South Africa’s Health Minister Joe Phaahla has announced that children and teens between 12 and 17 will now be able to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The announcement came during a media briefing Friday morning, where Phaahla confirmed that the decision was influenced by recommendations made by the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on vaccinations during a…
Sudanese classifieds and marketplace platform alsoug has raised US$5 million in Series A funding in a round that includes Egyptian fintech unicorn Fawry. Founded in 2016, alsoug is Sudan’s largest classifieds platform, and the startup has raised a US$5 million Series A funding round in order to build out an associated fintech platform, Cashi. “From our earliest beginnings…
With IT job vacancies continuing to climb as companies struggle to recruit and obtain critical skills in South Africa, there is an opportunity to upskill or reskill individuals to meet this demand. Prudence Mabitsela, founder and MD of Dynamic DNA, a leading training and skills development company empowering Africa’s ICT generation, believes these skills are…
DATE: October 29, 2021 (10am – 12pm EST) LOCATION: Virtual THEME: Global Health and Mental Wellness in a Post Pandemic World? What’s Next?” MEMO: An initiative hosted by the Global Startup Ecosystem in partnership with Google Cloud, AWS, IBM Cloud, Hubspot, Sendgrid, & More with 10 Global Speakers and 3,000 Digital Delegates for the day…
Impact Africa Network is creating From Here Ventures, a $25 million venture capital fund that will invest in African firms. From Here Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in extraordinary entrepreneurs that are building revolutionary businesses in Africa. Impact Africa Network, a non-profit startup studio founded in 2019, is now in its…
You have heard about Rent Small Small, right? Well, the Nigerian property technology startup that is reorganising the home rental market has been accepted to join the Techstars Toronto Accelerator Programme starting this October. Rent Small Small is just celebrating its third year anniversary. Techstars is an operational investment company that helps founders and early-stage entrepreneurs scale their…
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has called on countries to make digital data flow for the benefit of all. On this, UNCTAD said the world needs a new global governance approach to enable digital data to flow across borders as freely as necessary and possible. The UN trade and development body…
IHS Towers is the biggest operator of mobile phone towers in Africa. It also has presence in the Middle East and South America. The company first made attempt to list its shares on Wall Street back in 2018, but the market sentiments weren’t quite positive enough. A total of 22,500,000 units of shares are set…
Payments company Stripe announced it’s building out a new crypto team to help build out the “future of Web3 payments,” according to public statements posted to Twitter on Tuesday. Stripe, which had once been among the first to support Bitcoin payments before leaving the market a few years ago, has been watching for the right time to get back…
South African student housing marketplace DigsConnect has secured a ZAR3 million (US$200,000) grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation to help university students from low-income backgrounds secure safe and affordable accommodation. Launched in 2018, the DigsConnect platform allows landlords, estate agents and property managers to post their property listings, with students then searching and filtering through these listings to…
Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it has expanded its Azure Availability Zones, making them generally available in the Johannesburg data centre region (SA North) of South Africa. Azure Availability Zones form an important building block of comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy by ensuring resiliency and availability of business-critical applications and data through modernised…
French President Emmanuel Macron has made a new EUR130 million (US$150 million) commitment to support 500 African startups as part of a rejigged Digital Africa initiative. Launched in 2018 with the mission to equip African tech entrepreneurs with capabilities to design and scale up ground-breaking innovations for the real economy, Digital Africa brings together startups, academia, incubators, institutional…
There is good news for companies who wish to keep their data safe, and who are opposed to paying hackers ransom money in order to have critical data returned in the event of a hack. This input comes in the recent announcement that global giant Microsoft, the American multinational technology corporation, is investing in cloud…
Sudanese classifieds startup, alsoug has received a $5 million investment co-led by Egyptian fintech company, Fawry. The investment is the first foreign investment into the Northern African country since sanctions were lifted in 2020. alsoug is Sudan’s largest classifieds marketplace and allows consumers to buy and sell products including real estate, cars, electronics, and furniture as well…
WhatsApp is a breeding ground for scams and fake news that has gone viral, and while the Facebook-owned chat platform says it tries its best to scour these from its service, many still seep through. “We work diligently to reduce any spam messages that come through our system. Creating a safe space for users to…
Alphabet’s Google will tell its cloud customers the carbon emissions of their cloud usage and open satellite imagery to them for the first time for environmental analysis, as part of a push to help companies track and cut carbon budgets. The new features were among announcements Google Cloud made Tuesday to kick off its annual customer conference,…
Eden Life, Africa’s first home services app for scheduling food, laundry and cleaning services, has completed a $1.4m Seed round, led by UK-based LocalGlobe, along with participation from Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital. This brings Eden Life’s total investment to date to $2m following pre-seed backing from all of Andela’s original co-founders, and additional accelerator…
Microsoft Africa Development Centre (Microsoft ADC), the premier Engineering Center for Microsoft, has announced the commencement of its Game of Learners Clinic, a 3-month intensive programme for students in the university and beginner developers across West Africa. The programme is scheduled to commence in October 2021 and will allow participants to level up on .Net,…
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos, professionals and experts in the technology sector have stressed the importance of technology in the drive towards the smart city project of the state. Specifically, Governor Sanwo-Olu expressed his administration’s commitment to greatly invest in technology, which according to him, is critical to the development of the state and nation…
After testing last month, Twitter is rolling out a feature to all web users that will let them remove followers without blocking them. This safety feature can be helpful if you want to avoid the repercussions of blocking someone — if a blocked user navigates to your profile after you block them, Twitter will tell them that…
A massive 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps) Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack has been mitigated by Microsoft, the company says. The attack targeted an Azure customer in Europe and was 140% higher than the highest attack bandwidth volume Microsoft previously recorded in 2020. This attack occurred in early August of this year and is currently believed to have…
MTN Uganda is offering free shares to Kenyan investors in a bid to motivate them in buying stocks in the telecom firm. MTN Uganda yesterday opened an initial public offering (IPO) at $250-million yesterday. South Africa’s MTN Group is currently selling 4.47 billion shares in its Ugandan arm at a price of Ksh6.20 ($0.056) per…
Internet security provider Kaspersky has blocked more than 206,000 mobile malware attacks across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) region in just 6-months measured, between January to June 2021. Out of these attacks, a combined 30,000 originated from Nigeria (14,071), Kenya (10,697), and South Africa (5,499), respectively. Significantly, for the African countries monitored, Nigeria…
There is a persistent issue when it comes to the lack of education and how it contributes to the cycle of poverty, especially in underdeveloped areas of the world. According to UNESCO, more than 617-million children worldwide are lacking knowledge in basic subjects. The situation is alarming in Sub-Saharan Africa where out of 100 children,…
The successful completion of the Azura Edo 450 MW gas-fired power project in 2016 was hailed at the time as setting the blueprint for future independent power projects in Nigeria. The $900-million plant, which gathered 20 international banks and equity financing partners from more than nine countries, took over six years of project development and…
MyBroadband Insights has released its Q3 Mobile Network Quality Report, which shows the network quality of several of South Africa’s top telecoms gauged by a number of factors, including download and upload speeds, and latency. The report is based on results recorded between 1 July 2021 and 30 September 2021. The download speed (60%), upload…
Sixteen seed and Series A level African tech startups have been named finalists for the 2021 VC4A Venture Showcase, which will see them pitching to potential funders at the Africa Early Stage Investor Summit next month. Since 2017, the VC4A Venture Showcase has helped startup founders showcase their businesses to investors during the Africa Early…
Global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) have announced a new partnership to establish connections between African healthcare innovators and AstraZeneca’s A.Catalyst Network of more than 20 global health innovation hubs. The joint venture seeks to drive the development of engineering solutions that have the potential to address local challenges with…
Tunisian last mile delivery startup Lamma has secured an undisclosed investment from Orange Ventures to fuel its international expansion. Founded last year by Hamza Guesmi and Koussi Aymen, Lamma recently launched its q-commerce – “quick commerce” – app, offering delivery services in under 45 minutes. The startup began life as a carpooling service before it pivoted into…
African unicorns have made big news in recent months, with four startups having recently reached a $1 billion valuation or more this year alone, taking the total up to seven. Two of the new entrants are in fintech, one in edtech, and one in general technology. These and other technology-enabled sectors are where emerging market investors are…