M-KOPA unlocks $22.5 million in credit in South Africa as women drive uptake
M-KOPA, a Kenyan asset financing startup, says it has extended more than ZAR 370 million ($22.5 million) in credit to low-income consumers in South Africa since its 2023 launch, pointing to the growing role of device financing in expanding access to the digital economy. Nearly half of that uptake has been driven by women, who account for 49% of the company’s 105,000 customers, according to its 2025 impact report. 36% of female customers are first-time smartphone users, compared with 24% of men, the report said. The report, based on a survey of 452 customers and sales agents conducted by Caribou, found that 64% of users rely on their devices to generate income. About 35% reported increased earnings, while 39% said they could invest more in their children’s education. In South Africa, where cost keeps millions offline, M-KOPA is testing whether flexible credit can do what infrastructure investment alone has not by closing the gap between owning a smartphone and being able to afford one. According to the Global Findex 2025 Digital Connectivity Tracker, just 74% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa own a mobile phone, compared with 86% globally, and 77% of those without one cite cost as the main barrier. “South Africa’s unemployment crisis demands bold, inclusive solutions, and when Every Day Earners gain access to fair and flexible financing, they use it to unlock income, stability, and opportunity,” M-KOPA South Africa general manager Cameron Perumal said. Overall, 84% of customers reported an improved quality of life, and 66% said they were better able to meet household financial goals. Customers are largely urban (77%) and earn an average of ZAR 185 ($11.25) per day. Beyond consumer credit, M-KOPA said it contributed ZAR 24 million ($1.45 million) in taxes and ZAR 155.5 million ($9.46 million) in local procurement in 2024, while employing 155 people, 55% of them women. Founded in 2010, the company has now served more than 7 million customers across Africa and extended over $2.5 billion in credit across Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, including ₦231 billion ($170.34 million) in Nigeria. In South Africa, M-KOPA plans to expand nationwide and introduce refurbished smartphones in 2026, betting that lower-cost devices and flexible financing will deepen its reach among “everyday earners” still priced out of the digital economy.
Read MoreKenya replaces tax chief Humphrey Wattanga in surprise leadership shake-up
Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has replaced its Commissioner General, Humphrey Wattanga, in an abrupt leadership change that comes at a delicate moment for the government’s revenue drive. In a statement on Wednesday, the tax agency said its board would not renew Wattanga’s contract, sending him on terminal leave with immediate effect and bringing to a close a tenure closely tied to President William Ruto’s push to tighten tax compliance. The board, chaired by Ndiritu Muriithi, offered no reasons for the decision but praised Wattanga for “dedicated service and leadership,” citing his role in organisational restructuring reforms at the authority. Dr Lilian Nyawanda, currently Commissioner of Customs and Border Control, has been appointed acting Commissioner General pending a competitive recruitment process. “The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) Board informs the public that it will not be renewing Mr. Humphrey Wattanga’s Contract of Service as Commissioner General,” the KRA board said in a statement. “Consequently, and in accordance with his Contract of Service, he is proceeding on terminal leave effective immediately.” A technocrat exits under pressure Wattanga, a Harvard-trained tax expert who took office in 2023, was brought in to fix underperforming tax collection, one of Kenya’s most persistent fiscal challenges, amid rising public debt. His appointment signalled a shift toward data-driven enforcement and internal restructuring at KRA. He pushed through changes aimed at streamlining operations and improving efficiency, particularly in customs, a key revenue stream vulnerable to leakage. But his tenure also coincided with mounting political and economic pressure on the authority. The government has leaned heavily on KRA to finance an ambitious budget, even as businesses and households grapple with high taxes, sluggish growth, and rising living costs. In recent months, the taxman has faced criticism from the private sector over aggressive enforcement tactics, while missing some revenue targets has sharpened scrutiny from the National Treasury and Parliament. The appointment of Nyawanda suggests a preference for continuity from within KRA’s senior ranks. As head of customs and border control, she oversees one of the authority’s most critical and complex departments, responsible for a significant share of tax revenues and trade facilitation. Her interim leadership will be closely watched for signals on whether KRA will maintain its current enforcement posture or change amid growing concerns over the tax burden on businesses.
Read MoreZazu taps Visa to launch online business accounts in Morocco
Zazu, a pan-African digital bank that serves small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has partnered with Visa to launch a digital business account for Moroccan entrepreneurs and small businesses. The partnership embeds Visa into Zazu’s rebundled financial operating system for SMEs that offers the core utility of a bank, including accounts, cards, and transfers. Zazu can now issue Visa Business cards to Moroccan SMEs while plugging into its global payments infrastructure. The partnership comes four months after Zazu raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to support its rollout in South Africa and Morocco and lay the foundation for broader pan-African expansion. “Too many entrepreneurs waste time chasing their advisor, navigating overly complex interfaces, or disputing surprise fees. Zazu simplifies their day-to-day banking,” said Germain Bahri, co-founder of Zazu. “What this unlocks is the ability for us to issue Visa business cards to SMEs across Morocco and build a complete expense management layer around them,” The new digital business account is designed to collapse separate tools into one. A business can open an account online through know-your-customer (KYC) checks, access a dashboard that combines invoicing and payment links, and immediately begin issuing cards for team expenses. The company claimed payments made through invoices or links are automatically reconciled, giving businesses real-time visibility of inflows and outflows without needing separate systems. Zazu said it allows companies to issue multiple business cards across teams, each with its own limits and controls, which can be tracked in real time. The company said it has onboarded over 300 businesses into this ecosystem, including AI recruitment platform Jobzyn, Auto24, an online marketplace for buying and selling cars in South Africa, and Moroccan proptech startup, Yakeey. Founded in 2024 by Rinse Jacobs and Germain Bahri, Zazu is positioning itself as a “Mercury-style” banking experience for Africa, built around Application Programming Interface (API)-driven integrations to connect with finance tools, such as bookkeeping, tax management, payroll, and cap-table management. The company is built on a partnership with Chari, a Moroccan fintech that provides access to technological infrastructure, a payment licence, and market expertise. Zazu is backed by international investment funds, notably Plug and Play, Bell Ventures, and Ryad Ventures, as well as business angels from Solarisbank, Qonto, and Paymentology, alongside recognised figures from the Moroccan ecosystem: Ismael Belkhayat (Chari), Mohamed Benmansour (Binga / Nuitée), and Youssef Koun (Wonderful & Co.).
Read MoreCroatia’s Media King picks Nigeria to test its cloud-powered public WiFi model
Media King Group, a Croatian smart public WiFi provider, is setting its sights on Nigeria, one of Africa’s most challenging connectivity markets, to test a new public WiFi model that could reshape how cities stay online. Founded in 2017 by Darko Kraljević, the company has spent nearly a decade building what it calls a “smart WiFi” system designed to fix a familiar problem: networks that buckle under heavy demand. Now, through a local partnership led by Nigerian entrepreneur and film producer Charles Okpaleke, Media King is preparing its first large-scale African rollout, with Nigeria as the launchpad for a broader continental push. “We don’t want to just be local in Nigeria,” Kraljević told TechCabal in April 2026. “Nigeria will be the starting point for the entire African market.” Media King is betting that a cloud-managed WiFi architecture can succeed where earlier public access efforts have stalled. Big Tech-backed initiatives, including Meta, Google, and Microsoft-linked deployments via Tizeti, have all struggled to make free public WiFi viable at scale in Nigeria. Unlike earlier attempts to “blanket” areas with standard Wi-Fi protocols, which struggled with Nigeria’s high user density and power instability, Media King’s approach rethinks the architecture. Instead of relying on access points that both connect users and process traffic, it shifts the heavy lifting, traffic management, routing, and bandwidth allocation into the cloud. The company claims that the approach makes networks cheaper to deploy, easier to scale, and more resilient in high-density environments where demand typically overwhelms infrastructure. Traditional systems rely on access points that both connect users and handle computing tasks. But as more users pile on, those systems quickly overload, leading to the familiar experience of slow speeds or complete failure in crowded areas like airports, malls, or city squares. Media King shifts that computing burden away from the hardware into a centralised cloud-based system. In Kraljević’s telling, access points become little more than “antennas,” while the heavy lifting, traffic management, bandwidth allocation, and routing are handled remotely and dynamically. The result, he claims, is a network that can support an unlimited number of concurrent users without degrading performance. Instead of rationing bandwidth equally, the system allocates resources in real time, prioritising users with heavier data needs while maintaining overall stability. That promise has already been tested in Croatia, where Media King was born and deployed what was described as Europe’s fastest public WiFi network along Split’s busy waterfront. The system has since been used in shopping malls, public transport systems, hospitals, and government buildings, often in high-density environments where conventional networks struggle. For the Nigerian partners, the appeal lies not just in the technology but in its potential to succeed where previous public WiFi efforts in the country have failed. “The challenge was that existing infrastructure couldn’t reliably deliver quality service,” said Afam Anyika, CEO of Media King Nigeria. “With 60–70% of budgets going into infrastructure, we’ve partnered with Media King Global to cut upfront costs while still rolling out our systems nationwide.” Nigeria has seen multiple attempts at public connectivity, from government-backed initiatives to experiments by global tech giants. Still, most have struggled with sustainability, high infrastructure costs, and poor service quality. In many cases, networks deteriorated quickly or failed to scale beyond pilot phases. “The real issue has always been that traditional infrastructure cannot meet real-world demand,” said Anyika. “Even when you solve for access, the quality drops as more people connect.” Media King believes its model addresses both the technical and commercial challenges. By partnering locally, the company avoids the heavy upfront costs typically associated with infrastructure deployment, instead focusing on operations, workforce development, and market expansion. Crucially, the service will be free for end users, a non-negotiable, according to Kraljević. “It must be free, because someone else pays,” he said. That “someone” is expected to come from a mix of advertisers, government use cases, and data-driven services built on top of the network. Media King’s platform includes an integrated digital layer that turns each WiFi hotspot into a communication and advertising channel. When users connect, they can be directed to targeted content, public service announcements, or brand campaigns. Beyond advertising, the system also offers anonymised data insights, such as foot traffic and dwell time, to help businesses and governments make decisions about urban planning, service delivery, and customer engagement. The company says it has already deployed the model in Croatia, where its network supported public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is now exploring similar use cases in Nigeria, spanning education, healthcare, and local government services. However, expanding into Nigeria comes with notable execution risks, particularly on the regulatory front. As of 2026, the introduction of the Internet Code of Practice has tightened oversight, clearly defining the obligations of Internet Access Service Providers, including those offering public WiFi hotspots. Under NCC guidelines, commercial or public WiFi is no longer plug-and-play—operators must obtain a valid ISP licence, typically renewable every five years, and register each hotspot location with the Commission. Media King, however, maintains that it does not require additional licencing because it operates on existing public WiFi frequencies and partners with local internet service providers. The company also plans to fully localise its deployment, from data infrastructure to operational teams, to reduce latency and better align with regulatory expectations. Initial rollouts are expected later this year to target high-density urban areas and underserved communities with limited broadband access. In some cases, the company says it could combine its system with satellite connectivity, such as Starlink, to extend coverage to remote locations without traditional fibre infrastructure. For now, the focus is on getting the first deployments off the ground. The company says it is already in discussions with government and private sector partners, with early rollouts expected this year. “We spent years proving this system works,” Kraljević said. “Now we are ready to take it global, and Africa starts with Nigeria.”
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I built a product in 20 minutes with Projectmaven
In my short life on earth, I have started many businesses. In 2020, I was making face masks. One year later, I was convinced skincare was my calling, so I started making black soap. Now, that idea never made it off the ground because I never quite mastered the craft, but for a while, I was all in. Then there was the online restaurant, freelance gigs, a brief attempt at making clothes, and a handful of other ideas that felt just as promising at the time, but sometimes, translating those ideas into a product that actually worked was difficult. Recently, I found myself once again sitting on a product idea that felt exciting but slightly out of reach. This time, I wanted to try something different instead of letting it sit in my notes like many others before it, and that was how I ended up on Projectmaven. Founded in March 2026 by Olaotan Towry-Coker, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded AfriTickets, a ticketing platform, and Cranium One, a Coworking space, Projectmaven is designed to turn an idea into a product. “I have been building in the tech space since 2011,” Towry-Coker told me when we spoke last Friday on the phone. “Non-technical founders who are trying to build technical products typically run into a layer of friction, which is that if you don’t understand the technical aspect of what you’re building, you’re going to run into problems when you have to describe it to your developer.” Projectmaven is his attempt to remove that friction. The platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to take a rough idea and turn it into a structured plan with proposed features, target users, third-party integrations, technical architecture, timelines, and cost estimates. How Projectmaven works I get a lot of messages—emails, SMS, WhatsApp—sometimes simultaneously. To reduce the overwhelm and make responding easier, I dreamt of an app that could notify me of a message with a summary of what the sender said and three possible replies I could tap to send. That was the idea that I took into Projectmaven. When I loaded the website, it started with a single prompt asking for my idea, and I typed it in as it was in my head. Typing my idea into Projectmaven. Image source: TechCabal From there, Projectmaven began a nine-step process to help me figure out what my product was. The first step is product description, where the AI agent reflected my idea to me in a more structured format. It broke down what it understood I was trying to build and how it would work. It also highlighted the parts of the app I had not thought about, such as access to third-party messaging apps, privacy concerns, and difficulties in accurate message summarisation. It showed me similar existing products and suggested ways my version could stand out. Towry-Coker explained that Projectmaven uses a mixture of OpenAI and Gemini frontier models for its tasks. “We’ve implemented fine-tuned prompts, custom prompts that allow the system to understand the client’s request,” he told me. “What it’s doing is that it takes the idea, does a web search, crunches all the data points, and then it presents the data in a fixed format.” Projectmaven’s breakdown of my idea. Image source: TechCabal The next step is selecting the product scale, where the AI agent prompted me to choose if I wanted the product to be extra small, small, medium, or large, depending on my goal. I selected a small-scale product, basically a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). According to Olaotan, every choice a user makes at each step determines the result in subsequent ones. “Every step has an output that we’re trying to achieve… when you’re speaking to an AI agent, the prompt essentially dictates the outcome that it gives you,” he said. “We fine-tuned our prompts to specifically focus on each step that we’re building upon.” After selecting the scale of my product, the website prompted me to choose my target audience for the app. The AI agent recommended options based on my idea, which included busy professionals, business owners, customer support agents, gig workers, and visually impaired users. In the next step, I had to select features, out of a curated list, that made sense for the product I described. It allowed me to either accept them or tweak them. I didn’t have to do either because I hadn’t thought that far. I selected the agent’s recommendations and moved to the next step, integrations. Step 5: Integration. Image source: TechCabal At this stage, it was getting more technical as I had to select the external tools and Application Programming Interface (APIs) the product would need to function, such as Gmail APIs, AI models for summarisation, and messaging systems. After integrations, it moved into design preferences, where it displayed different visual directions the app could take, prompting me to pick one. The next step was technical integration. This is where users start seeing things like React Native, Firebase, Flutter, and native iOS—mobile app development and backend service platforms. The user could either choose themselves or let the platform decide for them. On any other day, this is where I would check out, but I let Projectmaven choose. From there, it moved to the developer experience, which required me to select what level of developer I needed and showed estimated hourly rates. I chose a junior developer. I then selected a timeline, determined by how complex a product is and how fast a user wants it built. Twenty minutes and nine steps later, Projectmaven generated a full project summary detailing cost estimates, a statement of work, a product requirements document, design direction, technical stack, and integrations. Product summary by Projectmaven. Image source: TechCabal For my app, it estimated a cost of about $5,720 over 160 hours, and broke the cost estimate down by feature, hours required, and the developer rate I had selected. Projectmaven goes a step further, allowing users to start building the app on rapid AI app builders
Read MoreAHL Venture Partners spent a decade doing equity in Africa. Then it chose debt.
Rosanne Whalley has been investing in Africa for 17 years. In that time, she has done early-stage equity, growth-stage equity, debt, fund investments, and mezzanine structures across several African countries. She has seen what works and what does not. She believes that the financial performance of Africa’s investment industry has been mixed, and most investors are only now starting to reassess how capital should be allocated on the continent. Whalley thinks debt funding is the best option for investors and founders. Whalley runs AHL Venture Partners, a Nairobi-based impact-focused venture capital firm founded in 2007 by a high-net-worth European family that wanted to support African entrepreneurs. For over a decade, AHL did a bit of everything, issuing equity cheques, fund commitments, and debt deals while building networks and learning the hard way what the continent rewards and what it punishes. Around 2020, the family behind AHL gave Whalley and her team a rare gift in African institutional investing: a blank canvas. No limited partner mandates. No sector restrictions. They gave her just one question: What can make money and have a durable impact? The answer they arrived at was private credit. Debt recycles faster than equity in African markets, the returns are more predictable, and the liquidity profile lets you fund more businesses over time, Whalley said. AHL cleaned up its legacy equity portfolio and reoriented around lending to scaling businesses with strong cash flows and management teams that do not go quiet when things get hard. The firm has now invested in over 35 businesses and is raising a dedicated debt fund to scale the strategy. But Whalley’s read on the broader market is sharp. She thinks impact investing has underdelivered financially, that development finance institutions treat private credit managers more as competition than partners, and that loading early-stage founders with sustainability and gender requirements before they have found product-market fit does more harm than good. In our conversation, Whalley and Kerry Nasidai, AHL’s investment manager, walk through why they abandoned equity for debt, how they price currency risk when lending in dollars in Africa, what red flags make Whalley walk away from a founder, and where she thinks African private credit is heading. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. AHL moved from equity-type investments to debt. Why did that transition happen? Kerry Nasidai: We’re in a unique position in that we have quite a long history. We were founded back in 2007 by a high-net-worth European family who had done some work on the continent and were thinking about how they could support the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Africa. At that initial stage, it was very much about supporting the ecosystem from different angles. That meant doing some very early-stage equity investments, but also debt investments, mezzanine-type products, and even fund investments. We did that for years, building our networks and expertise with each new deal. Then, around 2020, there was an internal reframing of how we make all the impact we are creating sustainable. That ended up looking like: can we shift our focus more toward debt investments? There were a couple of reasons. Debt is more liquid and still very important to the market, but you can also be more prudent in how you deploy capital. The liquidity profile is quite different, and the returns profile is also quite different from equity in the African market. From 2020, Rosanne took over with this new strategy, which was primarily increasing our debt investments but also helping to clean up our equity and fund portfolio. The aim was to create a more sustainable structure for AHL because with more sustainability, more money comes back in, and we are able to support more businesses across the continent. Now we are at a very interesting stage where we are looking to set up a separate fund, building on the expertise we have developed since 2007 and the strong track record we have shown on debt. There has been more interest from the initial family that set up the foundation capital, but also from other investors we have interacted with. We are now in the process of beginning to close another fund, focused purely on debt. Rosanne Whalley: I have had the opportunity of investing across the region for the last 17 years, across everything from early-stage and growth-stage equity, debt, and fund investments. We had a very unique opportunity in 2019 and 2020, where we did not have a top-down strategy or mandate. If you think about it, most funds are dictated by their source of capital. LP capital tends to drive behaviour and strategy, especially in Africa, where a lot of capital is still development finance institution (DFI) and impact-driven. In our case, the family behind AHL essentially said: you as a team, work out what can make money and have a durable impact. That forces you to step out of “this is what I need to do” and instead think about what works, based on everything you have seen and where the market actually is. Because we had experience across fund investments, equity, and debt, and we were seeing how each was performing, we could assess what truly works for entrepreneurs, investors, and capital allocators in the region. That’s how we landed on the private credit strategy. Even within private credit, we’re not a typical lender. We want to partner with strong teams building defensible business models at scale and then finance them over a long-term journey. Over that journey, they will need different types of capital, like senior secured working capital, mezzanine financing, or bridge funding, at different points. What’s been a privilege at AHL is that we’ve been able to build this strategy bottom-up. That’s often not the case. Usually, strategies are dictated top-down. I think that’s been a key part of our ability to pivot and execute in a way that is actually working and now scaling. You’ve been investing in Africa for two decades. What’s the biggest structural shift you’ve seen
Read MoreSMC DAO acquires Nigerian crypto startup Bread Africa in six-figure deal
SirMapy and Co. decentralised autonomous organisation (SMC DAO), a community of crypto traders and investors that backs and builds Web3 products, has acquired Nigerian crypto startup Bread Africa in an undisclosed all-cash six-figure deal. The deal adds to a growing list of acquisitions among local crypto startups and reflects the steady consolidation underway in Nigeria’s digital asset ecosystem. In 2025, crypto startup Roqqu acquired Flitaa, an exchange platform with operations in Nigeria and Kenya, for an undisclosed amount. In Bread Africa’s case, the acquisition deepens an existing relationship between the buyer and the founder: its chief executive officer, Iam Etefia, previously sold two earlier ventures, Peniwallet and Peniremit, to SMC DAO in 2023 for $250,000. Founded in 2025, Bread Africa operates as a web-based crypto application that allows users to convert digital assets into local currency. The product stripped away the typical barriers associated with crypto transactions, with no sign-ups, no wallet connections, and no Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, offering what Etefia describes as a “frictionless” experience. Behind that simplicity was a more complex setup. Bread Africa ran on several blockchains, including Base and Solana, but ultimately settled transactions in compliant naira (cNGN), the naira-backed stablecoin, on Base to make transactions faster and cheaper. The platform converted crypto funds into cNGN and paid them directly into users’ bank accounts, enabling near-instant crypto-to-fiat conversions. Bread Africa also attracted early ecosystem backing. The startup received grants from cNGN, Base, and blockchain infrastructure provider Alchemy, reflecting its early integration into emerging crypto rails tied to the Nigerian market. “We integrated them [cNGN] without even having a relationship with them,” said Etefia in an interview with TechCabal. “We saw what cNGN could do and believed the naira could be spent globally, not just in Nigeria, so we built around that.” The startup, run by a three-person team, including Etefia, his co-founder, Maven Harry, and a community manager, had processed over $1.8 million in total payment volume (TPV) at the time of sale, according to Etefia. The acquisition transfers all of Bread Africa’s operational and branding assets to SMC DAO, which has long sought to own an exchange product within its ecosystem. Etefia will remain involved in an advisory capacity, consulting on Bread Africa’s development, while stepping back from day-to-day operations. His team, however, is moving on. Etefia and his co-founder will now focus fully on Loaf, a separate product they are building independently of the acquisition. The product is a significant expansion of Bread Africa’s original concept. Loaf goes beyond simple crypto swaps and functions as a “Web3 bank,” allowing users to spend crypto as easily as cash, including paying bills, buying airtime, and making cross-border payments without relying on traditional exchanges. For Etefia, selling Bread Africa and continuing to advise on it frees up his small team to concentrate on Loaf, which he argues has a much bigger upside. SMC DAO, the acquiring entity, operates as a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), an online community that pools funds and votes on what products to build or buy, similar to Shiba Inu and PEPE. For the community, Bread Africa is a ready‑made product that already helps people cash out of crypto into bank accounts. Under its new ownership, Bread Africa, which is currently under maintenance, will keep its core operational identity. “Bread Africa will remain a seamless web-based app with no sign-ups, wallet connections, or KYC required,” said an SMC DAO spokesperson. “We’re going to position the product as the go-to swap for cryptocurrencies.” The organisation is positioning the platform as a go-to destination for swapping digital assets, similar to decentralised exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap and PancakeSwap, which let users trade cryptocurrencies directly without intermediaries. SMC DAO also plans to evolve Bread Africa into a broader financial gateway that functions as an on-ramp, enabling users to exchange fiat for cryptocurrencies, and an off-ramp, to go back to cash. This is similar to how services like MoonPay work with crypto wallets such as Phantom, enabling users to buy and sell digital assets using traditional payment methods. Future iterations of Bread Africa will include support for multiple currencies, fiat-to-fiat conversions, and access to tokenised assets, such as stocks and commodities, which are digital versions of real-world financial instruments that can be traded on the blockchain, according to SMC DAO. As part of its post-acquisition strategy, the organisation has said it intends to transform Bread Africa into a “swap everything” platform, enabling users to move between crypto, fiat, and other digital representations of real-world assets. While the deal is modest in size and scope, it highlights a familiar pattern in Africa’s tech scene: small teams building focused products, testing user behaviour, and exiting early, often to ecosystem players looking to assemble broader financial platforms piece by piece.
Read More“I wasn’t aiming for Eventbrite, I was aiming for Ticketmaster”: Day 1 to 1000 of Jetron Ticket
Damilola Jerugba describes his interest in building things as a fascination with how things work and come together. He said he taught himself how to code through Udemy courses and YouTube tutorials, and then went on to work as a software engineer at companies like Reddit, Moniepoint, and Busha. At Reddit, he worked on the advertising team, helping build the infrastructure companies use to run campaigns. At Moniepoint, he worked on customer support tools as a senior frontend engineer, and at Busha, he worked as a backend engineer. These experiences, he said, shaped how he thought about performance, reliability, and building systems that worked at scale. “These weren’t just jobs; they were an education I brought back into Jetron Ticket every single time.” The idea for Jetron Ticket came when his close friend, Jemedafe Caleb, who organised events and parties, needed coordination and a more reliable way to manage attendees. Jerugba saw it as a problem to solve and an opportunity to sharpen his coding skills. He co-founded with Akinkunmi Solomon in 2022. In its earliest version, Jetron Ticket was an online ticketing platform where event organisers could create events, sell tickets, and manage check-ins through a dashboard. Operated by a 10-person team, the platform gradually grew from a side project to one that supports events across multiple Nigerian cities, including Lagos, Kaduna, Plateau, and Rivers. Nigeria’s events scene has expanded rapidly in recent years, driven by music, nightlife, and cultural moments like Detty December, the festive period from mid-December through the New Year. defined by partying, concerts, and festivities. In 2025, Lagos recorded nearly ₦400 billion ($290 million) in consumer spending during the period, with over ₦129 billion ($93 million) going to entertainment and nightlife alone, according to a report by YC-backed fintech, Cowrywise. What pushed Jerugba into ticketing was what he described as a gap between demand and infrastructure. “When Jetron Ticket started, there wasn’t much out there to help organisers run professional events,” he said. “The infrastructure serving that market still hasn’t caught up with the demand.” Day 1: The missing emails and the founder who did almost everything Jetron’s first day was at a Y2K-themed party organised by the same friend whose problem led Jerugba to build the product. He had spent two months building the platform’s first version: users could create events, attendees could buy tickets, receive QR codes, and get scanned in at the venue. It worked, mostly. But the gaps became obvious quickly. The platform had no system to store customer emails, which meant that there was no way to build a user base or follow up on attendees after the event. To improvise, Jerugba and his team asked attendees for their names and email addresses at check-in and then typed them into an Excel spreadsheet, one by one It was slow and made check-in more tedious than it needed to be, but it was the only workaround the team had. There were other problems. Some attendees completed payments but didn’t immediately receive their QR codes. Because the team was still small, Jerugba handled most of those issues himself. “I was handling everything during that time,” he said. “I handled the entire software development life cycle, customer support, and check-ins, meaning I went to the events to help them with scanning to make sure everything went well.” The missing email system was one of the first things the company fixed after that debut event. Payment confirmation was overhauled so tickets could be delivered reliably. With each new event, Jerugba said, the rough edges from that first night were addressed one by one. Day 500: Growth came, and so did the bills By Jetron’s 100-day mark, something had started to click. The platform had grown beyond the initial circle of friends and was showing up across different cities, without a marketing strategy in place, according to Jerugba. “Once someone uses our platform for an event… attendees who also organise events will look at our platform and use it,” he said. For what started as a side project, he didn’t hide his surprise at the traction it was getting, particularly when he received a customer support request for an event in Kaduna, one of the most populous cities in Northern Nigeria. As usage grew, so did the demands of running the business behind it. From its inception, Jetron was sustained by Jerugba and his co-founder’s salaries, channelled directly into the company. According to Jerugba, the team was spending over ₦1.6 million ($1,160) monthly on salaries alone, with labour accounting for the bulk of its costs, followed by infrastructure and third-party tools required to keep the platform running. It worked for a while until Jerugba lost his job at Reddit in 2023 when his contract role ended. While Jetron was generating revenue, it wasn’t enough to cover costs, and letting employees go wasn’t something he was willing to consider. For about three months, Jetron ran entirely on his personal savings. “It was a tight window, but because our infrastructure costs were lean, the platform stayed live throughout.” His understanding of the industry itself was also deepening. Working closely with event organisers, especially during peak periods like Detty December, exposed Jerugba to the mechanics of the market. He began studying global players in the ticketing space like Ticketmaster and StubHub, learning how they handled growth, their unique features, how their systems were structured, and how they supported large events. That research shaped Jetron’s direction. In 2023, Jetron introduced new features, like seat mapping, to give attendees more control over where they would sit at an event, believing it would bring a level of structure that mirrored more mature ticketing systems. Over time, the product expanded to include tools like group tickets, promo codes, and curated guest lists—features designed to reflect how people actually attend events in Nigeria, often in groups or through coordinated access. Eventually, revenue began to reflect Jetron’s growth and match its costs. According to Jerugba, Jetron processed over ₦60 million ($43,000) in ticket
Read MoreTelkom Kenya is now Kenya’s smallest mobile operator after two-year slide
Telkom Kenya has fallen to the country’s fifth-largest mobile operator, down from third place just two years ago. Its subscriber base shrank to roughly 744,500 by December 2025, down from 1.34 million in December 2023, according to Communications Authority (CA) data. The decline marks one of the sharpest contractions among Kenyan operators over that period, as Equitel and Jamii Telecommunications both overtook it. The decline came even as the broader market expanded. Over the same period, Safaricom grew to 52.3 million subscriptions and Airtel to 22.3 million, widening their lead, while Equitel and Jamii Telecommunications held or expanded within specific segments. The shift points to a market that is no longer just led by a dominant incumbent but increasingly defined by scale at the top and clear positioning among smaller players. Telkom has lost ground in absolute terms and slipped between these two ends of the market without a clear base to defend. Part of the decline is tied to network performance. The CA’s quality-of-service data shows Telkom trailing competitors on call stability and availability, a gap that weighs more in a prepaid market where most users can switch providers at little cost. In that environment, even small differences in reliability tend to translate quickly into churn, particularly among price-sensitive users, a segment Airtel targets aggressively. Infrastructure constraints compound the problem. Telkom’s long-running dispute with American Tower Corporation (ATC) over tower access and outstanding fees has threatened site shutdowns and limited the operator’s ability to maintain consistent coverage. That tension has made it harder to sustain network quality or expand capacity at a time when rivals have continued to invest, reinforcing a cycle in which weaker service feeds subscriber losses, which in turn constrain further investment. At the same time, Telkom’s market position has become harder to define. Safaricom continues to anchor its dominance in network reach and its mobile money ecosystem, while Airtel has combined lower pricing with improving coverage to add millions of users since 2023. Smaller operators have avoided direct competition by focusing on narrower use cases, with Equitel operating as the telecom arm of Equity Bank and Jamii Telecommunications targeting data-driven segments. Telkom’s slide suggests that operators without either advantage face growing difficulty holding on to users as competition sharpens.
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Regulatory Passporting and the Future of Cross-Border Fintech in Africa
Africa’s fintech giants are already regional, but regulation isn’t When Nigerian fintech companies expand across Africa, the technology often travels easily. Payments APIs integrate quickly, merchants understand the products, customers adopt digital wallets and online checkout tools without much friction. Regulation, however, does not travel as easily. A fintech that is licensed in Nigeria must often repeat the entire licensing process when entering another African market, navigating new capital requirements, compliance rules, reporting standards, and supervisory expectations. The result is a fragmented regulatory landscape that many fintech founders say slows expansion across the continent. This challenge sits at the centre of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Fintech Policy Insight Report, which explores the potential role of regulatory passporting in reducing duplication across jurisdictions. According to the CBN survey, 62.5% of fintech stakeholders already operate in or plan to expand into other African markets, and the same share supports the development of a regulatory passporting framework. The message from the ecosystem is clear: African fintech companies want to scale regionally. The question is whether the regulatory architecture of the continent is ready. Infrastructure matters as much as regulation Nigeria hosts one of Africa’s largest fintech ecosystems. Startups such as Flutterwave, Paystack, and Fincra now power payment infrastructure, merchant acquiring tools, cross-border settlement networks, and financial APIs used by businesses across multiple African markets. Yet each new market often introduces a different regulatory environment. Fintech operators expanding regionally must secure local licences, meet jurisdiction-specific capital requirements, and build relationships with local banking partners and regulators. These processes can take months and sometimes years. Passporting, Fincra argues, would also fundamentally reshape partnership models: by shifting relationships away from local intermediaries engaged purely for regulatory access toward partners focused on payment system connectivity, liquidity management, and settlement efficiency. But reducing licensing duplication, while necessary, may not be sufficient. Even operators who have cleared the regulatory hurdle find that the practical mechanics of cross-border payments introduce a separate layer of complexity. Expansion ambitions meet regulatory fragmentation Even when regulatory approval is secured, fintech companies must still navigate the practical mechanics of cross-border payments. These include foreign exchange constraints, liquidity management, settlement timing, and interoperability between payment systems. Nigeria’s domestic payments system offers an example of what coordinated infrastructure can achieve. The country’s instant payments network processed nearly 11 billion transactions in 2024, according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS). Nigeria’s scale is significant in global terms and has shown how large domestic payment rails can become foundational infrastructure for digital financial ecosystems. Yet, scaling such systems across borders introduces new coordination challenges: from fraud monitoring and dispute resolution to identity verification and settlement oversight. Transaction volume alone, however, does not define interoperability. In Paystack’s assessment, the gap between infrastructure progress and commercial reliability is where the most consequential work remains, particularly around data sharing, identity verification, and what merchants actually experience at the point of settlement. Passporting may start with bilateral corridors While passporting is often discussed as a continent-wide framework, the CBN report suggests that implementation may begin with smaller regulatory pilots. Survey participants proposed exploring bilateral cooperation between Nigeria and several peer regulators, including those in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Senegal. Such pilots could test mutual recognition of licences while regulators coordinate supervisory standards and consumer protection frameworks. They could also allow countries to experiment with payments system interoperability, particularly between markets with strong digital financial ecosystems. One example mentioned in the report is the possibility of testing interoperability between Nigeria’s and Ghana’s payments systems to support real-time cross-border settlement. These experiments could complement continental infrastructure initiatives such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which aims to enable instant cross-border payments in local currencies across participating African markets. For operators who have navigated Africa’s licensing landscape firsthand, passporting is less a destination than a foundation. Flutterwave, which has expanded across multiple African markets without a passporting framework in place, sees the bilateral corridor model as the right sequencing. How passporting works in other financial markets The idea of regulatory passporting is not unique to Africa. In the European Union, financial institutions licensed in one member state can operate across the bloc under passporting frameworks embedded in regulations such as MiFID II. This system allows banks, investment firms, and fintech companies to provide services across 27 EU countries without having to secure a licence in every country. The European Union’s Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) framework, for example, allows investment funds authorized in one member state to be marketed across the entire bloc, while Singapore’s Monetary Authority has pursued cross-border regulatory cooperation agreements to support fintech innovation. These precedents matter for Africa, but they do not translate directly. The EU’s passporting architecture was built on decades of regulatory convergence across economies with comparable institutional maturity. African regulators are now exploring whether similar coordination models can work across a continent with far more diverse regulatory environments, deeper infrastructure gaps, and a much shorter history of cross-border supervisory cooperation. The operators and investors who have engaged most closely with this question are clear that the concept is sound, but that the conditions which made it work elsewhere will need to be deliberately constructed here, not assumed. Why regulatory alignment matters for Fintech capital Beyond operators and regulators, passporting also matters for capital. African fintech startups attracted $1.38 billion in venture investment in 2025 alone, yet investors continue to weigh regulatory complexity when assessing cross-border expansion strategies. Growth investors often evaluate markets not only on demand and revenue potential, but also on regulatory predictability and the cost of expansion. However, regulatory alignment alone does not determine fintech success.Market depth, customer adoption, and strong product execution remain decisive factors. In that sense, passporting may reduce friction in scaling across markets, but it does not replace the fundamentals that ultimately drive company performance. As Lexi Novitske, partner at Norrsken22, noted in response to the CBN report, the practical implementation of new regulatory frameworks will matter as much as the concept
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