Mastercard Launches 2KUZE Agtech Marketplace For Farmers In East Africa

Several well-respected voices we featured on the show last year predicted that we would see some major Agtech plays happen in 2017. 

Sure enough, Mastercard made headlines last week for launching a digital marketplace platform called 2KUZE which connects smallholder farmers, agents, buyers and banks in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The app allows farmers to buy, sell and receive payments for agricultural products via their feature phones.

If this initiative works half as well as we hope it will, it should make a heck of a difference to small-scale farmers looking to sell their produce to the right buyers more efficiently and at the best possible prices.

This week’s African Tech Round-up features a conversation I had with Katherine Liew. Katherine is the Head of Digital Disruption at Barclays Africa. Given what’s fixing to be an exciting year for fintech on the continent, I was keen to tap Katherine’s mind to get a sense of how one the continent’s largest banking incumbents is going about keeping up with the frantic pace of innovation within the financial services industry.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

Unpacking Africa’s Solar Power Revolution With Chad Larson Of M-KOPA Solar

This week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up features a snippet from my full-length sit-down with Chad Larson— one of the three founders of the Kenyan solar power start-up M-KOPA Solar. Chad serves as the company’s Finance Director and Chief Credit Officer. He has lived in Nairobi with his wife and three boys since the company launched in 2011.

Chad is a qualified CFA and an Oxford MBA who previously served as the CFO of the Africap Microfinance Investment Fund, based in Johannesburg, and prior to that, he spent 10 years in the investment banking division of Bank of America in Sydney and New York, working on fixed income, structured finance, and derivative transactions.

M-KOPA Solar is aiming to be a $1 billion company by providing pay-as-you-go energy to off-grid homes. To that end, the company successfully closed a $19 million round of financing led by Generation Investment Management LLP in December 2015.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

Kenyan Agritech Startup WeFarm Secures $1.6 Million In Funding

How much of an over-achiever is Elon Musk fixing to become, though? In the last week, he’s added providing global internet coverage via a massive satellite network to his audacious To-do List. In this week’s African Tech Round-up, I reflect on how Musk’s latest ambition might upset net neutrality watchdogs around the world who might not trust SpaceX to responsibly execute on something they don’t trust the likes of Google and Facebook to do.

Also on this week’s show is more about perhaps the most publicised tech investment news of the past week, the $1.6 million investment haul made by the Kenyan agritech startup WeFarm. It’s exciting to see agritech startups start to excite the global VC community. It’s absurd how millions of people on the continent go hungry every year despite how well-endowed Africa is in terms of natural resources. It’s about time we harness tech to work smarter, improve our yields, and get food to hungry people not just on the continent, but wherever it’s needed around the world.

Finally, listen in to hear my conversation with Milena Taieb, Head of Video for France, Africa and the Middle East at Believe Digital Studios— the world’s leading multi-channel network (MCN) specialising in multi-platform distribution, audience development and content monetisation. Milena reveals how Believe has upended the traditional music and video production business, and how despite the plethora of self-publication platforms available to creators today, success is predicated on executing a killer digital strategy.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com

The Kenya Revenue Authority Says Uber Will Not Be Subject To Value-Added Tax

In this week’s African Tech Round-up, we ask the question, “Should Uber’s wings be clipped before they change the world as we know it?”

Lawmakers on the continent appear torn between adopting the pragmatic approach of embracing technological innovation and actively resisting the very real threat of change bringing with it the decimation of the traditional livelihoods of thousands of people who are simply not prepared or willing to adapt.

In the past week, the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has declared that for tax purposes, it will treat Uber as a technology company, rather than a transport company (meaning Uber needn’t pay Value-added Tax), while in South Africa, the Competition Commission has dismissed complaints brought against Uber by the SA Meter Taxi Association who accused the ride-hailing service of anti-competitive behaviour. But in Nigeria on the other hand, Lagos State politicians are reportedly putting pressure on Uber to operate based on the old taxi franchise system in a bid to protect incumbents within the existing taxi business from disruption. Who’s got it right, do you think?

Also in this week’s podcast, Nick Saunders of email security firm, Mimecast, joins Andile Masuku to discuss the recent hacking allegations at Kenya Commercial Bank that we covered in last week’s show, as well as to unpack the diabolical DDoS attack that ground Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix and others to a halt in the US last week.

 

Kenya Commercial Bank Gets Hacked?

So, Episode 80 of the African Tech Round-up, aka the episode that nearly never happened, is finally out.

In an interview I just taped for the upcoming season of the African Tech Conversations series, Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer of M-KOPA Solar, Chad Larson, shared words he lives by that epitomise why I’m glad the team and I didn’t give up on publishing the podcast this week— despite the ridiculousness that made it nearly impossible to do so. “Done is always better than perfect,” he said. So, here it is.

There’s no doubt that this has so far been a bumper year for the world’s hacking community. Last week, one of Kenya’s biggest banks, the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), spent a fair amount of energy trying to convince its customers that their personal data remains uncompromised– this, following claims by a certain programmer who goes by @IrakChris on Twitter claiming to have accessed KCB’s client data through vulnerabilities found in the bank’s mobile app.

Meanwhile, Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Reddit, Yelp, Netflix, and The New York Times suffered easily one of the world’s biggest coordinated distributed denial of service (aka DDoS) attacks last Friday which led to the sites either slowing to a snail’s pace or being knocked out altogether.

For all the details on these stories and more, tuck into this week’s show, and be sure to tell us what you make of the week’s headlines on Twitter, or via email.

 

Rwanda Launches World’s First Drone Delivery Service

Rwanda has helped Africa beat the rest of the world to rolling out a commercial drone delivery service.

The land of a thousand hills has partnered with the UPS Foundation, Gavi, and the Californian drone startup, Zipline, to start using drones to deliver life-saving medical supplies to hard-to-reach places in the country.

Zipline’s autonomous drones will now fly blood and plasma to places where poor road conditions often result in delays to time-critical deliveries of medical supplies for hours or even days. With drones, delivery time is reduced to minutes, even in bad weather. Take that, Amazon!

Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up is high-profile tech investment news involving Naspers, MTN, as well as William Kirsh-led Triptech Media’s 20% acquisition of the social transit application GoMetro— a startup which seems to be generating a fair amount of investor interest at the moment.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.

 

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.

 

Barclays Africa’s Blockchain Transaction A World First

It’s been a busy week for the continent’s fintech scene.

The past week saw MTN South Africa announce that it would be discontinuing its mobile money service due to “a lack of commercial viability”. This revelation comes just months after Vodacom South Africa ended its catastrophic attempt at copying and pasting Kenya’s M-Pesa magic.

Meanwhile, Madagascar became only the second African country after Tanzania to to roll out mobile money interoperability across the country’s mobile networks.

But easily one of the catchiest headline stories of the past week was about Barclays Africa’s involvement in what’s being celebrated as the very first blockchain verified financial transaction in the world by a major banking institution. The pilot deal between The Seychelles Trading Company Ltd. and Ornua saw the two companies harness a blockchain platform developed by Wave to trade a letter of credit. This transaction has to be Barclays’ most overt show of confidence in the potential of blockchain technology to deliver improved efficiencies in international trade.

Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up is a discussion I had with the Kenyan journalist, Eric Mugendi. Eric is Editor-at-large at iAfrikan.com, and also writes for his Tumbler called Kenyan Longreads. Eric joined me on the show to discuss the controversy that unfolded on Twitter around the African Tech Summit happening in London on September 29th. The event’s conspicuously mostly male, non-black/non-African speaker list included folks many people in the Twitterverse did not feel were representative of Africa’s tech ecosystem, and also managed to leave out many worthy participants. Eric and I went about unpacking the issues at play.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.

Not-so-little Trademark Faux Pas Leaves Safaricom and Craft Silicon Red-faced

Safaricom and Craft Silicon both took an “L” this past week.

As it turns out, they neglected to trademark the Little Cabs brand name before launching their ride-sharing service some weeks ago. And now,  they’ve had to drop the word “Cab” from their brand after the “Little Cab” trademark-holder went to court to defend his right to use that name. From now on, whey are to be known as Little.

The whole situation is embarrassing to say the least, and reminds me of the wisdom Alpesh Patel shared with me in a taped conversation I had with him some months ago, about how important it is to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” when it comes to securing one’s commercial intellectual property. Nevertheless, I’m sure the folks at Safaricom and Craft Silicon learned their lesson.

This week’s African Tech Round-up also features a chat I had with Brendan Horan. Brendan is an executive vice president of MiX Telematics— a fleet and mobile asset management solutions business that’s listed on both the Johannesburg and the New York Stock Exchanges, as well as the Managing Director of MiX Telematics’ African business.

Listen in to hear how Brendan’s company goes about applying a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model to deliver solutions to customers in more than 120 countries around the world, how the global AI and machine learning trend is impacting their corporate’s strategy, and how Brendan deals with the challenge of growing the firm’s African business in hugely varied markets across the continent.

Will Facebook’s OpenCellular Crush BRCK?

Ever since my in-depth conversation with Barclays Africa’s Stephen van Coller some weeks back, I’ve been both fascinated and frustrated by his view that the likelihood of big players like financial institutions, mobile telcos and digital media giants being completely disrupted by smaller, innovative startups is low because of the extent to which the incumbents operate at such massive scale and possess well-protected access to markets.

Last week, the global digital behemoth that is Facebook announced that they’ll be rolling out the OpenCellular system worldwide. OpenCellular is said to be an inexpensive, weather-resistant and fully customisable platform that will be able to serve as a wireless access point for connecting devices using 2G, LTE or even Wi-Fi.

While this move by Facebook is no doubt just a footnote in the company’s playbook for achieving complete digital dominance, one wonders if this could signal the beginning of the end for the likes of Kenya’s BRCK— a home-grown system designed to do exactly what OpenCellular promises to do, perhaps less reliably.

One wonders if there is any chance that a minnow like BRCK can stand up to the fire and might of a beast like Facebook? It seems unlikely that BRCK has captured enough of the affordable WiFi deployment market to develop a legitimate first-mover advantage, and it’s equally unlikely that anyone over at Facebook is losing any sleep worrying about their plans being disrupted by smaller players.

Also in this week’s show, we share a snippet from a conversation I had with Gareth Cliff— the controversial South African Radio DJ, Idols South Africa judge, and Co-founder & President of Africa’s largest podcast producer, CliffCentral.com. Listen in to hear Gareth’s candid take on why he quit one of South Africa’s most lucrative radio gigs to found a platform that now boasts over 40 podcast titles and garners over 140,000 downloads per week.