Kenyan Solar Company D.Light Lands $22.5 Million To Fund Growth

In a week which saw Yahoo announce that it had suffered the worst cyber-breach in history, and all three of Egypt’s incumbent mobile telcos opting not to bid for the 4G licenses being floated by the Egyptian government, Kenyan solar company, D.Light, shone brightly by announcing that they had raised $22.5 million in funding from leading VC’s, debt financiers and non-profit organisations. The money will be used to grow D.Light’s PayGo business globally— a pay-as-you-go offering which enables low-income customers to buy solar products on credit.

D.Light has already made its mark by delivering affordable solar-powered solutions in Africa, China, South Asia and the United States. The company has so far sold more than twelve million solar light and power products in 62 countries, and aims to light up the lives of 100 million people by 2020.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Nicholus, one of our US-based listeners, shares insights he gleaned at Intercommunity— the Internet Society’s annual global membership meeting which took place across various live locations around the world last week. Nicholus attended one of the sessions held in Washington DC, and emailed us a report via audio note which touched on why some US lawmakers are continuing to challenge the merits of allowing internet governance to shift from the United States to the international body, ICANN.

Also in this week’s show is a conversation I had with the four co-founders of a promising South African start-up called Airbuy— a business which plans to help people convert airtime into “airbucks” that they can use to purchase goods and services online. The chaps are still celebrating their recent win at an MIT Global Startup Labs competition hosted at Wits University, and they let me take a peek under the hood of their passionate entrepreneurial hustle.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Afrimarket Lands €10 Million To Deploy E-commerce Platform Across Francophone Africa

The French e-commerce startup, Afrimarket has raised €10 million from the Global Innovation Fund and the private sector arm of the French Development Agency (AFD), Proparco, as well as from a handful of individual investors such as the co-founder of PriceMinister, Olivier Mathiot, who’s been granted a seat on Afrimarket’s board.

At a glance, the company seems to have it made– except that growth within the e-commerce sector across the continent has consistently failed to meet expectations, and foreign-owned, foreigner-run e-commerce copy-cat plays backed by the likes of Rocket Internet continue to have precious little to show in terms of solid success.

The bottom line is that this is Africa, and Afrimarket’s founder and CEO, Rania Belkahia, better have a few good tricks up her sleeve, including a tonne of patience and access to a lot more cash, if her company is to achieve its ambitious aspiration of dominating the French-speaking West African e-commerce market.

Then, in this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, we share a conversation I had with Ernesto Spruyt, the founder of Tunga, an online market network that provides international clients access to African coding talent. He also happens to serve as Chief Mentor for Telegraph Media Group’s DigitalX accelerator program in Amsterdam.

Ernesto speaks on what prompted him to come to Africa looking for coding talent, and shares some of key things African coders who aspire to having international careers ought to be keeping top of mind.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.

Chef Tips With Lesego Semenya

In this instalment of #AndilesTake, I catch up with my mate, Chef Lesego Semenya, a year and a half or so after he first shared the vision for his LesDaChef fine dining brand with me.

I’m fascinated by the level of focus and intentionality this Soweto-native, and Prue Leith Chefs Academy graduate in Centurion brings to his culinary hustle, and I take great pleasure in celebrating the fact that since we last spoke on mic, Les has been named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans, dubbed a rising star by House & Leisure, appointed consulting chef to a number of leading luxury gourmet food and drink brands, recruited as resident culinary expert at a handful of South Africa’s leading radio stations and tv networks, extended his reach on social media and now serves as a judge on SABC 3’s prime time tv show, Top Chef South Africa.

That said, I consider his greatest achievement to be the fact that despite all the success he’s enjoyed, Les remains as genuine and down-to earth as when I first met him at a killer gourmet home cook-out he hosted six odd years ago.

My First VR Interview

Check out my very first VR interview, courtesy of Julian Von Plato, the kleva behind BalconyTV Johannesburg and many other cool projects. In this chat I share about my journey to becoming an entrepreneur, broadcaster and new media specialist, as well as give my top tip to youngsters who aspire to having a successful career in media. Let’s go! 🚀

Will Consolidated Media Plays Disrupt Telcos?

One of the more surprising things that came out of a recent conversation I had with BT’s Managing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa, Oliver Fortuin is his answer when I asked him (somewhat unfairly) what disruptive trend could potentially render BT redundant in the next decade. His answer? The trend towards consolidated media ownership. Listen in to this week’s African Tech Round-up to hear Oliver unpack that answer.

Meanwhile, the French Urban television network Trace TV’s acquisition of Kenyan, pan-African VOD service Buni.tv made headlines last week. Buni.tv is believed to be one of the largest African VOD services offering home-grown content. Trace TV has revealed that this acquisition is part of their plans to gear up for the launch of a VOD platform called Trace Play later in 2016.

Now, I reckon that aside from keeping an eye out for competitors like iROKOtv, DSTV and Netflix, aspiring VOD service providers like Trace TV would do well to anticipate the moves being made by the likes of South Africa’s Telkom, Zimbabwe’s Econet and offshore players like BT— because by Oliver’s own admission, incumbents like BT don’t plan to quietly “stay in their lane” and watch the world pass them by.

Vodacom Admits That M-Pesa Roll-out In South Africa Flopped (feat. Dominique Collett)

So, Vodacom is finally pulling the plug on their disastrous six-year attempt to roll out M-Pesa in South Africa. (The service will be shut down on June 30th 2016.)

Funny thing is, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub has blamed his company’s diabolical failure to meet their target of enlisting at least 10 million active users on South Africa’s relatively well-established banking industry. (By the end of 2015 they had only managed to onboard a paltry 76,000 active users.)

However, Joosub’s assertion does not sit well with our guest on this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up— the brilliant and insightful, Dominique Collett.

Dominique knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t in terms of mobile money innovation on the continent. Following a successful exit at the incredibly successful fintech startup she co-founded– Tyme (acquired by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for a rumoured ±USD30 million), Dominique has gone on to become a financial services investor and innovation architect who is now a Senior Investment Executive at Rand Merchant Insurance Holdings (RMI), as well as the Head of Alpha Code, RMI’s nippy financial services incubator/accelerator.

Listen in to this week’s discussion to hear Tefo Mohapi, Dominique and I ponder what lies ahead for Africa’s mobile money scene.

Doing Social Business With Gys Kappers

Anyone who’s ever heard Gys Kappers speak will know how passionately he advocates for organisations to be super-intentional about systematically tapping every single employee— from the top to the very bottom of their structures, for game-changing insights and wisdom that can otherwise easily go ignored.

In the latest episode of African Tech Conversations, Gys shares an incredible story of how an idea put forward by an entry-level factory worker helped the concrete masonry business he had a hand in building (the largest privately-owned business of its kind in South Africa at the time) stay afloat during the early to mid 2000’s.

But it was a chance encounter with a fellow MBA student at the University of Cape Town following that seminal experience that would lead Gys to co-founding “social business software and collaboration company”, Wyzetalk— which is currently leading the charge on the continent to persuade companies to adopt social business software to achieve collaboration, open innovation and communication objectives.

Listen in for the whole story.

Hanging With Mark Kaigwa, Thebe Ikalafeng & Rebecca Enonchong

This week’s instalment of the African Tech Round-Up was recorded at the African Media Leaders Forum, which wrapped in Johannesburg on the weekend. And what a treat it is!

“It’s a blessing to be born in Africa, and to be an African.” –Sugun Agbaje 

The show is an all-Africa affair — what with Mark Kaigwa stopping by. Mark is easily one of Kenya’s leading proponents of social media, as well as a respected innovator within digital tech in general. He is also the Founder and CEO of the Nairobi-based digital agency, Nendo Ventures— well-known for the Nendo Social Media Trend Report. You can look forward to hearing his insider’s take on several of the week’s biggest stories.

*TV informercial voice* But that’s not all… Cameroonian tech entrepreneur, Rebecca Enonchong, and South African business, branding and marketing legend, Thebe Ikalafeng, both make unexpected guest features on this week’s episode.

Rebecca shares some strong views on whether she thinks the MTN will actually pay the $5.2 billion fine levied by the Nigerian Communications Commission, and Thebe drops some wisdom around what Africa’s “new breed” of techies need to do to attain global relevance.

Check it out!

Pursuing Excellence With Dominique Collett

I’m sure many of us can relate to being let down, or at least disillusioned with our careers when we were in our early twenties. In the latest instalment of African Tech Conversations, Dominique Collett-Antolik shares how she experienced a complete meltdown based on her disappointment with how little she had achieved in life by the age of 23. You see in her eyes, her gig at that age— being an investment banker at Standard Bank, was simply not good enough. After all, the dolls she played with as a child had been “23-year-old lawyers and astrophysicists”.

Yes, folks. We’re dealing with a serious over-achiever here— a force of nature whose journey through life has led her through the corporate halls of some of the world’s leading investment banking institutions and consulting firms.

Following a successful exit at the incredibly successful fintech startup she co-founded, Tyme (acquired by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for a rumoured ±USD30 million), Dominique has gone on to become a financial services investor and innovation architect who now inhabits a senior role at Rand Merchant Insurance Holdings. She is no doubt one of the most talented, well-informed and influential players on South Africa’s innovative fintech scene.

What Are You Going To Do When They Come For You?

Think back to high school. Remember how the new dude always got all the girls whispering, or how the new girl got all the boys trying to walk her home? Now, if the newbie rolled into town with discernible signs of affluence (i.e. dope clothes, or an expensive scent), the singles market would get particularly frenzied. And when the newbie possessed a hint of exoticism (i.e. a foreign accent, or an unusual taste in music), even the kids involved in some of the most stable couplings might start feeling the pressure to reevaluate their options.

In this week’s African Tech Roundup, Tefo Mohapi and I discuss the pressure African tech startups are feeling in the face of local markets being invaded by experienced and well-resourced foreign-based interests. Local incumbents in many sectors of tech now find themselves fielding competition from abroad. In everything from venture capital investment to mobile money solutions, media streaming platforms and e-commerce solutions, the race to dominate is well and truly on.

In the light of all this, I pose a simple question, “What are you going to do when they come for you?”

This week’s episode will feature some insights from Nubi Kayode that may help us all find confident answers to that question. Nubi is a Nigerian Business Analyst at Accenture Ireland, and Managing Partner at DevShackAlpha.co.  He co-founded EasyAppetite.com— Nigeria’s first online takeaway site in 2012, and managed to survive railroading attempts by foreign-backed competition, and set himself up to make a successful exit in 2014 when his company was acquired by CityChops.

Be sure to catch all the week’s most important digital, tech and  innovation news from across the African continent:

• Find out about a Zimbabwean high school dropout who’s built an electric powered vehicle and a hybrid helicopter,
• Discover which two foreign money transfer firms have teamed up and become the latest to launch into Africa,
• Learn more about Kenya’s admirable obsession with building their own laptops,
• Hear what you can do to extend the runway for struggling Cameroonian startup, KwiiziBox, and
• Get the low-low on a South African-based video-on-demand platform that is calling it a day.