Category: Tech

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Tech

What’s Really Happening With Crypto in Africa?

Reading Time: 22 minutes

Cryptocurrencies seem a world away, lost amid the lofty towers of finance in New York and London. But look closer at Africa, where ordinary people propel peer-to-peer digital assets in everyday transactions.

Far from speculative bets made by suits behind screens, individuals across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and beyond use stablecoins for escaping inflation or sending cross-border payments.

Unencumbered by institutional inertia, African users rapidly build this parallel financial universe brick by brick.

How do Africans navigate this new web of decentralized finance in practice?

Journey with me across borders and wallets to glimpse how and why crypto takes roots at the grassroots.

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The Hard Things About Subscription Payments in Africa

Reading Time: 15 minutes

Over the last few years, there have been many developments in the consumer payments space in Africa, led by the explosive growth of mobile money. It doesn’t seem to be slowing down ever since its introduction over fifteen years ago.

Despite this, online subscriptions still seem incredibly hard to crack for most countries.

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The Fight for Mobile Money 2.0

Reading Time: 17 minutesUnderstanding the complex continental war to be the digital bank for the African consumer.

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How banks are becoming telcos and telcos are becoming banks in Africa

Reading Time: 9 minutesTwo very important days in your life as an African are the day you get your first phone and the day you open your first bank account. Are these days about to become a thing of the past?

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How a 20-year Old Mobile Technology Protocol is Revolutionising Africa (With Numbers)

Reading Time: 8 minutesEvery time you dial *XYZ# to check the airtime balance on your phone, you are using a decades old technology standard called USSD. For a very long time, that’s pretty much all it was used for, but now the game has changed.

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Why Your African Parents Don’t Believe in Your Crazy Dream + Why You Can’t Blame Them but Should Pursue It Anyway

Reading Time: 7 minutesBeing a member of Generation Y is tricky. For those who may not be in the know, Generation Y basically refers to millennials, basically, persons reaching young adulthood around the year 2000. People like me-ish (If you consider 2012–16 close enough to the year 2000 to count.

It’s extra tricky (but statistically more awesome — I’ll explain in a minute) if you’re a member of Generation Y and born African. You may find yourself frequently torn between the principles and habits that you learned from your native culture and those you may have adopted from foreign influences.

It’s difficult to describe, but those who have experienced this know exactly what I’m talking about.

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Life Sucks in Africa

Reading Time: 5 minutes… my typical day in tech on the “dark” continent.

Most days I wake up pretty late. 8am on a good day. The first thing I do is reach out for my phone. I check the time, and scroll through a series of notifications to find out whether or not a server just exploded, or more realistically, if a Russian bot finally discovered the SSH port of my production server and client emails have been down for 6 hours.

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The Biggest Battles I Face As an African Technology Entrepreneur are in The Mirror

Reading Time: 7 minutesSometimes I’m the biggest impediment to my own progress.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences as a tech entrepreneur in Africa. I had told my friends that I’d write a second post if I got 15+ recommends.

I didn’t really expect it to be “good enough” to go viral, but that article now has over 490 recommends and has been republished on Startup Grind. The republished article has picked up 50+ more recommends and is growing by the day. I guess I’m not doing too bad.

And yet somehow, I still d̶i̶d̶n̶’̶t̶ don’t feel confident about publishing this post. My mind has a funny way of playing tricks on me, often leading me to overestimate my ability in certain areas and underestimate them in others.

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What It’s Really Like to Be Young, Black, and an African Tech Startup Entrepreneur (in Africa)

Reading Time: 11 minutesRight then, back to the main topic. Being a startup founder anywhere in the world is incredibly hard, but in Africa, it’s a special kind of organised chaos.

It’s not pretty.

I’m nearly 24 years old, and over the last 8 years, I’ve built and launched 3 technology companies in Africa across different verticals in two countries. The first one when I was 16 years old — I didn’t even know that it was a startup at the time, and it failed.

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Who’s the Fastest of Them All? Airtel Malawi vs TNM Malawi (3G Internet Speed Test)

Reading Time: 5 minutesSo, tonight, I decided to benchmark my mobile phone connections.

From all the media and advertising, it would appear that both Airtel Malawi and TNM Malawi claim to have the fastest mobile Internet in Malawi.

It’s obvious that at least one of these claims must be false, and I just wanted to find out the truth.

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