For nearly 20 years, Baratang Miya (pictured) has been encouraging women and girls to step into STEM. In 2003, she founded GirlHype to pursue her vision.
The South African entrepreneur had the opportunity to strengthen her coding skills in Silicon Valley, in the U.S., after being selected by the TechWomen program. The idea for GirlHype was born out of Baratang Miya's personal experience. When she was a university student, she did not know about the Internet. Later, one of her acquaintances introduced her to the digital world. “It has changed my life to the level I could never have dreamed of. It has taken me to the policy level to speak at platforms like the United Nations. I’ve just come back from the UN, in December, speaking as one of the high-level panel members at the Internet Governance Forum,” she remembered.
GirlHype combines both theoretical courses and practical experiences in the field of computer science. The organization offers girls and young women the opportunity to participate, develop technical skills and social skills necessary to fully engage in the new 21st-century job market and higher education.
Baratang Miya’s mission is to address gender inequality in access to digital opportunities and skills. Her work has earned her partnership with international organizations, including UN Women, Mozilla, TechWomen, Silicon Cape, and Technovation. In December 2021, she attended the UN Internet Governance Forum where she shared her vision. "It is high time that the United Nations takes the initiative to ensure that no one is left behind, especially women and girls," she said.
African girls and women should be at the heart of global technology solutions that will be used by their communities, she believed. "We are committed to preparing each of our students to be problem solvers, collaborative leaders, and innovative entrepreneurs of tomorrow," she said.
Aïsha Moyouzame
Over the past five years, the Ghanaian government has developed various means of securing tax revenues from the exploitation of its subsoil resources. The measures have been reinforced with digital tools.
Ghana has digitized its national laboratory for the analysis of all precious minerals intended for export. The transformation of the facility managed by the Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC), was unveiled last March 2 in Accra by Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia.
Nana Akwasi Awuah, MD of PMMC, explained that the digitization of assays will now make it possible “to generate assay certificates which have unique security features. These unique features will make it difficult for gold scammers to follow to facilitate their dubious activities.”
“Digitization has also now made it possible to monitor in real-time, gold exports passing through the National Assay Laboratory. At the click of a button, persons given access to the dashboard can see, in real-time, the amount of gold exported in both kilograms and ounces, where it was exported to, the value in Ghana cedis and dollars, the withholding tax, the exporter, and many other relevant data to aid national economic planning,” he added.
The transformation of the precious minerals analysis laboratory is part of the government’s strategy to secure tax revenue from this sector. Five years ago, the President of the Republic ordered the government to identify a means of independently verifying gold exports. The PMMC officially started operations in February 2018 following several engagements with the Ghana Chamber of Mines, the Association of Gold Exporters, and the Ghana Chamber of Bullion Dealers.
"President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo recognizes that our progress as a nation in the modern world is inextricably linked to digitalization and will, therefore, continue its adoption for enhanced service delivery. It is a critical path for our nation to remain competitive in the world of today and tomorrow," Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia said.
Adoni Conrad Quenum
Moroccan B2B e-commerce and retail startup Chari.ma announced it has made an offer of $22mln to acquire consumer credit company Axa Crédit.
“We are thrilled to announce a cross-selling partnership between Axa Insurance Morocco and Chari. This partnership will allow Axa Insurance to keep growing on the Moroccan market and play a central role in financial inclusion,” commented Meryem Chami, CEO of Axa Assurance Maroc.
The offer comes less than a month after Chari.ma raised an undisclosed amount of funds. The company co-founded in 2020 by Ismaël and Sophia Belkhayat, had indicated the new capital valued it at $100 million. Chari.ma also announced it would, following this operation, test the Buy Now and Pay Later service with its customers, before considering an extension into the customer loan sector.
The new partnership will allow Axa to refocus on insurance, its core business. Chari.ma, for its part, could now offer credit to its customer base of consumer goods retailers. The company will use the Karny.ma platform, which it acquired in August 2021, to assess the creditworthiness of its unbanked customers with no credit history. These retailers will in turn be able to grant consumer products on credit to their customers.
Chamberline Moko
The low bancarization in Africa has long kept a large part of the population away from traditional financial services such as savings and credit. Tontines have become the way for the unbanked to access these services.
To make this informal savings method more effective, given its proven social impact over many years in Africa, Nigerian Bernie Akporiaye launched MaTontine- a financial service platform that uses digital technology to modernize traditional savings circles. MaTontine, currently available in Senegal, provides access to small loans and a range of financial services such as micro-insurance to its customers. “We solve the problem by utilizing mobile phones and our platform to digitize the benefits of traditional savings circles (ROSCAs), thereby reducing the cost of borrowing by 75% or more,” explains Bernie Akporiaye.
The platform's members contribute to an online kitty and collect the amount in turns. According to Bernie Akporiaye, members receive a credit score based on their payment morality, from which partners can offer them small loans or contracts. The use of the basic service is free of charge, the startup being financed via the commissions taken from the services of its partners Cofina and Sunu Assurance.
The particularity of MaTontine is that it uses old-generation mobile phones, unlike most competing fintech companies that use smartphones; 90% of the platform’s members are women. Bernie Akporiaye stressed that the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted how vulnerable these women are, most of whom “live on less than $5 a day." MaTontine is therefore working on integrating other services such as financial education, to better prepare users for a possible future crisis.
The startup won the 3rd prize in Orange’s AfricaCom Awards competition in 2016 and a grant from the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator innovation fund in February 2018. It was honored in 2019 by Inclusive Fintech 50 Fintech, an initiative by MetLife Foundation, Visa, Accion, and IFC. Since its launch, MaTontine has registered 6,000 customers and disbursed $200,000 in loans.
Ruben Tchounyabe
French banking group Societe Generale is ending its mobile money service YUP, created in 2017, in Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Guinea, Ghana, and Madagascar. The information was disclosed in a letter sent on March 1, 2022, by Nicolas Pichou, CEO of Societe Generale Cameroon, to his employees.
"Dear colleagues, 5 years ago, anxious to promote financial inclusion and facilitate access to innovative fund transfer means by notably dematerializing companies’ payment flow, the AFMO (Ed.note: Africa and the Middle East) Business Unit launched an electronic money service and created a dedicated entity YUP. Despite all the efforts made by the YUP teams in the 7 geographic zones concerned, including Cameroon, to develop our market share and improve the experience, the service has not succeeded in creating a viable model and the market outlooks do not comfort us in planning for the continuation of this segment. In that circumstance, Societe Generale Group, in consultation with all its local subsidiaries, took the difficult decision to stop the operations of YUP in all the geographic areas where it was deployed,” explains the letter sent by Nicolas Pichou.
In short, despite all the resources deployed over the past five years to capture shares of the highly dynamic mobile money market, YUP has proven unprofitable for Société Générale. In the case of Cameroon, the reason for this failure is the undisputed supremacy of the country's two main mobile operators (MTN and Orange namely) in this market. Those operators entered the local market almost ten years before YUP and have had the opportunity to establish a network that leaves almost no room for newcomers.
Over 19 million active mobile money accounts
In July 2021, when celebrating its 10th anniversary in the Cameronian mobile money market, Orange Cameroon claimed it was controlling 70% of the market share, with cumulative transactions amounting to CFA800 billion yearly. "When I say cumulative transaction values, I mean deposits and withdrawals, money transfers, bill payments, salary payments, and everything else that is merchant payment, etc. Our daily cumulative transactions amount to CFA3 million,” explained Emmanuel Tassembedo, director of Orange Money Cameroon.
MTN Cameroon is a bit cautious as far as its mobile money market share is concerned. Its executives claim MTN Mobile Money had 5.6 million active subscribers in the second quarter of 2021, at least 168,000 points of presence across the country, including 108,000 merchant points and 60,000 distribution points.
Both operators offer innovative services like insurance subscriptions and tax payments. According to the Ministry of Finance, in Cameroon, close to CFA10 billion of taxes were paid through the two mobile money operators.
Let’s note that Cameroon is CEMAC’s leader in the mobile money segment. According to data published by the central bank BEAC, in 2020, there were 19.1 million active mobile money accounts in Cameroon. This was 64.8% of the 30.1 million mobile money accounts active in the CEMAC region whose membership includes six countries (Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Chad, the Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea). During the period, mobile money service providers active in Cameroon carried out 73.13% of the transactions recorded in the community space.
Brice R. Mbodiam
Malian pastoralist communities now have a digital solution to help them identify good pastures for their herds. The solution -STAMP (Sustainable Technology Adaptation for Mali’s Pastoralists) - is the fruit of a public-private partnership between the Malian Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Orange-Mali, the herders' organization "Tassaght," the international remote sensing service provider HSS, and the Netherlands International Development Organization (SNV). It was launched in 2017, the year in which the service won the 1st Orange Prize for Social Entrepreneurship Mali.
STAMP is a response to the grazing problems of pastoral populations in the Gao region, where industrial and agricultural activities, human and animal overpopulation, and climate change have reduced resources for livestock. The solution provides the beneficiaries with geo-satellite information on the availability and quality of biomass for feeding their livestock, the availability of surface water for watering, and also the concentration of animals around these resources. It also provides information on livestock and grain prices, as well as advice on animal health and financial products for livestock farmers. Users only have to call a center managed by Orange Mali or dial a USSD code on basic mobile phones to instantly obtain important data for their movement.
On December 17, 2020, during a press conference in Bamako, Thomas Sommerhalter, the STAMP project manager explained that the "producer surveys (carried out as part of the project, ed) revealed that reliability and the need for timely information are key to decision-making by pastoralists."
STAMP also integrates two other services to help farmers obtain information on weather, planting methods, seeds, planting time, fertilizers, etc. The head of the corporate social responsibility division at Orange Mali, Abdoul Malick Diallo, explained that the client advisors speak local languages, including Fulani, Dogon, Songhai, and Bamanankan to facilitate talks with the community.
Ruben Tchounyabe
Tech4dev announced it is launching a new edition of its women Techsters fellowship. The non-profit social enterprise wants, through this initiative, to bridge the digital divide between men and women in the tech sector.
The training combines theory and practice to give women the opportunity to enter the job market. It is specifically designed for technology novices who are encountering technology for the first time. Applicants for the scholarship must be between the ages of 16 and 40 and reside in one of the following countries: South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, DR Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Algeria, South Sudan, Morocco, Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Egypt.
Successful candidates will be trained in the skills of blockchain, cybersecurity, data science and artificial intelligence engineering, mixed reality/3D animation, mobile application development, product design (UI/UX), product management, and software development.
The Women Techsters Fellowship Program aims to increase the number of girls and women with improved livelihoods and access to digital jobs. The program will begin in May 2022 for one year, including 6 months of intensive training, followed by a 6-month internship. At the same time, learners will participate in a mentoring program to help them build technology careers and technology-based businesses. Applications are due by March 22, 2022.
Vanessa Ngono Atangana
Pascal Kanik is bringing the digital into schools in DR Congo with his startup Schoolap, a digital platform that provides students with access to digital lessons and transforms the way teachers teach in schools.
He created the startup in 2017 alongside another entrepreneur, Guy-José Leta. The idea of setting up this tool was born while he was on a work mission as a Vodacom employee to raise awareness about sustainable development in the country's provinces. “I realized the lack of quality learning in the areas I visited. I noticed that teachers don't know what sustainable development is. I then wondered how they could teach something they don't know,” he says. He then decided to bring quality lessons to them. Access to the digital platform is free and lessons can be downloaded to any device.
Schoolap also incorporates a tablet for those who wish to purchase it. The courses available meet the criteria and requirements of the Ministry of Education. "There are even courses in sign language for deaf and dumb people, and cartoons for kids," he adds.
Pascal Kanik won several international awards for his innovation and has even sold the concept to Seychelles. In April 2019, Schoolap won the award for best online education platform at Seedstars, a startup competition focused on emerging markets. That same year, the entrepreneur entered into a funding agreement with CFC, and subsequently raised $500,000 from the international Eutelsat Group, which accelerated his penetration of the Congolese market.
Schoolap has become increasingly successful with the lockdown imposed due to Covid-19. According to Pascal Kanik, the platform already has more than 20,300 educational content, a network of more than 6,000 schools, 1,900,000 students, and 105,000 teachers. The startup wants to reach 28,000 schools in the long term and conquer new markets.
Schoolap recently established an adapted bank loan with RawBank, the country's main bank, to enable the delivery of more than 10,000 tablets by the end of this year, much more than the 500 tablets sold monthly at the beginning of its marketing in 2021.
Aïsha Moyouzame
Over the past five years, Gabon has performed well in the UN e-government development index. Despite this progress on paper, not much has changed on the ground.
Société d'incubation numérique du Gabon (SING), a private company providing digital innovation services, announced the launch of the SmartGov program last February 25. The initiative is part of the government’s ambition to digitize public services and make the administration more collaborative and efficient.
"Services need to communicate with each other so that they are faster and more efficient," said Yannick Ebibie (pictured), MD of SING. "Even though the country is the highest-ranked in terms of e-government in the Central African region and among the best on the continent, people still have to queue for hours at ministries to access services. And sometimes not everything on the website is updated," he said.
Gabonese authorities have made digital transformation a priority since 2009. The ambition is to make Gabon a model of digitalization in Africa by 2025. To support the migration of Gabon from e-Government to Smart Government, the SING also launched a three-day hackathon. During this event, SING will select and fund the best ideas, capable of facilitating the entry of public administrations into a more collaborative vision. CFA1 million (nearly $1,700) will be granted to the winners with a three-month technical assistance period.
Brice Gotoa
South African cryptocurrency exchange platform valr.com announced yesterday it has raised more than R750 million (about $50 million) in a Series B round to finance its expansion strategy. This deal represents the largest cryptocurrency fundraising ever in Africa, according to the company, which is currently worth $240 million,
Under its plans, VARL wants to expand into India, while strengthening its presence in Africa. “We believe that Africa’s future is bright for the adoption of cryptocurrencies for both asset diversification and payments. VALR brings an amazing product and service to onboard both retail customers and institutions,” said Paul Veradittakit, partner at Pantera Capital, the company that led the transaction.
Two years ago, in July 2020, VARL benefited from a $3.4 million Series A funding. The resources were used to develop new products and expand into new African markets. The cryptocurrency exchange platform claims to have processed more than $7.5 billion in transaction volume since its launch in 2019. It also claims more than 250,000 retail clients and 500 institutional clients on the continent.
According to an August 2021 study published by research platform Chainalysis, the African cryptocurrency market grew by 1,200% in value between July 2020 and June 2021. Despite this growth, the continent represents the smallest cryptocurrency economy of all regions studied by Chainalysis.
Chamberline Moko
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Moroccan Nizar Berdai (pictured), 25, is becoming a model of student entrepreneurship. He owns two startups: WeMash Digital, which specializes in digital transformation, and Wsselni Maak, which is a ride-sharing solution. This year, the young entrepreneur who is currently pursuing a master's degree in strategy and finance at Sciences Po Paris wants to focus on expanding his car-sharing solution.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Nizar Berdai obtained a bachelor's degree in Salé, Morocco, then moved to Canada in 2015 to study finance and political science at HEC Montreal and McGill University. He was very active in the community and was a member of the Quebec Youth Parliament.
The idea to create a business came up to him while he was preparing for his master's degree at ESSEC Paris. He then created WeMash Digital, a startup specialized in communication consulting and digital transformation. Very quickly, he landed contracts with clients including Moroccan public sector organizations and NGOs such as Oxfam Morocco. At the same time, he refined a carpooling project and launched in February 2021, Wsselni Maak.
The student currently enrolled in a Master 2 in Finance and Strategy, at Sciences Po Paris, claimed Wsselni Maak receives an average of 450 offers and requests per day. In less than a year, the startup has more than 20,000 users in Rabat, Salé, Témara, Casablanca, Agadir, and Fez.
Nizar Berdai is now working to increase the service’s user base through partnerships with companies that will be announced, he says, in the coming days.
Aïsha Moyouzame
Agritech investment remains low in Africa despite great successes by some startups. Egyptian agritech startup FreshSource Global announced last February 28 it has secured seed funding to finance its expansion. The B2B platform, which connects farms to businesses in Egypt and provides last-mile solutions, said it has raised an undisclosed “seven-figure” round in dollars from Wamda Capital, 4DX Ventures, and some angel investors.
“We are planning to use the funds to expand our team and invest more in our technology. Also, we are going to be covering all of Egypt’s governorates by the end of 2023. By 2024, we will start considering a global expansion plan,” said co-Founder Farah Emara. She believes the new resources will help "accelerate our mission to create more sustainable fresh food systems through data and technology to transform the lives of producers, businesses and consumers and improve the planet."
FreshSource acts as an intermediary between agricultural producers and businesses such as supermarkets. The company founded in 2018 and launched in 2019 relies on a digital platform through which it centralizes supply from farmers and demand from retailers. It ensures that customers' needs are met by reducing the number of intermediaries through which agricultural products pass. It also ensures the safety of agricultural products, particularly in terms of preservation and transportation to the buyer.
By 2020, FreshSource was already claiming 300 local farmers as users of its service, creating 1,500 jobs and also having prevented 200 tons of food loss. According to Farah Emara, "By reducing food waste, you reduce the cost of fresh food and enable a segment of the population that couldn't afford it before to live a healthier lifestyle. Also, this method increases producers’ income and thus improves their quality of life.”
Adoni Conrad Quenum
Household waste management has been a major problem in African cities for several years. A Malagasy startup has entered the sector using digital technology to protect the planet.
In Madagascar, like the rest of the world, as the population grows, the volume of waste produced also grows; 50% of garbage in the country still ends up in the streets according to the NGO Ran'Eau. In 2017, the local startup Greentsika launched its household waste collection service using digital tools. Tested and deployed in Tuléar, in the south of Madagascar, the solution is the result of a collaboration with the German NGO Welthungerhilfe, which handles the transportation of waste to landfills.
Greentsika’s service is accessible via mobile phone, email, social networks, or directly at the company's offices. The solution offers various means of payment, including mobile money transfers, bank transfers, checks, and cash. The monthly subscription fee for a household starts at 4,000 ariary ($1), for two to six pickups per week of a 50 kg bag of waste. The fee for businesses (hotels, restaurants, schools, government offices, etc.) starts at 20,000 ariary. The subscriber company chooses the days it wants to have the waste collected and the agent who is dedicated to it.
Subscribers are given a card with a barcode that Greentsika's agents will scan at each garbage pickup. The unique barcodes allow Greentsika to have reliable data on the number of pickups made in a household or business. They also enable the startup to know the coverage of its agents and track their routes in real-time, and identify the customers who have paid their subscription. Rajaofera Gaëtan, one of the four co-founders of Greentsika, said the entire system is cloud-based.
Greentsika, accelerated by Orange Fab Madagascar in 2019, already claims 2,300 customers, 160 garbage pickups per day for 7 tons of waste collected daily. The startup aims to cover the entire city of Tulear and enter other cities, creating more job opportunities. In 2020, Rajaofera Gaëtan estimated that 5 to 6% of households in Tulear were covered.
Adoni Conrad Quenum
Demand for broadband connectivity is growing in Africa. So are the risks of cybercrime. Improving supply while protecting access has become a necessity to ensure the region's development.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced yesterday it will soon deploy two root server clusters in Africa. One is confirmed to be installed in Kenya. The two technical infrastructures will allow Internet queries from Africa to be processed locally, without depending on networks and servers located in other parts of the world. It will also improve network quality by reducing latency throughout the region.
According to the international non-profit organization - which coordinates the domain name system and plays a key role in maintaining a global, interoperable and secure Internet – the clusters “will reduce the time it takes for a website to load, particularly when there are spikes in Internet usage. This will bring immediate benefits for everyday Internet users across the continent.”
The root servers will also reduce the impact of a potential cyberattack on the continent. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattacks aim to overwhelm servers with a flood of queries. The technical infrastructure will allow for greater bandwidth and data processing capacity, reducing the risk of Internet downtime due to a cyber-attack.
ICANN's investment in Africa is part of the ambitions of the Partner2Connect digital coalition launched on September 20, 2021, by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The goal is to drive meaningful connectivity and digital transformation globally in line with the African Digital Transformation Strategy (2020-2030).
Currently, only 33% of the African population has access to the Internet, according to ITU. With the digital transformation accelerating and inducing high Internet consumption, the Union believes that the rate will increase rapidly in the coming months.
Muriel Edjo