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.

 

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.

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.

Uber Domination

Despite the considerable push-back Uber has experienced in certain African markets, the firm’s march towards utter and complete world domination continued last week as they launched in Tanzania’s capital city, Dar es Salaam.

Dar es Salaam is the 3rd African city Uber has taken to in as many weeks (following Luanda, Uganda and Accra, Ghana) and their 475th location worldwide. Since launching in Johannesburg in 2012, Uber has quietly gone about silencing many of the doubts that sceptics have had about the viability of their business model in African markets that typically show little regard to hype-driven startups that roll in from the West expecting an easy ride. (No pun intended.)

Basically, what might have appeared to some as being a casual African safari is gradually developing into a case study on lean, mean execution. Only time will tell if a home-grown platform like Little Cabs— the ride-hailing service Safaricom is set to launch, will be able to rain on Uber’s parade.

Be sure to listen into this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up to hear my chat with Matthew Lee— a plumber turned corporate executive who now heads up African operations at the German open source software firm, Suse.

Matthew shares insights on how well Africa is keeping up with the rest of the world in terms of producing world-class software applications, and points out key growth areas that could benefit from the increased roll-out of OSS solutions.

First published on AfricanTechRoundup.com.

Mbwana Alliy Talks About Startup Governance & Funding Tech Startups In Africa

I attended Afrikoin Johannesburg last week. One of the stand-out interactive panel discussions hosted at the conference saw participants enthusiastically promoting the merits of bitcoin and various other applications of the blockchain.

However, a question I posed led to a very lively debate about whether improved “access” to seamless, more affordable financial services does in fact equal “inclusion” for Africa’s poorest— especially given how centralised the world’s computing power is, and how huge stashes of bitcoin are held by a relatively few well-resourced interests.

I put the same question to founder and managing partner at Savannah Fund, Mbwana Alliy— who Tefo Mohapi and I caught up with for a chat after the conference. We were lucky enough to get his response to my question on tape, in a recorded conversation that ended up being over an hour long.

In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up (the last full-length episode of 2015), you can not only look forward to listening to our impromptu chat with Mbwana in its entirety (including him sharing his thoughts on the Angani debacle), but you can also look forward to hearing two leading Zimbabwean startup founders enlighten us as to why Zimbabwe might be the perfect use-case for disruptive fintech innovations.

Then heads up, folks! For the next four weeks starting next week, in place of our regular podcast programming we’ll be sharing exclusive content from the Annual Round-up 2015 event we hosted at the Wanderers Club, Johannesburg 2 weeks ago.

We’ll kick things off next week by sharing a conversation we had with Senior Investment Executive, RMI Holdings, Dominique Collett-Antolik and CEO & Founding Partner, Convergence Partners, Brandon Doyle around tech in enterprise. Don’t miss it!