Babatunde Akin Moses, Mayowa Adeosun, and Onyinye Okonji co-founded the startup in 2019. Governed by a board, three co-founders lead the Sycamore team who refer to one another as Sytizens—a play on Sycamore and citizen.

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The CEO is informed by three key executives: Daniel Anyaegbu (CTO), Kingsley Makinde (head of product), and Adebayo Adenaike (head of investment). Adeosun, the COO, manages a team including Mercy Dada (head of risk), Segun Afuwape (head of collections), Elizabeth Oyelae (head of finance), and Chukwuemeka Ikpa (head of internal control). Meanwhile, the CCO, Okonji, leads Mojisola Fagbohunlu (head of marketing), Francis Agim (head of sales), Adewunmi Awofadeju (head of customer experience), and Atiti Timi (Head of HR).

This TechCabal org chart details Sycamore’s leadership structure.

If you would like to showcase the leadership structure of your startup in this way, contact the author of this article: ngozi@bigcabal.com.

However, collecting repayments is a significant problem for these lenders. Some digital lenders shame and harass defaulters, creating a tense and harmful environment for borrowers. 

It has created a market for ethical collection agencies like BFree—who recently raised $2.95 million in funding—and Mwanga, startups that use phone calls and text messages to remind borrowers of their outstanding balance and the consequences of non-payment. Ethical loan collectors—BFree claims to have upped loan recoveries for their clients by 70%—say they treat borrowers respectfully, even in cases of defaults.

But banking experts doubt the effectiveness of ethical methods, particularly when borrowers face financial hardship. 

“There is a significant limit to ethical loan collection in Nigeria, especially for small loans,” said Adedeji Olowe, CEO of Lendsqr. “Lenders are walking a fine line, it’s only at a sizable level that you can manage finance risk. At the bottom, it’s a free for all.” 

The underlying economic realities that push borrowers to default in the first place may mean that repayments are impossible no matter the collection method. “Without addressing these issues, ethical collection may not be enough,” said Adedeji Olowe, CEO of Lendsqr. 

One expert who asked not to be mentioned believes unethical loan recovery methods could be avoided if digital lenders filter through the behavioral data of their borrowers to know their ability to repay. According to him, borrowers with betting or impulsive buying habits can be screened during the loan underwriting process or before they’re given loans. 

While these checks are in place for some digital lenders, ethical collectors might struggle to recover debts because rogue lenders are learning to game the system and exploit loopholes. 

For instance, if borrowers know their salaries will be directly debited within 24 hours, they might be tempted to empty their accounts upon receiving their paychecks, hindering repayment, one expert who asked not to be named told TechCabal. 

Another challenge posed by ethical loan collection for digital lenders is the cost of outsourcing loan recollection to collection-as-a-service startups. These collection-as-a-service startups charge between 10-35% of the loan amount recovered, which digital lenders account for in their interest rates to lenders, bumping it higher than the average interest rate and possibly deterring borrowers from lending or leading to more loan defaults. 
In 2022, the National Information and Technology Development Agency fined Soko Loan ₦10 million for privacy violations, sending a strong message to the industry. While regulatory bodies like NITDA have taken action against unethical loan recovery practices, experts who spoke to TechCabal believe there should be similar consequences for defaulters to make ethical loan collection work in Nigeria.

Kenya has approved the operation of 17 new digital credit providers (DCPs), including Autochek – a car loan facility startup – one year after it licensed 32 digital credit providers.  

In a move signalling a crackdown on predatory practices, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) continues to scrutinise applications from digital lenders, issuing licenses to just 51 lenders, so far. This stringent vetting process follows the need to address borrower concerns, such as unethical loan collection techniques.

In 2022, through the CBK, Kenya purged all digital lending companies for operating without licences. The directive implied that these companies, which had grown to hundreds, had to cease operations immediately and apply for a permit from the CBK. The licences were structured around a new law, the CBK (Digital Credit Providers) Regulations, 2022, which introduced data protection laws to safeguard borrowers from illegally using their personal information.

Before these changes, Kenya had hundreds of unlicensed digital lending platforms. However, concerns about high-interest rates, personal data abuses, and unethical debt collection practices compelled the government to act. “The licensing and oversight of digital credit providers (DCPs) was precipitated by concerns raised by the public about the predatory practices of the unregulated DCPs,” the CBK said in a statement.

After the law was passed, only a few digital lenders could provide their services to Kenyans, including Branch, which operates in other markets such as Nigeria and Tanzania, and Tala. Then, over 480 digital lenders applied for the license, indicating the lucrative nature of the online lending business in the country. 

The regulatory change was a response to public outcry over the unchecked practices of digital lenders. These companies charged excessive interest rates, sometimes up to 400% per year, among other unethical business practices. 

Under the new law, the CBK (Digital Credit Providers) Regulations, 2022, all digital credit must register as data controllers and processors with the Office of Data Protection (ODPC). Credit providers must also provide evidence of their source of funds as an anti-money laundering directive.

On January 17, TechCabal reported that Access Holding Plc, the parent company of Access Bank, received approval in principle from the Central Bank to launch Oxygen X, a standalone lending product. While Access is the first holding company to make a play for standalone digital lending, other banks are in talks to spin off standalone digital lending services, a highly-placed industry source told TechCabal. 

“Banks may launch their apps, but they don’t have the mastery of execution that fintechs have,” said the source who asked not to be identified. “Banks will possibly drop the ball. I am not betting on any banks to win in the market.” 

That argument isn’t new. When traditional banks began a push into fintech, the consensus from fintech insiders was that the banks didn’t have the operational chops to mount a challenge. But Habari Pay, the fintech arm of Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO), posted profits of ₦1.3 billion in the first half of 2023, according to GTCO’s financial report.

It also may be premature to write off the big banks given that QuickCredit, arguably the most innovative lending product in the last few years, has come from the banks. 

Will banks change their approach to retail lending? 

While one of the core mandates of commercial banks is to lend, they don’t give out a lot of loans, especially to individuals and small businesses (retail lending). Rather than serve a mass market with a high risk of defaults, banks would instead give loans to high-quality borrowers such as salary earners with credible employers. 

A former bank executive argues that the entry of traditional banks into the digital lending market will only be a game-changer if the banks abandon the old lending and leverage data philosophy. 

“For me, the big question is, what will be different? What is the play? Is it lower rates and faster returns? One advantage banks have is that they can unlock customers’ data to make lending decisions,” he said.

Nigeria’s digital lending market is dominated by startups like Carbon, FairMoney, and OPay, serving a growing mass of digital-first customers. There are about 211 licensed digital lenders in Nigeria, according to the country’s digital lending regulator, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC). The selling point for these startups is the simplified lending process, allowing people to get loans in a few minutes and less stringent KYC requirements. 

But easier means more expensive. Many digital lenders offer loans with interests as high as 30% per annum, while banks like GTBank—through its digital lending platform QuickCredit—offer around 21%. 

The difference in interest rates often comes down to the cost of financing. While traditional banks have trillions of Naira in customer deposits to lend from, fintech startups often draw on debt or venture funding. Beyond this, digital lenders don’t have as many data points to make loan decisions, meaning slightly more risk. These risks are baked into the interest rates.

The cost of loan recovery is also one key issue lenders have to deal with. As one industry insider put it, traditional banks “can’t do the rough things,” referring to some digital lenders’ questionable loan recovery methods. 

One thing is clear: traditional banks offer lower interest rates to beat fintechs. Whether they can change their lending strategies remains to be seen. 

Oxygen X is not entirely a new product for the Access Corporation, having originally been named Quickbucks. The Quickbucks app has a 2.6-star rating on Android’s Playstore and was originally launched two years ago. 

“The Quickbucks app has about 7 million customers, and that is what they are trying to migrate to Oxygen,” one person with knowledge of the business said. “FairMoney and Opay lend to everyone, but banks want you to be their customer before lending to you.” 

A standalone lending app means that Oxygen can acquire users who don’t have Access Bank accounts.

While other holding companies in the financial services space have focused on fintech plays (GTCO has Squad, Stanbic has Zest, and Access has Hydrogen), Access Corporation has become the first to make a play for standalone digital lending. 

Oxygen will compete with digital lenders like Carbon and OPay, serving a growing mass of digital-first customers. Since moving to a holding company structure in 2020, the Access Corporation has made big bets, including the launch of Hydrogen and a rapid expansion across the continent. 

“We want to be present in 22 countries over the next five years,” Herbert Wigwe, Access Corporation’s CEO, said in a Bloomberg interview. Since then, the banking subsidiary has acquired several banks to deepen its global reach. 

In November 2023, Access Bank said it was expanding to Asia, joining the likes of South Africa’s bank TymeBank to open shop in Asia. Early this month, the bank acquired Megatech Insurance Brokers Ltd, an insurance brokerage company licensed and regulated by the National Insurance Commission.

Emata, a two-year-old agro-financing startup for small-holder farmers in Uganda, launched with one goal in mind: to offer collateral-free loans to small-holder farmers. While the majority of Uganda’s seven million farmers live in rural areas, their outputcontributes 35% of the country’s export earnings. But agencies like the World Bank say that these farmers could be more productive and command better profits. One of the ways to ensure improved outcomes is access to loans.  

Emata’s founders, Lillian Nassanga, Dave Agaba, and Bram van den Bosch launched a study throughout rural Uganda to understand how farmers work, and realised that there was a huge financial gap for farmers in the region. Africa’s agricultural financing gap is about $240 billion, with Uganda’s estimated between $1.5 billion and $2 billion annually. “We realised that if farmers in Uganda and Africa are given the correct support and financing, they will be able to feed the world. This is not happening because banks are not offering loans to farmers, and that’s when Emata began,” Nassanga said.

Emata started by issuingloans to dairy farmers before expanding into coffee and oil seed farmers. The startup relies on data obtained from cooperatives and farmer-based organisations to make loan decisions. “The first thing we do is to ask whether they [the cooperatives] have digital records of the farmers. The records allow us to understand how the farmer has performed over a period of time, how much the farmer has been yielding for the month,” Nassanga told TechCabal. “We combine this data with the farmers’ living expenses and weather data so we can understand what the farmer’s potential will be for the seasons coming.” Once Emata concludes this task, they apportion credit limits to each farmer. The credit limits determine how much loan a farmer can obtain. “No one farmer has the same limit. We reward loyalty over one-hit wonders because we want this smallholder farmer to grow,” she said. 

How Emata disburses loans

Cooperatives are a way of life for smallholder farmers in Uganda. These farmers often lack the resources to access financial services, agricultural inputs, and marketing support on their own. Pooling their resources in these cooperatives—such as Kiruhura Dairy Cooperative, Rushere Dairy Farmers’ Cooperative Society, Kigezi Highland Tea Cooperative, and Nyabyeya Coffee Cooperative—allows the farmers to access better prices for agricultural inputs and higher prices for their crops. Emata leverages this farmer-cooperative relationship to disburse loans easily to the farmers. 

The farmers apply for loans through a cooperative agent. These agents then apply for loans on behalf of the farmers through Emata’s WhatsApp chatbot. The farmers receive the loans in their mobile money wallets—MoMo wallets are the most popular for these unbanked farmers. According to Nassanga, loan processes take up to 5–10 minutes. “We have a person trained to use our WhatsApp chatbot to request loans on behalf of the farmers. Once they put in information about the farmers, we look through the farmers’ data points and approve or deny the loans. Once the loan is approved, the agents get notified on WhatsApp, and the loans will be disbursed to the farmer.”

Due to low digital literacy in some rural parts of Uganda, working with cooperatives has been a difficult task for Emata. “Sometimes, there is no digital record of these farmers, so we have to train the staff to input the data into the computer,” she said.

Emata does not have a loan cap, but its minimum loan size is about $25. “Our loans are getting bigger by the day even as the farmers grow,” said Maren Hald Bjørgum, chief communications officer. Bjørgum did not disclose Emata’s interest rate but says the agro-financing firm’s interest rates are competitive. According to her, interest rates differ from partner to partner and from value chain to value chain according to the risk.” Loan tenure ranges from two weeks to nine months, and farmers repay at the end of the harvest. Farmers can also get increased loan prizes depending on their previous performance. “We match our loan periods for the start and end of each season; as long the model shows you can repay it, you will get a loan,” Bjørgum disclosed.

According to Musoke, Emata has disbursed loans worth $1 million to farmers and hopes to double that in the coming year. The startup recently raised a $2.4 million seed round, a mix of $1.6 million debt and $800,000 equity funding, The startup plans to use the funding to deepen its offerings in Uganda—where it currently has no competitor—and expand into Tanzania. Emata has onboarded 56 partners, 40,000 farmers, per Musoke. 

“The structures we have developed here are easily transferrable to other markets,” she told TechCabal. Emata is hoping to strike partnerships with farmer based organizations for its next growth phase, according to Musoke. The agro-financing startup is in talks with dairy potato partners in Tanzania and Ethiopia and will enter the countries in the coming days, Musoke shared with TechCabal. 

Access to credit is rife with challenges in many parts of Africa. While fintechs have built credit solutions to bridge the credit gap, challenges still remain: many lenders buck at loan repayments. Yvonne Johnson, Co-founder/CEO of Indicina believes that the right customer education can help bridge this gap and build trust among borrowers and creditors. 

She made this observation while speaking on building trust among lenders at Moonshot, a flagship conference by TechCabal, which has gathered players and builders in the African tech space to network, collaborate, share insights, and celebrate innovation on the continent. 

Johnson is of the opinion that many Africans do not properly understand credit solutions which is a result of the financial literacy gap in the continent. African countries score the worst in terms of financial literacy in the world. Data from the S&P’s Global Financial Literacy survey suggest that financial literacy levels on the continent are lesser when compared to European counterparts. South Africa and Nigeria both have financial literacy levels of 42% and 26% while European countries have a range of 65%–75%. 

While access to credit is rife with challenges, it remains an important arsenal for every economy. Being able to borrow money at affordable interest rates is how households can build wealth, take advantage of opportunities, and take a bet on a business idea.

While SMEs take on loans to fund their businesses, Daniel Osineye, founder/CTO, Evolve Credit, suggested that credit solutions should be designed in a way that considers the business. “Don’t give out loans and expect the user to pay back in an unreasonable time frame. You have to be able to match the repayment circle of your business with the technology; you have to put them in the loop,” he said. 

Johnson echoed Osineye’s sentiment. According to her, lenders should try not to give out predatory loans.  While concluding the panel session, Dayo Ademola, managing director, Branch Nigeria, asserts that credit remains the most important piece of the financial ecosystem.

Cet article est aussi disponible en français

First published 9 July 2023.

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Credere (from Proto-Indo-European – ḱreddeh- i.e to trust) is the heart of lending. In far too many African markets credere is local, very local and we can’t technology our way out of this “tribal” variety credere.

The entire financial system is constructed on the premise that if you have too much money than you could spend in the short term, you would look for somewhere to stash it. And if I knew how to spend money in the short term to generate even more money, you would stash it with me.

You trust me with your money and I trust that between keeping watch over it and giving it back to you, I can make enough to justify the effort by making more money from it. To quote Matt Levin.The bank is a magic trick that allows risk-averse savers to fund risky projects.

Let us call this system of brokerage between risk-averse depositors and risk-loaded entrepreneurs, Trust Transactions.

Another point to note about this system is that was not legislated into being. It has had centuries to develop and be finetuned. Even so, it does not work the same everywhere. For Africa in particular, alongside versions of the Trust Transactions described earlier (mostly large for cross-border trade routes), local groups developed their unique Trust Transaction systems for depositing and managing wealth. Despite this happening in populations separated by thousands of miles, the results were often similar. Whether they are called tontines, chamas, esusu or stokvels, these small group credit systems essentially functioned as deposit money banks, and insurance systems for their communities across Africa.

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These communities were more social than commercial

A close parallel to how these systems operated are the credit union and Main Street bank ecosystem that blossomed as frontier towns grew in young America. These small-town banks served as engines for America’s explosive growth in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Whether in 20th-century America or Africa, the key to the success of these banks was that they were more social than commercial in their daily operations. They had a friendly human face whom participants knew and trusted. And trust was often the only asset entrepreneurs who borrowed from the pooled fund could boast of.

As the United States grew into a modern economy, these small family-friendly banks, credit unions and the entrepreneurs they backed also blossomed alongside the. Sam Walton of Walmart fame for example built his straggling small-town business into a national chain off the back of credit from small-town banks. As business grew, several small-town banks lost their small-town background, grew and became indistinguishable from the big banks.

By contrast, Africa’s credit unions—the chamas, tontines and esusu groups—remained local. Contained in small towns, neighbourhoods or villages participation was limited to only a few people at a time.

By this time, the modern financial system was pretty much established. Still, even though the newly created African banks received the bulk of their deposits from ordinary income earners, they preferred to operate models based on lending to the government or a handful of big businesses. Remember, successful banking depends on a trick. I convince you that your money is safe with me and I convince myself that someone else needs that money enough to promise to pay me for taking a risk that you would not have chosen to take. Usually, this desperate someone is a business person.

From micro-finance to digital banking and lending

While esusu-type groups grew with the increasing population, African banks mostly chased safe investments in government bonds. So if you had enough money, you kept some of it at the bank, but if you needed a loan or money to finance a big project you turned to your closest esusu group.

Fast forward this by a few years and suddenly there are more options to pick from. High-interest loans from micro-finance banks + paperwork. And high-interest loans from a smartphone. Most people will pick the smartphone option. But there are three problems with this. The first is that the smartphone option is usually not a business loan. The second is that the lender and the borrower do not know each other. The last problem is that trust is highly localised. Once “out of bounds,” commercial trust breaks down.

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The result is predictable. High default rates. Lenders try to fight with higher interest rates and naming-and-shaming schemes. Eventually, it devolves into a cat-and-mouse game between lenders and borrowers.

If you were a digital lender what would you do in response? A lot of digital lending firms seem to think the answer is writing more algorithms to help them predict what a prospective borrower would do. It’s a good idea and it probably helps a lot. While I’m not a banker or an underwriting expert, I’ve given this some thought and the underlying problem with getting digital lending to work seems to be more of a social problem than a problem software can solve.

To put it another way, trust relationships in many parts of Africa do not extend more than a few degrees of personal contact. We are stuck in the local esusu trust level of trusted transactions. It is a malaise that affects everyone. Banks and depositors alike. In many cases, there is good reason for that.

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The lack of and abuse of broad consequences for misusing trusted transactions encourages everyone to just stay away and stick to the devil that is known. One former neighbour started a business distributing doughnuts. Within a year, he had switched to bread, delivering 100 loaves per week. By the next year, he had grown his distribution enough to need two buses and today regularly delivers several thousand loaves per week with a fleet of four minibuses at last count—in a small Nigerian city. And he covers only a portion of cities. He started that business with debt and still incurs occasional debt when he needs an expansion burst, so he is not anti-credit. But this former neighbour and friend will not touch bank money, even when his bank is calling.

I doubt he will shift his position (all things being equal) for a pure-play digital bank or fintech. The sample size cited is one, but represents, I believe how a lot of business is conducted in Africa. It is a deep gap in the business ecosystem that financial services providers are going to have to work out.

How do you keep the human face and expand the trust chain enough to find scale fast, but not too fast that it breaks down? How do you remain local in a thousand different cities and neighbourhoods without losing a scalable value proposition? Because technology alone cannot leapfrog this trust disconnect.

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12 APRIL, 2023

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Good morning

Twitter’s Circle feature is broken open.

Numerous users are reporting a Twitter bug which is bringing up Circle tweets—tweets that are only supposed to show up on closed groups—on the For You Page. 

Meanwhile, Chief Twit Musk has announced that all legacy verified ticks will be removed by April 20. Only Twitter Blue subscribers will have the blue ticks after then. 

In today’s edition

• Swvl’s fresh problems
• Kenya fines two companies for data abuse
• AfDB’s $525,000 fintech grant
• Twitter no longer exists
• The World Wide Web3
• Opportunities

SWVL’S FRESH PROBLEMS

Egypt-born mass transit startup Swvl has received its third delisting warning from Nasdaq. Per the warning, dated March 31, Swvl has 180 days—or until September 25—to raise the value of its publicly held shares above $15 million.

Swvl struggles: Swvl’s high-cash burn model financed its expansion and acquisition efforts, but its efforts did not make it profitable. In H1 2022, it made $40.7 million in revenue but lost over $161.6 million. Since its initial public offering (IPO) in April 2022, Swvl’s shares have dropped by 99%, and its valuation from $1.5 billion to just over $6 million. 

Low on cash and losses, the firm, earlier this year, tried to raise money by reversing its $40 million acquisition of Turkish startup Volt Lines. The losses have also forced the company to lay staff off, and scale back operations; it exited Pakistan in December 2022.

Is acquisition a way out? Sources close to Swvl have reported that the company has received acquisition and partnership offers from unknown “strategic investors”.

Personnel losses: Meanwhile, the company is also facing other strategic losses in personnel. Two of its board members and members of its audit committee—Steve Albrecht and Gbenga Oyebode—resigned last week. Its CFO Youssef Salem, who was with Swvl since June 2021, also resigned at the end of March. The company stated that Youssef’s resignation was not related to any disagreements he had with Swvl. Salem will act as an external advisor for a period while Abdullah Mansour, who served as CFO for Swvl’s Middle East operations, is now interim CFO.

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KENYA FINES TWO COMPANIES FOR DATA ABUSE

Kenyan loan company, WhitePath Company Limited and workspace provider Regus Kenya are feeling the heat for not playing by the data protection rules, Techweez reports.

Each company has been slapped with a hefty penalty of Ksh5 million ($37,000) as per the Data Protection Act and Complaints Handling Procedure and Enforcement Regulations. 

It turns out that WhitePath has been receiving a barrage of complaints, with close to 150 users claiming that their applications have been accessing their phone contacts without permission and bombarding them with unwanted text messages. To make matters worse, WhitePath’s staff has allegedly been harassing the complainants and their contacts. 

As for Regus Kenya, they’ve been accused of spamming improper information to a complainant despite attempts to make them stop. 

But that’s not why the fines were expensive 

They suffered such an expensive penalty for refusing to cooperate with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC).

According to the ODPC, WhitePath failed to comply with an enforcement notice dated January 10, 2023, while Regus Kenya was non-cooperative and ignored multiple complaints, reminders and an enforcement notice.

The Data Commissioner, Immaculate Kassait, sternly emphasised that it’s the responsibility of every company to prioritise protecting personal data and challenged businesses to do so by design and by default.

AFDB GRANTS $525,000 FOR FINTECH HUB

The African Development Bank (AfDB) is dishing out a $525,000 grant to support the Africa Fintech Network (AFN) in building a digital hub for fintech founders across the continent. 

What kind of a digital hub?

The hub is an online portal where fintech associations across Africa can exchange knowledge, strengthen relationships, and show off their incredible innovations and achievements. The AFN digital hub aims to boost competitiveness and innovation in the African fintech sector and, consequently, bridge the financial inclusion gap in Africa.

The Africa Digital Financial Inclusion Facility reports that it expects the hub’s knowledge repository to be actively used by about 33 associations of fintech founders and investors across Africa.

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TWITTER DOES NOT EXIST ANYMORE

Or to be precise, Twitter Inc, the company, has ceased to exist as a standalone company and has been merged into an entity called “X Corp”.

Backstory: In April 2022, Musk registered X Holdings I, II, and III in Delaware, three separate companies designed to facilitate his purchase of Twitter. 

According to that deal, Twitter would merge with X Holdings II, but keep its name and general corporate structure while continuing to operate under Delaware law.

X Holdings I, controlled by Musk, would then serve as the merged entity’s parent company, while X Holdings III would take on the $13 billion loan that a group of big banks provided Musk to help cover the $44 billion purchase.

An official structure? X Holdings II was slated to be defunct after it merged with Twitter. So the official structure after Musk’s takeover was: X Holdings I oversees Twitter Inc, while X Holdings III handles the cash. But that has not been the case.

According to the Nevada secretary of state’s online business portal, Elon Musk registered two new businesses in the state on March 9, 2023: X Holdings Corp and X Corp. Then, on March 15, Musk applied to merge those Nevada businesses with two of his existing companies: X Holdings I with X Holdings Corp, and Twitter Inc with X Corp. 

Big picture: In the latter’s case, the articles of the merger mandate that X Corp fully acquire Twitter—meaning that, for all intents and purposes, “Twitter Inc” no longer exists as a Delaware-based company. Now, it’s part of X Corp, whose parent company is the $2 million X Holdings Corp. And that means X Holdings I no longer exists, either.

THE WORLD WIDE WEB3

Bitcoin	$29,990	– 0.44%
Ether	$1,869	– 2.63%
BNB	$319	– 2.51%
Dogecoin	$0.081	– 3.36%
Name of the coin Price of the coin 24-hour percentage change		Source: CoinMarketCap

* Data as of 06:30 AM WAT, April 12, 2023.

IN OTHER NEWS FROM TECHCABAL

Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund is setting up a carbon credit market.

Kenyan agritech Victory Farms raises $35 million Series B.

OPPORTUNITIES

• The SaaS Accelerator Program: Africa 2023 has opened applications for its accelerator programme to enable early startups in Africa to receive funding. Selected startups will receive up to $70,000 in funding. Apply by September 7.

• ALX Africa is calling for young African learners who are interested in data analytics, data science, cloud computing, and salesforce administration to apply to its new world-class programmes at no cost to them. Apply to any ALX course here.

• Dream VC has announced that it’s now open for its Launch Into VC (LIVC) and Invest Accelerator programmes. Junior professionals keen on breaking into the investor space can apply for LIVC to get a carefully curated investor talent accelerator led by existing venture builders. Senior professionals should apply for its Investor Accelerator 2023 Programme where future investment leaders and ecosystem builders will be upskilled. Apply for LIVC and Investor Accelerator Programme by April 16.

• The Jasiri Talent Investor Programme is looking for highly-driven individuals with a history of achievement and/or entrepreneurial action who aspire to launch a high-growth venture. Apply by April 23.

• The Africa’s Business Heroes (ABH) Prize Competition, a philanthropic initiative sponsored by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Philanthropy, is calling for participation from Africa’s entrepreneurial talent. Apply by May 12.

What else is happening in tech?

• The Kenyan government is struggling to pay its employees, including its ministers.

• Kenya secures $390 million from World Bank Group to boost digital economy.

• South Korea has fined Google $32 million for squeezing out a local rival. 

• Africans holding the B-1 or B-2 visas can now apply for jobs in the US. What’s the catch?

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Written by – Timi Odueso, Ephraim Modise & Ngozi Chukwu

Edited by – Kelechi Njoku

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