Africa’s Real Gold Mine Isn’t Underground
The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt, the mineral every electric vehicle on earth…
Tony Ajah
<a href="https://www.tonyajah.com/" target="_blank">Tony Ajah</a> is an entrepreneur, a business growth strategist, a thought leader, an author, a trainer, a professional speaker, and a business mentor. He provides strategic business support services for entrepreneurs, SMEs, and organisations in Africa. He is the acting editor of TechTrends.Africa
The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on roughly 70% of the world’s cobalt, the mineral every electric vehicle on earth…
A brilliant idea dies in Africa almost every day, not because it lacked merit, but because it lacked money at…
The day a serious competitor enters your market is the day your company finally finds out what it’s made of….
There is a boardroom in Lagos where the walls are lined with maps of oil blocks, and three streets away,…
In 1991, a handful of Indian engineers in Bangalore were writing code for American banks that had never heard of…
Nigeria has oil. The Democratic Republic of Congo has cobalt, the mineral powering every smartphone and electric car on earth….
Walk into any tech hub in Lagos, Nairobi, or Kigali on a Tuesday afternoon, and you will find brilliant people…
In 2007, a telecom company in Kenya launched a text-message-based service to let people send money to each other, and…
Every month Nigeria spends waiting on a finished AI law is a month a fintech in Lagos ships a credit-scoring…
There’s a market woman in Onitsha who will let you take goods on credit and pay next week, no paperwork,…
A bank teller in another country once watched an elderly woman withdraw a large sum of cash, hands trembling, voice…
Africa does not have a resources problem. It has a distribution problem, and technology is the fastest bridge we have…
Most founders walk into investor conversations carrying one thing they shouldn’t: confusion. Not confusion about their product, but confusion about…
A teenager in Lagos taps his phone to pay for jollof rice. A small-business owner in Cape Town swipes a…
There’s a particular kind of founder you meet in Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra who hasn’t read a single pitch deck…
Nobody tells you this early enough: you don’t need a title to lead, and you don’t need permission to create…
Every week, someone tells me that AI will run businesses in five years. My answer is always the same: a…
Africa’s technology story is, by most measures, one of momentum. Startups are scaling. Mobile money has become infrastructure. AI policy…
For decades, the story of banking in Africa has been one of absence. The branches are too far away. Documentation…
Africa has the highest share of women STEM graduates in the world. That fact alone should have reshaped its technology…
Africa’s creative sector, spanning music, film, fashion, and digital art, is expanding at a pace that is difficult to ignore….
Africa feeds over a billion people, yet the continent imports more than $40 billion in food annually. That contradiction sits…
For years, the dominant narrative around African technology went something like this: a promising but fragile ecosystem, perpetually waiting on…
Every week, Nigerian organisations absorb an average of 4,701 cyberattacks. South African firms faced a 36 per cent year-on-year surge…
There is a familiar pattern in how the world discovers African culture. The music travels first — Afrobeats fills clubs…
Every few years, a company does something that quietly shifts the competitive ground beneath an entire industry. Sometimes it is…
For much of the last decade, the ambition was simple: build something that looked like Silicon Valley, just set it…
Africa has a youth problem in the most consequential sense. The continent is home to the world’s fastest-growing youth population,…
Every functioning digital economy runs on a layer most people never see. In mature markets, this layer includes trade associations…
The rules have changed. Across Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, and Dakar, the founders raising money today are not the ones who…