The African Tech Round-up turns one today, and it’s difficult not be sentimental. It’s been an incredibly rewarding year! We set out to provide some much-needed coverage of the biggest digital, tech and innovation news stories from the African continent— minus all the PR-soaked click-bait and consumer-driven tech chatter one tends to find all over the web. We’ve certainly done our best to deliver on that mandate. In producing the show over the last 52 weeks, we hope that like us, you’ve come to ...
Apr 11, 2016•55 min
Mbwana Alliy is the founder and managing partner at Savannah Fund, an Africa focused Technology Venture Capital fund that runs both an accelerator and seed investments in e-commerce, gaming, education technology and social networking. In this not-so-quick chat with Andile Masuku and Tefo Mohapi, Mbwana shares insights on the venture capital scene in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fields tough questions about the very public troubles at one of his more high-profile investments-- the cloud data service s...
Apr 11, 2016•1 hr 17 min
At Afrikoin Joburg 2015, hosted at Alpha Code in December 2015, Andile Masuku spoke to two leading Zimbabwean startup founders with businesses in the fintech space, and asked them to unpack why Zimbabwe might be the perfect use-case for disruptive fintech innovations.
Apr 11, 2016•12 min
MTN’s West African headache is now officially a chronic migraine. Just as the MTN Group thought the worst was over, lawmakers in Nigeria’s House of Representatives decided to shake things up. Some members have declared any concession (promised or granted by the Nigerian Communications Commission) in terms of the $5.2 billion fine that MTN Nigeria was charged some months ago, “unlawful”. Others have gone as far as saying that if Nigerian law is correctly applied, the fine ought to be doubled. We’...
Apr 04, 2016•17 min
Lungisa Matshoba is a Co-founder & Director of the Cape Town-based fintech startup, Yoco, and Shafin Anwarsha is Founder & Head of Product at Giraffe— a Johannesburg-based mobile recruitment startup. The two are well-regarded poster boys for South Africa’s emerging startup scene. Both their firms are currently enjoying a season of relative success as their businesses continue to gain traction and land the backing of venture capitalist interests. Among other things, Lungisa and Shafin cha...
Apr 03, 2016•17 min
Geraldine Mitchley is the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships and Emerging Payments at Visa Sub-Saharan Africa. Andile Masuku caught up with her at Nest.vc's recent #WhatsNext #FinTech event in Johannesburg and asked her to describe Visa's approach to acquiring fintech startups that might be able to deliver the type of innovative solutions they might have difficulty developing in-house.
Apr 03, 2016•7 min
There are media reports doing the rounds regarding South Africa’s Film and Publication Board (FPB) Chief Operating Officer Sipho Risiba supposedly giving Netflix a two-week ultimatum to comply with its regulatory requirements (whatever those are), or risk facing tough sanctions. Word is, Risiba recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kenya Film Commission in a show of support for Kenya's mission to regulate Netflix’s activities within that country. Despite details around this matt...
Mar 28, 2016•24 min
Dare Okoudjou is the CEO of MFS Africa-- a firm which specialises in “making simple and relevant financial services accessible through mobile phones across Africa”. His international consulting background and current role as overseer of MFS Africa’s business across 22 African countries inform his perspectives on what might be next for the continent’s fintech scene. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Dare factors in on a broad range of topics, including what financial services incumbents might be d...
Mar 25, 2016•19 min
Sechaba Ngwenya is the co-founder of fintech startup, Creditable, that is currently enjoying the support of VC’s like Nest.vc while “playing nicely” with financial incumbents like DBS Hong Kong to establish the commercial viability to their innovative banking solutions. Sechaba lets Andile Masuku in on what it’s taken to get his company to the relatively peachy phase they are now operating in, and dishes on the tricky business of securing the trust of existing financial institutions that have hi...
Mar 25, 2016•14 min
Last week, the Standard Bank Incubator in Johannesburg played host to Nest.vc’s forum on finance and technology. The gathering formed part Nest’s monthly entrepreneurship speaker series and showcase dubbed #WhatsNext. It is the very first #WhatsNext event that Nest has hosted in Southern Africa— doing so in partnership with Standard Bank South Africa, and with support provided by iAfrikan and the African Tech Round Up. In this week’s discussion, Zimbabwean tech entrepreneur and Business Analyst ...
Mar 21, 2016•54 min
Vodacom is reportedly fielding a lawsuit filed by a South African company called Ndabenhle Business Enterprises CC. Word is, Ndabenhle is alleging that Vodacom stole the “Airtime Advance” idea from them and ran with it, leaving them in the cold. Vodacom’s Airtime Advance innovation allows prepaid subscribers who run out of airtime to get R5 or R10 in prepaid minutes on credit and only pay it back when they recharge, with a little interest of course. In this episode of the African Tech Round-up, ...
Mar 13, 2016•27 min
Andile Masuku had a lively chat with Aaron Fu, Managing Partner (Africa) at NEST recorded during his first proper visit to Johannesburg in December 2015. They talked about everything from what he’s personally looking forward to in 2016 to what strikes his fancy in his professional capacity as the head of a leading VC firm on the continent.
Mar 13, 2016•25 min
Andile Masuku chats to Stuff Magazine South Africa Editor, Craig Wilson, about all the biggest news to come out of the Mobile World Congress 2016-- that went down in Barcelona.
Mar 13, 2016•27 min
Aspirational mobile trends like virtual reality are all well and good, but as Africans we must still grapple with the practical implications of having a massive percentage of mobile users on the continent continuing to rely on feature phones. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Stuff Magazine South Africa Editor and good friend of the show, Craig Wilson joins Andile Masuku to unpack some of the highlights of Mobile World Congress 2016— which wrapped in Barcelona just over a week...
Mar 07, 2016•42 min
Andile Masuku got to hang with two interesting African-American entrepreneurs who were in South Africa on business, and gleaned insights on the start-up scene they hail from. Talib Graves-Manns is the Entrepreneur in Residence with Google for Entrepreneurs and Code2040 at the American Underground in Durham, North Carolina. Talib is also the Co-Founder of three startups: RainbowMe Kids, Point AB, and Life on Autopilot. Brien Jordan-Jack is an aerospace engineer, and a celebrated commercial airlin...
Mar 06, 2016•54 min
It would seem that MTN might be off the hook over the small matter of the several billion dollars it owes/owed the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)— proving to many that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”, or as Tefo Mohapi so eloquently put it in this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, “TIA”. MTN Nigeria seems to have taken the casual legal advice of a certain Kyle Torrington of LexNove who joined me on last week’s show and suggested that the ...
Feb 29, 2016•23 min
Uganda’s most closely contested election in decades pitted the victorious incumbent, Yoweri Museveni, against seven other candidates, including his former doctor, Kizza Besigye, and ex-prime minister, Amama Mbabazi. While polls leading up to the election showed that Mr Museveni had a comfortable lead over his nearest rival, there was still the open question of the winning candidate needing to secure more than 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off with the second-ranked contender. (Mr Museveni event...
Feb 22, 2016•52 min
Facebook is still smarting from having Free Basics kicked out of India. Clearly no one was more upset by India’s emphatic rejection of Mark Zuckerberg’s walled garden project than venture capitalist and Facebook board member, Marc Andreessen, who took to Twitter last week to express his frustration at the country’s decision— a move that was met by global outrage. Nevertheless, we have Andreessen to thank for inspiring our discussion on this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, and re-ign...
Feb 15, 2016•39 min
Siyabulela Xuza is a young engineering graduate from Harvard, who got his start in science very young, experimenting with rocket fuel in his mother’s kitchen in a little rural town in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. While still very young, he would later become quite well-known for his prowess in the field of energy engineering, winning numerous awards and endowments from around the world— so much so that he even had a planet named after him. These days, he’s back on the continent, and alongside...
Feb 14, 2016•24 min
No doubt about it— it’s an unsettling time to be an Uber driver in Kenya. This past week, more reports of intimidation and violence against Uber drivers have been reported in Nairobi. And you can be certain that the beef is not over Uber’s shocking new logo. It appears Uber’s presence in the East African nation has begun to to seriously offend the nationalist sensibilities of some Kenyans. In this week’s discussion on the African Tech Round-up, Tefo Mohapi and I try and wrap our minds around the...
Feb 08, 2016•30 min
The soul-destroying Twitter outages and more recent SEACOM broadband disruptions notwithstanding, the team at the AfricanTechRoundup.com has been extremely busy since we properly got 2016 on the go a few weeks ago. So busy in fact, that Tefo Mohapi was unable to join Andile Masuku on the show this week. (Heads up. This week’s episode will be uncharacteristically short, but informative, nonetheless.) Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By...
Feb 01, 2016•11 min
We had to face a tough truth this week. The fact is that we are complicit in the perpetuation of horrible crimes against humanity. And if you’re reading this right now, it’s likely that you are too. If you’re an enthusiastic user of the useful tech products made by the likes of Apple, Sony and Samsung (as we are), then you’re contributing to the on-going exploitation of children as young as seven years of age in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-u...
Jan 25, 2016•27 min
African lawmakers are struggling to come to grips with the opportunities and threats presented by various important innovations being spurred by technological advancement— this as they carry out the unenviable task of safeguarding public welfare. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku discuss some of the more troublesome regulatory issues that are cropping up in countries like South Africa, Kenya and even Morocco— where VoIP apps have recently been ban...
Jan 18, 2016•31 min
We’re just loving this trend of brilliant Africans crashing our podcast recordings. The last time that happened we had a total blast with Rebecca Enonchong, Mark Kaigwa and Thebe Ikalafeng. This week, Nigerian software engineering heavyweight, Emeka Okoye, literally walked into the room as Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku were chatting about about how Africa seemed to be responding to Netflix’s surprise roll-out of its service to pretty much every corner of the planet. Be sure to listen in to hear ...
Jan 10, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Happy New Year! The African Tech Round-up team is only one week away from being back on strike to bring you the most important digital, tech and innovation news from across the African continent. This week though, we round off our coverage of the Annual Round-up 2015 with two awesome keynote addresses. The first is one is entitled, “Where To From Here” presented by Musa Kalenga who is Africa Client Partner at Facebook, as well as Head of Brand, IAB (SA). And the second talk entitled, “Digital Af...
Jan 04, 2016•37 min
We let you in on a panel discussion from the Annual Round-up 2015 that covered some of the past year’s highlights from from a gadgets and apps perspective. Andile Masuku leads this laid-back conversation with Deputy Editor of Stuff Magazine and Technology Analyst, Craig Wilson, Director of Project Fable, Kojo Baffoe and Digital Content Specialist at Caxton Magazines and Contributor at TechGirl.co.za, Jade Brennan. While we talked about everything from wearables to virtual reality— highlighting w...
Dec 28, 2015•27 min
In the second instalment of our four-part Annual Round-up 2015 insights series, we bring you a panel discussion on African startups featuring Google South Africa’s Head of Communications & Public Affairs, Mich Atagana and Entrepreneur Magazine Columnist & Co-Founder of LexNove, Andrew Taylor. Mich has had the unique privilege of not only covering the birth, progress, and often, the demise of many startups on the continent, but also working for some as well. Her current role at Google giv...
Dec 20, 2015•45 min
Over the next four weeks the we are taking a much-needed break. Cue peaceful ocean sounds But we’ve made sure that over the next four weeks, in place of our regular programming, we’ll be sharing exclusive content from the Annual Round-up 2015 event we hosted at the Wanderers Club, Johannesburg on November 26th 2015. The Event was powered by the good people at Opera Africa, who are totally all about helping us “do more” (on the web). This week, we kick things off by sharing a stimulating panel di...
Dec 13, 2015•43 min
We attended Afrikoin Johannesburg on 3 December 2015. At the event, Andile Masuku posed a question that led to a very lively debate about whether improved “access” to seamless, more affordable financial services does in fact equal “inclusion” for Africa’s poorest— especially given how centralised the world’s computing power is, and how huge stashes of Bitcoin are held by a relatively few well-resourced interests. We also caught up with Savannah Fund founder, Mbwana Alliy for a chat after the eve...
Dec 07, 2015•1 hr 53 min
We're still buzzing from the great time we had at the Annual Round-up 2015, that Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku hosted at The Wanderers Club in Johannesburg last week. Many thanks to those of you who made it out on Thursday morning, and a big thank you to our incredibly generous and insightful guest panelists and speakers. Also, big up to our event partners, Opera Africa, Stuff magazine, and iAfrikan.com. It was an chilled morning of intelligent, retrospective conversations-- which took stock of ...
Nov 29, 2015•14 min
