Facebook today announced the winners of the 2021 Facebook Community Accelerator Program, highlighting the 13 Facebook community leaders from Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya who will receive training, mentorship and up to $50,000 USD in funds to invest in an initiative that extends their community’s positive impact. The 13 winners emerged out of over 13,000 applicants…
With Africa’s startup ecosystem worth put at $6.6 billion, over 90 per cent of these funds are currently concentrated in five cities including Cape Town, Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Accra. This is one of the key findings in the latest Global Start-up Ecosystem Report 2021 (GSER 2021), compiled by Startup Genome and the Global Entrepreneurship Network….
In today’s rapidly changing financial world, businesses are continually innovating to satisfy dynamic client expectations while adhering to severe regulatory standards. As these businesses spread their services across multiple locations, expanding distributed systems becomes increasingly difficult. To shed light on the complexities of this topic, Olamiposi Ogunyemi, a Senior Software Engineer with almost a decade of…
If you’ve ever tweeted something innocuous that went on to kick off a firestorm of unwanted attention, you know full well that people on Twitter will fight about anything and everything — it’s the internet’s premier destination for high-speed, low-information opinion slinging, after all. Twitter has been working on ways to tone down the toxicity…
WhatsApp for Android is in testing a profile photo privacy setting that will let users hide their profile photos from specific contacts, according to a report. The custom privacy setting may come alongside the existing options to let you show your profile photo to everyone, all contacts, and nobody. The change is said to be…
Huawei’s, annual flagship event for the global ICT industry – HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 – kicked off on Sep 23, 2021. Eric Xu, Huawei rotating chairman, opened the event with a keynote speech titled “Innovating Nonstop for Faster Digitalization”. This year’s event, themed “Dive into Digital”, explores how digital technology can better integrate with business scenarios…
African Development Partners III Fund (ADP III) has surpassed its US$800 million target and is set to close at US$900 million, with an additional US$250 million in dedicated co-investment capital, according to Development Partners International, a premier investment firm focused on Africa. This takes the total amount invested on the continent to US$1.15 billion. ADP…
According to Keith Kalyegira, Chief Executive Officer of the Capital Markets Authority, the initial public offering (IPO) of telecommunications company MTN Uganda is expected to raise approximately $1.2 billion. MTN Uganda has previously announced that it had received approval to float 20% of its stock. MTN Uganda intends to launch an initial public offering (IPO) and list on…
At a virtual event on Wednesday (Oct. 6), Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said his company will invest $1 billion in Africa over five years to build a subsea internet cable, support nonprofits, and fund businesses. The cable, named Equiano after the Nigeria-born 18th-century abolitionist, has been in the works since 2019 when it was first announced. It…
The Healthcare Innovation Summit Africa (HISA) returns on the 17 and 18 November 2021. There is simply no other event in Africa like HISA2021 – this virtual congress seeks to join the dots between innovation and practicality, presenting the latest healthcare technologies and showcasing their practical application and integration into existing healthcare infrastructure. Join IT News Africa at this year’s summit…
Telkom South Africa has launched a new set of postpaid promotional deals and prepaid LTE deals offering more value to its mobile customers. These new data price reductions come not long after the semi-private telco announced its 1GB mobile data bundle reduction to R79 and the introduction of a new and affordable 1.5GB + 1.5GB All Network…
MTN Group has announced the appointment of Adekunle Awobodu as its new Chief Financial Officer for Digital and Fintech. According to a statement from MTN, Awobodu is a seasoned business and finances professional who has spent most of his career at MTN, including serving as CFO for MTN Nigeria for 4 years, having started as…
The central bank of Zimbabwe has added 47 more people to its blacklist for allegedly using social media to advertise and facilitate unlawful foreign exchange transactions and money laundering. According to John Mangudya, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, 30 people were “blacklisted and prevented from accessing financial and mobile telecommunication services for the…
Ghana Tech Lab has partnered up with a number of partners for the fourth edition of the Ghana Startup Summit, which will take place in Accra over the course of a week. The theme of this program is “Enterprise Innovation and Youth Employment at the Center of Ghana’s Digital Drive,” and it is primarily focused…
AppsFlyer, the marketing measurement and experience platform, has released their 2021 edition of its State of eCommerce App Marketing report, outlining key global trends to guide marketers in building a mobile-first experience that will drive engagement and sales for the upcoming holiday season. Having analysed over 750 million app installs across 7250 apps, and 3 billion remarketing…
A few years ago, the majority of South Africans had never made a single purchase online. Today, the local e-commerce market has experienced a massive boom as lockdown restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19, made online shopping feel like the safer, and sometimes the only, option for consumers. According to a 2018 report from shopping…
Seven African startups are among the eight selected to take part in the inaugural cohort of the Last Mile Money Accelerator, a four-month programme managed by IDEO and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim of the Last Mile Money Accelerator is to supercharge inclusive fintech startups with grant capital, world class…
Moroccan B2B e-commerce and fintech startup Chari has raised a US$5 million seed round which values the company at US$70 million and sets it up for expansion into French-speaking Africa. Founded last year by husband and wife team Ismael and Sophia Belkhayat, Chari.ma allows traditional proximity store owners in Morocco to order products and have them delivered….
South African prop-tech venture building group Castle One has received a “significant investment” from HL Hall and Sons Holdings in a deal it says will unlock new, synergistic value for the benefit of the real estate industry, both locally and abroad. Founded by tech entrepreneurs Jonothan Rawson and Mark Forrester, Castle One has been active in the…
Nigerian fintech startup Bitmama has closed a US$350,000 pre-seed funding round to grow its operational presence, expand its team, and penetrate new markets across the continent. Launched in 2019, Bitmama provides a secured blockchain infrastructure that allows users across Africa to transact Bitcoin, Ethereum, Celo and six other cryptocurrencies. With users across Nigeria and Ghana, Bitmama has…
Keeping track of your finances can be one of the most important things you do. It allows you to manage your money and it will help you determine what you should spend your money on and what things might be better to wait on or go without for now. It’s now easier than ever before…
Contactless payments made using mobile phones will almost double over the next two years – twice as fast as the growth of contactless card payments. A study by Juniper Research found that the volume of mobile contactless transactions rill rise from 26 billion in 2021 to 49 billion in 2023, driven by enhanced security, convenience,…
Kenyan agri-tech startups have been invited to apply for the O-Farms accelerator programme, which is focused on circular agribusiness with the goal of making circularity a mainstream approach for improved rural livelihoods and sustainability. Funded by the IKEA Foundation, O-Farms is led by Bopinc and Village Capital and is focused on accelerating the next generation…
Much like my compadre, Jerry Hildenbrand, I buy tech across a wide range of popular brands. For me, there’s really no such thing as “brand loyalty” as I, too, just want to be able to use “cool tech.” But there’s one section of the tech market I won’t touch anymore: any Android-brand tablet. I’m not here…
Tunisian data management and analysis startup Biware has raised a MAD3.5 million (US$1.2 million) seed funding round to help it expand its team and launched new branches. Founded in 2011 by Mohamed Amine Boussarsar and Walid Kaâbachi, Biware assists businesses in extracting value from their data for strategic purposes, such as increasing revenues, lowering costs, and reducing…
South African startup Stone Three, a leading industry 4.0 solution business that combines expert services with the power of machine learning to solve problems that increase operational productivity and keep people safer, healthier and happier, has raised expansion funding from Knife Capital. The end-to-end solutions for AI-augmented digital productivity, health and workplace safety offered by Stone…
Facebook had its largest outage ever that took down WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and even Facebook’s internal tools for over six hours on Monday night. The social giant blamed the outage across its platforms on configuration changes made to routers that coordinate network traffic. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our…
Peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency trading platforms are now the engine of growth as Africa pulls ahead of the rest of the world in grass-roots adoptions of virtual cash. Retail-sized transfers make up a larger share of the continent’s cryptocurrency activity on the continent with P2P enabling the practical use of digital money. In countries like Nigeria and…
The Airtel Africa Group has announced the new appointment of Olusegun “Segun” Ogunsanya, as its Managing Director (MD) and CEO. Ogunsanya took the helm of the group as of 1 October 2021. This comes as former CEO, Raghu Mandava, who led Airtel Africa since 2016, was announced to be stepping down from the company’s board of directors…
YouTube announced on Monday that it’s expanding video action campaigns (one of Google’s interactive ad types for video) to connected televisions (CTV) to make YouTube ads more shoppable. The company says this new move will help advertisers drive more online sales and grow their businesses. For context, when viewers see a video action campaign on…