder was a warning label, what would it read? Don’t get too comfortable. Expect the best, but always prepare for the worst. Getting paid in cedis just got easier for African businesses operating in Ghana. Fincra now issues dedicated GHS virtual accounts to enable businesses to collect payments. See how Fincra GHS virtual accounts work. companies South African retailer Mr Price takes control of NKD’s European operations Image Source: Tenor Imagine going on holiday and deciding, on a whim, to buy the local bakery and stay forever. That’s essentially what Mr Price has done with its latest European expansion. The South African retailer has taken control of NKD, a German retail company it agreed to acquire in 2025. The deal adds 2,156 stores across seven European countries to Mr Price’s portfolio, previously operated by NKD under its parent company, Pegasus Holding Group, which was also part of the acquisition. What happened? Mr Price announced the R9.6 billion ($569 million) acquisition in December 2025, but it only became the owner of NKD in March 2026, after securing approvals from the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and European regulators. From that point, NKD became part of the Mr Price Group. In Q1 2026, the South African retailer’s sales jumped 45.3% to R13.1 billion ($776 million), with NKD contributing R3.8 billion ($225 million) in cash sales, helping offset a much slower 3.2% sales increase in Mr Price’s South African business. Explain like I’m new here: For years, South African retailers have sought other growth avenues outside their core clothing and grocery businesses. Several companies in the same—or adjacent—bracket as Mr Price, such as Shoprite, Pepkor, Pick n Pay, Woolworths, and SPAR, have all tried other businesses, including telecoms (mobile virtual network operator), mobile phones, and even scaled-down banks. Another pattern is continental expansion. While the likes of Shoprite and SPAR have pulled back from certain foreign markets, Mr Price thinks there’s value in Europe’s retail economy. The continent offers something South Africa has struggled to provide in recent years: relatively predictable consumer demand. While economic growth across the Euro area has remained modest, inflation has eased from the highs seen after the 2021-2022 energy crisis, and unemployment has remained relatively low, giving retailers a more predictable environment to operate in. For value retailers, that makes planning inventory, pricing, and margins a lot easier. South Africa, on the other hand, has spent the past few years contending with uneven growth rates, high unemployment, elevated borrowing costs, and electricity shortages that have weighed on household spending. Why now? The maths of the deal is starting to make sense. WhileSouth African sales grew a modest 3.2%, the inclusion of NKD has supercharged the group’s overall growth. The acquisition is a hedge against a stagnating home market. Unlike previous South African retail ‘vacations’ that ended in retreat, Mr
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WayaWaya appoints ex-Chase Bank Kenya executive Raj Singh as board adviser
WayaWaya, the Kenyan company building AI-powered financial services for banks and merchants, has appointed former Chase Bank Kenya executive Raj Singh as a non-executive director and board adviser. The appointment comes as the startup intends to deepen relationships with financial institutions and merchants while expanding into new African and international markets. Singh will advise WayaWaya’s board and executive team on strategy, governance and commercial growth, the company said in a Thursday statement. WayaWaya joins a growing list of African fintechs recruiting experienced banking executives as they scale into regulated financial services. In July, Nigerian fintech unicorn Moniepoint appointed former Branch Kenya chief executive Rose Muturi to lead its Kenyan business after acquiring Sumac Microfinance Bank. In April, Cellulant, a payments firm, hired former Xapo Bank executive Anthony Hernandez as chief operating officer to sharpen its expansion strategy. “Raj joins us at an important point in WayaWaya’s growth journey. His banking, fintech and international experience will be invaluable as we move from innovation to scale,” said Teddy Ogallo, founder and chief executive officer of WayaWaya. “We look forward to working with him in shaping and executing our growth strategy, particularly in expanding our network of banking partners and merchants, strengthening strategic partnerships, and taking WayaWaya into new markets across Africa and beyond.” As a board adviser, Singh will help shape WayaWaya’s long-term strategy, strengthen corporate governance, expand banking and merchant partnerships, and guide the company’s international expansion, the statement added. Singh has spent more than two decades in banking and financial technology across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. He previously served as Group Chief Operating Officer and Director of Retail Banking at Chase Bank Kenya, where he led digital banking initiatives. Earlier in his career, he worked at First City Monument Bank (FCMB) in Nigeria, overseeing banking operations transformation, and spent more than five years at India’s ICICI Bank managing retail banking operations. Singh also held advisory roles, working with financial institutions and fintechs on digital banking and artificial intelligence. He is currently managing director of Rova, a consulting firm, and serves on the boards of Finova360 and Finnafrica, fintech advisory firms. He also mentors startups through venture builder FasterCapital. “I am delighted to join the Board at this important stage of the company’s journey and look forward to working with Teddy and the leadership team to strengthen strategic partnerships, accelerate commercial growth and support WayaWaya’s expansion across Africa and international markets,” said Singh. The appointment follows a long-running dispute over claims that WayaWaya was acquired by Kenyan customer experience company Ajua in 2021. WayaWaya has maintained it remained independent, telling TechCabal that the relationship was a consultancy arrangement rather than an acquisition. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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