Touted the largest ever startup fund in Africa, Timbuktoo Africa Innovation Fund will commit $350 million of risk-tolerant capital to help attract an additional $650 million from private investors, Eleni Gabre-Madhin, Chief Innovation Officer at UNDP Africa told TechCabal via email. “What we’re trying to do is make it more attractive for domestic capital to come in at earlier stages… venture capital in Africa needs to be riskier,” Gabre-Madhin said at the launch event in Davos.

Timbuktoo will provide financing for accelerators and venture builders from the $350 million, including investments of up to $800 million in venture firms in 8 African countries alongside private partners. These details have not been previously reported.

The funds will “make pre-seed, seed, and pre-Series A investments on an equity basis to startups,” Gabre-Madhin said. In Casablanca, Morocco, funds from Timbuktoo will target tourism and hospitality startups, in Dakar, Senegal it will target edtech. In Lagos, Nigeria, Timbuktoo and its commercial fund partners will focus on fintech startups, while in Accra, Ghana it will focus on agritech. In South Africa, Capetown’s hub will target creatives, with Greentech being the focus in Nairobi, Kenya. The Rwandan hub in Kigali will focus on health tech. Trade, logistics and e-commerce will be the fund’s focus in Cairo, Egypt. The fund will work with local universities to support tech ventures.

Foreign development banks are major contributors to the venture capital African startups have received. Institutions from the International Finance Corporation and the European Investment Bank have backed first-time fund managers in Africa like Ventures Platforms, and Atlantica Ventures. Managers of Boost Africa, a venture capital facility run by the European Investment Bank are currently in the final stages of talks with the European Union over a new €159 million facility, Déborah Vouche, a private equity investment officer at the bank told TechCabal.

Kigali’s rising fortunes as a financial centre

The fund will be managed from Rwanda, a boon to Kigali’s financial centre Ambitions. Established in 2020, Kigali International Financial Centre is the #3 financial centre in Africa, only behind Casablanca in Morocco and Mauritius according to the latest ranking from the Global Financial Centres Index. At the launch event on Tuesday in Davos, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame made the first public commitment of $3 million to the fund. 

“The decision to domicile the Timbuktoo Africa Innovation Fund within KIFC reaffirms our attractiveness as an international financial services hub,” Jean Marie Kananura, Chief Investment Officer, Rwanda Finance Limited, the parent company of the Kigali International Centre told TechCabal.

Leading fintech firms like Flutterwave, Chippercash and Onafriq have opened offices in the country and say they plan to make Kigali their payments hub for East Africa.

 In June this year, Flutterwave one of Africa’s most-valued privately held fintech, announced a similar plan after it acquired a payment service provider (PSP) licence in Rwanda.

Nala Money, which allows residents in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States to send money to 9 African countries, recently acquired a licence from Rwanda’s apex financial regulator, the National Bank of Rwanda. The licence will allow the company to cut out middlemen and offer cheaper international money transfers, Nicolai Eddy, chief operating officer of Nala told TechCabal. “It means we can aggregate the payment channels ourselves,” Eddy said, “We want to go deeper and a PSP licence also means that we can process remittance payments for third-party providers and  integrate with local banks and telcos.” 

A PSP licence in Rwanda means NALA can offer money transfer services through established players like Western Union, potentially opening up a new distribution and customer acquisition front for the business. Previously a fintech like NALA would have to rely on payment aggregators like Cellulant, DPO Payment or Onafriq (previously MFS Africa) in order to disburse payments to its customers in Rwanda. Per the World Bank, remittances as a percentage of GDP reached 3.6% ($474 million) in 2022. Altogether, Kenya Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda received roughly $6.36 billion in remittances last year, World Bank data shows.

Rwanda hopes to become a leading hub for financial services firms. The 2022–2027 fintech plan of Rwanda’s ICT Ministry says it hopes to build, “the narrative that Rwanda is the gateway for entering the African fintech market.” Some of the continent’s biggest fintechs already operate in the country with ChipperCash and Paystack being the most recent entrants.

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame formally opened Norrsken House Kigali. The 12,000-square-metre campus is a $20 million bet by Sweden’s Norrsken Foundation that Kigali will become a nerve centre for African technology companies.

“Rwanda is an excellent testbed and a proof-of-concept hub,” said Niklas Adalberth, the 42-year-old founder and chairman of the Norrsken Foundation in his keynote address. If the Kigali hub is successful, Norrsken will set up similar hubs in other countries. The foundation defines success as being the home for billion-dollar impact businesses and a thriving community of companies that could create profitable businesses that are a net positive for the planet.

It’s a big win for Rwanda; with a gross domestic product of around $13 billion and growing public debt, the country needs private-sector investment. “The country can be small but the value we create can be very high,” President Kagame told guests at Norrsken Africa Week.

Adalberth was only 24 when he co-founded Klarna, the Buy-Now-Pay-Later company that is Europe’s most valuable private company. Adalberth exited the company in 2016 and founded the Norrsken Foundation to support impact businesses. Since then he has progressively sold down his stake in Klarna to less than 1%. Half of the proceeds were committed as an initial investment into the Norrsken Foundation.  Since its creation in 2016, Norrsken’s house in Stockholm has become the centre of the city’s impact entrepreneurship space in a country that is considered Europe’s impact hub. By bringing the right mix of investors, entrepreneurs, and talent, the foundation hopes to recreate the same success in Kigali.

Built on the former site of École Belge de Kigali, a Belgian school founded in 1965, the Kigali campus is the second such hub the foundation has put up since it acquired one of the grand halls of an old tram station in downtown Stockholm for its first facility. Two weeks ago, the foundation opened its third house, a 3-storey, 10,000-square-metre building in Barcelona, Spain. The Kigali campus which has been operational since January 2022 hosts roughly 1200 members, East Africa director, Pascal Murasira said at Norrsken Africa Week. The event is Norrsken’s first impact entrepreneurship and investment meeting held outside Stockholm.

Wooing capital to Kigali

Two weeks ago, Norrsken22, an independently managed African growth-stage VC announced it had raised $205 million to invest in growth-stage tech companies in Africa. Last week, Norrsken22 partners were part of fund managers at Norrsken Africa Week. An event the Norrsken Foundation said was organised to bring capital allocators and tech founders together in person. The Norrsken Foundation is a founding partner of Norrsken22.

This first Africa event was held in the Norrsken campus in Kigali on the 8th and 9th of November. More than 1,500 entrepreneurs, investors, government officials, and academia from Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and across Africa attended the 2-day networking-focused meeting. The event also brought together the different arms of the Norrsken Foundation, including Norrsken22, the $205 million Africa-focused growth stage fund, and Africa Seed Fund, an early-stage investment outfit. African startups that had been part of the Norrsken Accelerator, a global impact-focused accelerator based in Stockholm were also represented by their founders. 

Kigali’s big push for private capital

Since 2009 Rwanda has aggressively sought to position itself as a diversified investment hub in East Africa. In recent years, the focus moved to tech investments. A $30 million Rwanda Innovation Fund backed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) was launched in 2021 to invest in funds and directly back tech companies in East Africa. Per Statista, Rwandan tech startups raised only $1.9 million in 2022, a year when African startups raised the most ever. It was a decline from 2021’s $6.8 million figure. 2023 has been better. Kasha, a Rwandan startup raised $21 million in Series B funding, and Eden Care, a Rwandan insuretech became the first from the country to be accepted into YCombinator, the famed San Francisco-based accelerator program. 

Convincing investors to invest in the country remains challenging. But the country’s new financial centre wants even more. It wants investment funds to be incorporated in the country and has created a special fintech program that boasts Flutterwave, Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa), Chippercash, NALA, and recently, Paystack as members. 

Just before Norrsken Africa Week, it hosted a breakfast meeting for investors. One early-stage investor who had attended the meeting told TechCabal that her firm was still weighing their options. Another early-stage investor said her VC firm was in the process of setting up a new fund in Rwanda and scouting for office space. They favour Norrsken, which is home to at least 3 other VC firms (Katapault, Angaza Capital, and Renew Capital). Earlier this year, on the sidelines of the Inclusive Fintech Forum, the Africa Business Angels Network (ABAN) and Kigali International Financial Centre signed an MoU to pave the way for the network to set up its catalytic Africa fund in Kigali.

Entrepreneurs also suffer from indecision. One e-logistics startup founder who spoke with TechCabal was impressed with Kigali, but still weighing options. She considers a location that will facilitate access to capital without being too far from the business operations as ideal. “It’s a chicken and egg problem,” the founder conceded.

Resolving this tension between capital and founders is the thrust of the Norrsken Foundation and its ecosystem partners.

This article was edited to correctly state the area of Norrsken’s campus in Kigali. We incorrectly reported it as 4,400 square meters.

Auto24, a used car marketplace, has expanded into four new African markets: Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa. This expansion comes exactly a year after the startup launched in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire to sell “reconditioned used cars” with several add-on services like a five-day refund policy, a six-month warranty, one-year maintenance, and one-year insurance plans for all vehicles. Axel Peyriere, the CEO and co-founder of Auto24, told TechCabal via text that the startup was expanding to build on a “bullish” year and chose Morroco and South Africa because they are the two biggest car markets on the continent. 

“In terms of new car sales yearly, South Africa is about 450,000 per year, Morocco about 180,000. Côte d’Ivoire for example is about 20,000 and Nigeria only 5,000. Even if we are in the used car space, it is a good indicator,” he said. He added that the startup chose Rwanda as an “entry gate” into East Africa and a market to sell electric cars because of its green policy. The expansion into Senegal was because of its similarity with Ivory Coast. 

Auto24’s expansion into Senegal comes a month after Chargel, a Senegalese logistics company, expanded into  Côte d’Ivoire. As Peyriere mentioned, Moustapha Ndoye, the CEO of Chargel, also told TechCabal that the expansion was because of similar dynamics between the two countries. This further lends credence to the ease of cross-border expansion that similar currencies, languages, and cultures in francophone Africa lend to its tech ecosystem.

Although he declined to share numbers, Peyriere told TechCabal that Auto24 has performed well in the past year and has “helped thousands of customers” to buy cars with no warranty return. “Our business model is very virtuous in the sense that first, our cars, as being used, are more affordable than new ones, and it is a real circular economy,” he added. 

When asked how Auto24 was able to launch in four countries simultaneously, Peyriere told TechCabal that he had started the expansion process months before and that he was already preparing to launch in more countries. “[We expand] to grow faster and accelerate growth,” he said.

Customers can access different financing options on Auto24 as a result of the partnerships that the startup currently has with other companies. The websites for the newly added countries will be available in both international and local languages and will allow customers to reserve and secure their desired car before test-driving and finalising the purchase. 

“Our obsession is to be customer-centric,” Peyriere. “Our goal is not only to be the best in the market but to ensure we deliver unparalleled services for every used car buyer and seller. This expansion is a testament to our dedication.”

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In 2018, Moses Mukundi had a life-threatening health emergency. As an investment banker accessing health insurance, he needed the doctor to sign off on his form. “My insurance rejected paying a claim because the doctor had stamped but had not signed the claim form. I had an acute allergy attack and had to be treated immediately,” he said on a call with TechCabal. And as the turnaround time took much longer than usual, Mukundi had to pay out of his pocket to get treated. 

That was his motivation to begin Eden Care Medical, a health tech startup. Eden Care Medical uses technology to simplify access to healthcare through its group life insurance and wellness plans. Mukundi believes this can be achieved by making healthcare accessible in terms of price point while aligning payments of healthcare premiums to a monthly-based payment— as opposed to 12 months upfront. With the right product, Mukundi believes that via this method, fraudulent claims are reduced and a viable plan is generated. He tells me that he launched his startup first for personal reasons. “This is not just something that I think has a large impact. But it’s also personal. I think I would not want anyone else to experience what I went through just because of a very minute detail,” he said while speaking from San Francisco.

According to Mukundi, access to Healthcare, which is facilitated by health insurance, remains very limited. “About 15 million Africans go into poverty every year due to a large medical bill. When you look at health insurance penetration in Africa, it’s sitting at about 0.2%,” he said.

In Rwanda, healthcare has been historically low over the years. The country has suffered shortage of medical personnel and high cost of accessibility. President Paul Kagame is paying more attention to this problem by creating health posts and unbundling the problem to a system of health insurance providers called mutuelles de santé. 

When I tried to use the app on the call, I was presented with a login that needed me to provide my company’s email login and password. Mukundi said the major target market for Eden Care is workers (remote or full-time) and students. “Already, the national health insurance covers anyone who’s unemployed. So, that’s not our target market. We believe where insurance will have material impact is for the employed and students. The product here is built with freedom for you to be able to buy the product through your employer. Or you can buy the product directly,” he said. To that end, the issue of defaults is lesser. He remarked that he had never encountered default issues while growing the startup. 

The road to Y Combinator

As an investment banker who moved from Uganda to Rwanda to work, Mukundi knew all there was about crunching numbers and selling insurance—he spent six years understanding its failures and experiencing those failures on a personal level. During the pandemic, he got admission to Wharton for an MBA. But he didn’t finish. “I was not going to pay another $100,000 for another Zoom university. So I decided to drop out of school and go build a business,” he told me with a chuckle. 

In 2017, the Rwandan Central Bank had placed a ban on new health insurance licences. According to the Eden Care Founder, the market was on the verge of collapse as competitor firms in the space cut prices until it became unsustainable. The Central Bank of Rwanda responded by regulating the market. After three months of convincing, the apex bank lifted all restrictions in August 2021. At this stage, the startup sought a funding raise to meet the financial obligations involved in getting a licence.

Mukundi did not disclose how much was raised in pre-seed funding, but by the end of 2021, they succeeded in gaining their license and the funds required to forge ahead. In January 2023, the startup rolled out the product to the market.

Mukundi says Eden Care Medical is present in over 500 healthcare facilities, but some of the challenge of building a digital infrastructure  is repeatedly rethinking its tech infrastructure. “This is probably the most complex startup I have done in terms of all the number of moving parts, right? You are dealing with six plus stakeholders as opposed to many startups where you largely have two or three maximum stakeholders. This is a lot more complex, and you must figure out how to build technology and connect different parts of this stakeholder group.”

The biggest win

Despite the challenges with regulation, Mukundi’s biggest win is cutting the time of seeing a doctor from 30 minutes to five minutes. Instead of queuing to fill out paperwork before seeing a doctor, you can go to the hospital and show them an OTP on your mobile phone through your app and see the doctor. “We are making health insurance simple, fast and stress-free,” he said. Mukundi said that their tech infrastructure is fast enough to onboard staff in large organisations without having to fill out any paper. Mukundi says insurance is easily sold through an aggregator and that aggregator here could be your employer, university, or an association. This is how Eden Care Medical onboards large groups and receives premiums through which the individuals enjoy healthcare.

Next steps

The usual funding given to Y Combinator firm is around half a million dollars. Mukundi says the funds are for expansion into other African countries, making sense of the data they have collated in building something new and perfecting the app on wellness and prevention. “Eden care products are focused on wellness and prevention because we have identified that there is a big gap in the market,” he said. The Y Combinator funds, according to Mukundi, is a validation of efforts of the growth of African healthcare and the innovation of AI in diagnostics and record keeping. The benefits are immense. “Getting into a place like Y Combinator helps elevate you, ahead of the park and makes fundraising easier. It also makes hiring a lot easier and that is why it was really important for us being the first company from Rwanda,” he added.

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Cet article est aussi disponible en français

First published 23 July 2023

It is Africa’s most ambitious ecosystem and country. A place I am optimistic about and invested in. Here’s how it can win for itself.

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This is the first of a series of ecosystem reviews, where I will attempt to pull at the threads of what often goes unspoken as African countries cultivate unique identities around technology, innovation and impact. Our first stop is my host for the past 7 weeks, the fledgling technology and innovation space in the Republic of Rwanda.

Every place has two important features. The first is what the place has going for it. The second is what it does not have going for it. Some of what a place lacks is permanent—the lack of geologic resources for example. Other forms of lack or disadvantages can sometimes be moderated if not fixed outright.

It is easy to fixate on the disadvantages that cannot be fixed—like Rwanda’s apparent lack of significant natural resource commodities, or that it is landlocked. But that is in my opinion, a nearsighted position—especially in Africa where more resourced economies are consistently dismal performers. What is more important is focusing on the disadvantages that can be moderated or outright eliminated.

As an urban space, Kigali (especially infrastructure-wise) is ahead of most sub-Saharan countries. But as the corporate centre of the Rwandan economy and seedbed of a newborn technology ecosystem, it is playing catch up with the continental leaders—Lagos, Cape Town, Nairobi, Cairo, Accra, Dakar, Casablanca, Tunis and even Abidjan. The extent to which it succeeds may depend on how fast it can recalibrate the deep but flawed mix of NGOism, social enterprise and government support that characterises it while catalysing free-spirited entrepreneurship.

Today’s review is structured on three pillars.

• What Kigali’s ecosystem has going for it.
• What it does not have going for it that can be fixed.
• And suggestions for where to start.

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Fuel for the ambition

As I said in the first paragraph, the technology ecosystem in Kigali is both playing catch-up and only in its infancy. Generally speaking, Africa’s technology ecosystem is still quite young. Depending on when you start counting, it is barely a teenager. Fledgling ecosystems are a tight bundle of energy, speed and conflict. Lagos has this undeniable energy. So does Nairobi, Cape Town, Cairo, Shenzhen, San Francisco, London or anywhere else you can think of. Wherever innovation manages to find a footing, it typically also generates and sustains this steamrolling bundle of entrepreneurial energy. It is the fuel for innovation ambition.

The key difference between Kigali and any of the places I mentioned above is where the ecosystem energy and ambition are concentrated. For Kigali’s technology ecosystem, non-profit-funded entrepreneur support organisations and the programmes they back and run are the locus of innovation while government support agencies like the Rwanda Development Board are the locus of entrepreneurial ambition.

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This is not ideal and is an inversion of how an ecosystem should operate. But it is also one of the biggest things Kigali’s ecosystem has going for it. An unmatched level of directed support from the state. However, because there is an over-concentration of innovation-searching energy at the state level, the government has become a source of ambition for the ecosystem. And a lot of this energy is channeled through ecosystem support programs of all stripes. In theory, the government’s ambitious growth and economic development priorities set the stage for an expected tsunami of innovation.

Killing life-support to live

But this tsunami has (so far) failed to materialise.

Instead, the result of this ambitious push towards innovation from state-backed resources and a deep pool of non-profit checkbox-oriented and development-funded entrepreneur support programmes is a glut of social enterprises and a dependency that may not develop into commercial viability.

In 1902—as a global pandemic spread by rats raged—government authorities in French Indochina (now Vietnam) struggled to reduce the rat population in Hanoi, the capital. To speed things up, they created a bounty programme that paid 1¢ for each rat killed.

To collect the bounty, people would need to provide the severed tail of a rat. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails. The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats, sever their tails, then release them back into the sewers so that they could produce more rats.

— Wikipedia.

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was the first proven example of the Cobra Effect, a perverse incentive theory which explains how the design of a projec can incentivise the wrong behaviour. This Cobra Effect is a story you have probably heard. For those who may not have had the pleasure, the story goes like this.

During the British Raj (rule of India), the government decided to, as in the Hanoi example, reduce the population of cobras in Delhi, so they offered a bounty to anyone who brought in a dead cobra. The result? People brought in dead cobras indeed, but only because a thriving cobra farming industry sprung up to supply the new demand.

The insight for you, my friend, is that the Cobra Effect is a market design bug which creates artificial markets. Artificial markets have one big problem. They internalise life support—whether in the form of grants or endless trainings. Think of a growing baby which is still attached to and dependent on its umbilical cord.

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You can avoid creating a perverse incentive by testing programme design for and rewarding outcomes rather than just output. The Hanoi Rat programme and the Delhi Cobra programme both wanted fewer rats, but both programmes rewarded a presentation of rat tails. The output terminus created a fake market for rat tails or cobra carcasses and condemned the programmes to die equally unnaturally.

As I said in my opening paragraph, the extent to which the yearling ecosystem in Rwanda succeeds may depend to a significant (not only) extent on how well it can recalibrate the deep but flawed mix of NGOism, social enterprise and government support while catalysing free-spirited entrepreneurship.

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Of course, innovation is long-tailed, and given the present-day realities, this analysis may be premature. But I trust that everything I have said in the preceding paragraphs is at least obvious to anyone looking without rose-tinted glasses. What exists today can be better.

Rethinking the approach

Ecosystems are both organised and organic. The organic component is what creates change. The organised component is how this change is directed so that it becomes sustaining and cyclical—a true ecology. Today, there is an over supply of the organised, especially in priority alignment and goal. And an undersupply of the free-spirited organic component.

For Kigali and Rwanda at large, some of the important components are there. Others components can be learnt. There is, for example, a real opportunity for its universities to become stronger ecosystem contributors in talent and product. There is an opportunity to build a local flavour of spontaneous collaboration.

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There is still a need and space for entrepreneur support and state support. It is a strategic advantage. But only when wielded as an advantage, not a cudgel. This means avoiding perverse incentives by building a strategic support advantage that is based on an outcome terminus. Not output. And certainly not unsustaining “impact.”

It also means building a culture of true venture that empowers entrepreneurs (and the ecosystem) to become comfortable with flying, in much the same way an eagle teaches its chicks to fly. Not by “teaching” and endless entrepreneurial training programmes, but by demonstrating what grit, growth and scale look like and cultivating a culture of spontaneous collaboration that will create this.

Ultimately, it will mean resetting the current gospel from, ”Test consumer businesses in Rwanda and scale it elsewhere” to “Build business solutions for the world from Kigali.”

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Flutterwave has been operating in Rwanda since 2020. But now the company wants to deepen its roots in the landlocked East African country by making it a settlement hub for payment operations in the region. In April 2023, several media outlets quoted Oluwabankole Falade, Fluterwave’s chief regulatory and government relations officer as saying that Flutterwave was committed to opening a Kenya office and making it the company’s regional hub. 

But the fintech has struggled to get a payment provider licence in Kenya amidst a spate of lawsuits and allegations of money laundering. Flutterwave has refuted the allegations and while some of the lawsuits have been withdrawn, other existing lawsuits which continue to make their way through Kenya’s legal system.

Kigali scores a win with Flutterwave

In March, Flutterwave announced that it had acquired Electronic Money Issuer (EMI) and Remittance licences in Rwanda. Both licences allow Flutterwave to hold money in wallets (like mobile money providers) and also process cross-border transactions. Flutterwave’s history with Rwanda dates back to 2019 when the company acquired a payment service provider licence in 2019. It was the first African country where Flutterwave got a payments provider licence after Nigeria. “Rwanda is big for us because it is one of the only markets where we have every licence you can think of,” the Flutterwave chief executive enthused.

“We’ve got plans to have a financial operations centre set up in Rwanda, where all our settlement across the region goes from here. Everyone has supported us to make that happen. So it makes sense to put something in this market and scale it from here,” Agboola told TechCabal. “It’s not about the size of the market, it’s about market readiness. They’re ready here,” he added.

While Agboola admits that “Rwanda is a small market,” he acknowledges that the East African country has ambitions of being a premier destination for foreign investment funds management into Africa.

African fintechs are turning to Kigali

Like Flutterwave, other African fintech companies are turning to Kigali as they expand across Africa. Unlike Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, Rwanda has neither the population nor the economic prowess to make acquiring licences in Rwanda a priority. A GDP of $11 billion caters to 13 million Rwandans. Namibia with a comparable GDP has only 2.5 million people. Namibia has an extensive South Atlantic coastline, a strong mining industry and two ports. Rwanda relies on imports through Dar es Salaam and Mombasa. But a series of strong regulatory reforms and an ambitious push to become an international financial centre catering especially to financial technology firms has won the appeal of fintech firms in Africa.

“In the last 3 years, Rwanda’s government approved 19 laws designed to ease business and make the country an attractive destination for firms that want firm legal and governance frameworks for their African operations,” said Jean-Marie Kananura, acting chief investment officer for KIFC. KIFC’s parent body, Rwanda Finance Limited, is headed by Tidjane Thiam, former chief executive officer of Swiss bank Credit Suisse.

MFS Africa, NALA and ChipperCash (which launched operations in Rwanda this week) are among some of the fintech companies that have recently created Rwandan operations. At the just-concluded Inclusive Fintech Forum in Kigali, which had in attendance, the presidents of Rwanda and Zambia, MFS Africa founder and CEO, Dare Okoudjou asked both presidents to create bilateral agreements that would allow fintech licence “passporting”. This would at least in theory mean that a fintech licenced in Zambia could use the same licence in Rwanda because their regulatory regimes have been harmonised.

Kigali has found support for its ambition in the middle east and Southeast Asia. It is deepening its relationship with the Qatar Financial Centre, Britain’s Jersey Finance, and Singapore’s Monetary Authority (the body in charge of Singapore’s International Finance Centre). At the forum this week, it signed an MOU with the Africa Business Angel Network (ABAN). The MOU TechCabal learned, means the angel investment network will be able to structure its special purpose investment vehicles (SPVs) in Rwanda.

Kigali’s International Financial Centre is only 3 years old (it was launched in early 2020). But it has moved at a rapid pace to reform or create new laws and build partnerships and people are taking notice. In the latest Global Financial Centre Index published by Z/Yen, a City of London commercial think tank, Kigali ranks above Kuwait City in the middle east, Nairobi and Lagos only behind Mauritius, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

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28 APRIL, 2023

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

TGIF

And we really mean it; it’s been a hectic week.

This week, we launched Entering Tech Shorts, a 60-second show that provides young people with valuable insights and tips on how to enter the tech industry.

If you want to learn about practical skills without all the tech jargon, then watch Entering Tech here. They’re educational but fun, like every lesson on marketing and product Elon Musk has taught us with his Twitter takeover.

In today’s edition

• Meta loses again in Kenya
• PayDay helps Starlink in Rwanda
• How to pay for Apple Music in Nigeria
• Funding tracker
• The World Wide Web3
• Job openings

META LOSES AGAIN IN KENYA

Meta is losing several battles in Kenya.

Yesterday, a Kenyan court judged against Meta in a lawsuit where two Ethiopians accused the social media giant of failing to moderate inciteful messages on its platform. 

The war is online: Last December, Abrham Meareg sued Meta in Kenya for the death of his father which occurred amidst the two-year Ethiopian war from 2020–2022. Per Meareg, his father was killed after his Facebook account was profiled and he was accused of associating with the rebel group, the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF).

Meareg and his co-petitioner, a legal advisor at Amnesty International, asked the court permission to serve Meta a lawsuit outside Kenya. Yesterday, the court granted the permission.

It’s still a long way to victory, but the lawsuit wants the court to force Meta to create a Ksh250 billion ($1.8 billion) fund that will be used to compensate victims of hate crimes fuelled on all Meta platforms.

Meta loses battles in Kenya: This is the second legal battle Meta has lost in Kenya this month. Just last week, a Kenyan High Court issued an order prohibiting Meta from using any third-party content moderator company other than Sama to examine its platform’s content. In the same lawsuit, it was also decided that Kenyan courts have the jurisdiction to determine petitions against Meta. 

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PAYDAY TO FACILITATE STARLINK SUBSCRIPTIONS IN RWANDA

It looks like Payday will also be getting a nice pay day courtesy of Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Rwanda-based startup announced a partnership that will enable Startlink customers in the country to purchase their subscription services through the platform.

The partnership will allow customers to pay for internet subscriptions and any other products and services offered by Starlink via its virtual cards.

Payday was founded in 2021 and enables remittances to remote workers, freelancers, business owners, and digital professionals with seamless, borderless payments. 

The neobank claims to offer global payment processing from over 130 countries, enabling Africans to work remotely for international organisations and receive payments and withdraw money in their preferred currency, regardless of their location.

Zoom out: Payday also offers a payment platform for Starlink subscribers in Nigeria where the internet service was launched early this year. In Rwanda, Starlink will cost Rwf 48,000 ($43.55), with a one-time payment of Rwf 572,000 ($519.02) for hardware.

HOW TO PAY FOR APPLE MUSIC

Since the limit on dollar transactions on naira cards, many Nigerians have faced payment difficulties for different services owned by international brands. One of the most notable sectors Nigerians have a hard time using are global music streaming services like Spotify, YouTube Music Premium, and Apple Music. 

However, to ease the stress of a part of this faction, MTN has partnered with Apple Music to allow subscribers to pay for the service with airtime. In this article, we’ll not only be showing you the way to pay for Apple Music using airtime, but also how to get six months of free unlimited Apple Music streaming upfront.

Please note that this is open to both iPhone and Android users of the Apple Music app. You only need to have an MTN SIM.

Pay with airtime: How do you subscribe to Apple Music and pay for it using airtime? That’s by using SMS. Here are the steps to follow:

• Open your messaging app and try to send a new message. 
• Send “MUSIC” to 8000 with your MTN SIM and then “Accept” the plan prompt. 
• Afterwards, you’ll get a confirmation plan that you have subscribed to Apple Music.

That’s all!

There are more options to pay for Apple Music in this article.

TC INSIGHTS: FUNDING TRACKER

This week, Maholla, a South African reward app received $1.5 million in seed funding from Buffet Group, Castleton Capital, Praesidium Capital Management and Galloprovincialis.

That’s it for this week!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements.

THE WORLD WIDE WEB3

Bitcoin	$29,487	+ 1.57%
Ether	$1,913	+ 0.37%
BNB	$327	– 1.49%
Cardano	$0.40	+ 0.32%
Name of the coin Price of the coin 24-hour percentage change		Source: CoinMarketCap

* Data as of 05:50 AM WAT, April 28, 2023.

Greenhouse Capital and EMURGO Africa have signed an alliance deal to fund Web3 startups in Africa. Nodo News reports that the alliance will see to the creation of an investment and advisory platform for fintech and cryptocurrency-focused startups on the continent and the Middle East.

A vigilante hacker has burnt over $300,000 worth of bitcoin belonging to Russian Intelligence agencies. CoinMarketCap reports that the hacker found 986 bitcoin wallets between March and April 2022, broke into the wallets, sent some of the bitcoin to charities on Ukraine, and burnt the rest!

IN OTHER NEWS FROM TECHCABAL

Entering Tech #28: GenZs and Millenials will work hard—but not live, or die, for their work.

Uber and Bolt vs drivers union: drivers share their opinion.

JOB OPENINGS

• Tek Experts – Technical Lead – Software Developer – Full time, Lagos Nigeria 
• Venture Builder – Founder’s Factory – Full-time, Kenya
• Kuda Technologies Limited – Technical Lead, Backend Engineer – Full time, Lagos, Nigeria
• Vocalysd – Technical Co-founder – Full-time, South Africa
• Talent500 – React.js Developer – Full-time, Kenya
• Wazobia Technologies –  Product Manager – Full time, Lagos, Nigeria
• Revelo Africa – Lead Front-end developer – Full-time, Ghana
• PressOne Africa – Technical Product Manager – Full time, Lagos, Nigeria
• Standard Bank Group – Software Engineer – Johannesburg, South Africa 
• MTN– Controller, Fintech Business Development – Full-time, Ghana
• Moja – Frontend Engineer (Kotlin) – Full-time, Remote, Kenya 
• Synnefa Green Limited – Junior Software Developer– Full-time, Kenya 
• Staffrite – Chief Technology Officer – Full-time, Kenya
• Datadrive2030 – Data Analyst – Full-time, Capetown, South Africa

There are more jobs on TechCabal’s job board. If you have job opportunities to share, please submit them at bit.ly/tcxjobs.

What else is happening in tech?

• Smile Identity acquires Appruve’s parent company to expand its reach in Africa.

• Europe wants to force ChatGPT to disclose its sources. 

• Tesla lawyers claim Elon Musk’s past statements about self-driving safety could just be deepfakes.

• Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk.

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Written by – Timi Odueso, Ephraim Modise & Tomisin Bamidele

Edited by – Kelechi Njoku

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According to WeeTracker, Moniepoint and PayDay are in talks that will see Moniepoint acquire the neobank in about three months. The publication also claimed that the acquisition amount will assume a valuation of $40 million for the neobank. But some investors close to the deal have denied the reports, clarifying that Moniepoint only invested in the neobank. Moniepoint also shared comments with TechCabal via email, stating that their investment in PayDay represented a “strategic investment” and not an acquisition. This was also echoed by PayDay representatives. 

Despite these denials, two other sources say that a deal is on the table and will likely still go ahead in three months. They claimed that an agreement in principle has been reached and that it will not be a surprise if the deal goes through as the acquisition supposedly makes sense for Moniepoint. According to TechCrunch, PayDay had earlier turned down a $15 million acquisition offer from an African unicorn.

While the Moniepoint acquisition allegations have been denied, it does make sense that Moniepoint would acquire PayDay. The neobank currently processes an average of 40,000 transactions daily and over $25 million monthly, numbers that make it a solid option for Africans looking to receive money from abroad. 

The customer base of PayDay and the volume of transactions it currently claims to process indicate that it has cornered a significant market share in the remittance market. With Moniepoint on track to achieve unicorn status, an acquisition of a promising startup like PayDay might help accelerate its journey toward achieving unicorn status.