Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qoA105xnIpU Khaman Maluach was just drafted 10th overall in the NBA Draft. He’s a South Sudanese refugee who grew up in Uganda and only started playing basketball when he was 13 years old. After first playing the game at Luol Deng’s basketball camp, Maluach played at the NBA Academy in Senegal, and played three seasons in NBA Africa’s Basketball Africa League, before signing with Duke University. He’s the first player from the BAL to be drafted int...
Jun 26, 2025•4 min
Watch this episode on YouTube . 2025 is the year of stablecoins. Transaction volumes have grown to over $33 trillion in the past 12 months. The top Dollar-denominated stablecoins are the 17th largest holder of US treasuries globally. Tether, issuer the largest stablecoin by volume, USDT, announced $13 billion in net profit in 2024. Circle, the USDC issuer, is going public. But what got the hype train going was Stripe’s acquisition of the startup Bridge for $1.1 billion. And all of Bridge’s produ...
May 29, 2025•9 min
There are 1,696 active players in the NFL. Just 138 are African. But if it were up to Osi Umenyiora, 11-year veteran and 2-time Super Bowl Champion, there would be many more. Osi is the Founder of The Uprise, the NFL's lead in Africa, and he's pioneering American football on the African continent. At the NFL's camp in Lagos, Nigeria, young athletes are vying for a shot to join the NFL Academy in London or to go straight to the League through the International Player Pathway Program. But many of ...
Apr 23, 2025•7 min
Farming is the number one source of employment in Africa, yet its agricultural productivity is the lowest of any region in the world. The opportunity is immense—60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land is on the continent—but rural communities are suffering from a lack of economic opportunity. So young Africans are building innovative solutions to tackle the problems that are impacting their families and communities. Wissal Ben Moussa is the Co-founder & R&D Officer of Sand To Green, ...
Feb 25, 2025•12 min
Reports suggest that climate change is set to cost the global economy $38 billion per year by 2049. Emerging markets need close to $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to meet the climate goals. That's 4 times what is currently invested. But high capital costs are stalling clean energy investment across Africa. If you want to build a renewable energy project in Sub-Saharan Africa, the weighted average cost of capital would be up to 4x as much as the same project in Western Europe or the US, due to the...
Feb 06, 2025•10 min
Nigeria’s energy crisis has persisted for decades. Africa's largest country is largely powered by fuel generators. They're noisy, dirty, and bad for the environment. But they also provide power to millions of people in a country with an unreliable grid. The removal of Nigeria's long-standing fuel subsidy in 2023 caused the price of fuel to quadruple, leaving Nigerian consumers searching for options. And many are going solar. So while economic considerations have largely driven Nigeria's transiti...
Jan 21, 2025•12 min
Can Africa be a leader in the global fight against climate change? While the continent has contributed just 3 percent to global carbon emissions, it is the most impacted by climate change. But it also has a range of natural endowments that leave it well-positioned to build green industries that will have a positive economic impact locally and can play a significant global role in getting to net zero. In this episode, we're joined by three Africa-focused climate founders solving local problems wi...
Dec 09, 2024•11 min
These climate investors are funding climate startups using a hands-on venture-building model to support founders across Africa. In this episode, we’re joined by James Mwangi from Africa Climate Ventures, Maxime Bayen from Catalyst Fund, and Lyndsay Holley Handler from Delta40. We discuss why African ventures and climate startups, in particular, benefit from the venture building model; the limitations of the traditional two and twenty fund model in the African tech ecosystem; the types of founder...
Nov 11, 2024•48 min
There are millions of Moniepoint point-of-sale terminals in use across Nigeria. These point-of-sale devices power Nigeria’s offline economy, and while there are many competitors in this space, Moniepoint appears to beating them all. How did they do it? How did Moniepoint grow so quickly? And why has it become the preferred choice for agents and merchants across Nigeria? In this episode, we hit the streets of Lagos with Ezekiel Sanni, Moniepoint's Senior Vice President of Distribution Network Sal...
Aug 29, 2024•7 min
Small retailers in Nigeria power the economy. But they’re going through some tough times. Devaluation, food inflation, and overall poor economic conditions have made it especially hard for these small businesses to operate. To better understand how retail works, and how these small businesses can grow, we hit the streets of Lagos with Deepankar Rustagi, CEO of OmniRetail. OmniRetail was ranked Africa's #1 Fastest Growing Company in 2024 by Financial Times. In this episode, Deepankar explains sma...
Jul 25, 2024•7 min
One of the African tech ecosystem's largest exits was the 2020 sale of Sendwave to WorldRemit for $500 million. Sid Sridhar was Sendwave's Head of Business at the time, and in this episode, Sid shares his M&A lessons for the African tech ecosystem. Sid is now the Head of Business at Wave, the mobile money company spun out of Sendwave that's competing head-on with the telcos in Francophone West Africa. Wave raised a $200 million Series A in 2021, valuing the company at $1.7 billion. 00:00 - I...
Jun 13, 2024•10 min
There is a $330 billion credit gap, according to the IFC. But why is it so hard to lend in African markets? We explore that question with Chijioke Dozie, Co-founder and CEO of Carbon, and Mark Straub, CEO of Smile Identity. This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in Africa Summit in New York City. Download their FinTech in Africa research report, published in March 2024. 00:00 - Introduction 01:36 - The credit infrastructure problems in Africa 02:28 - Carbon's approach to len...
May 30, 2024•20 min
In this episode, the third in our docuseries on jobtech platforms and the future of work, we dive deeper into the value chain, because the problems that small businesses have across the continent are multi-layered. In an environment of demand constraints and a lack of infrastructure, platforms need to solve multiple problems across the value chain. This is what makes jobtech platforms so hard to build in Africa. But for those who can solve problems across the value chain, it not only unlocks gro...
May 23, 2024•8 min
Benjamin Fernandes, the Founder and CEO of the remittance platform NALA, likes to say that payments are just 1% built in Africa. Why are cross-border payments so hard? In this episode, we're joined in conversation with Benjamin Fernandes and Dan Kleinbaum, a co-founder of Beyonic, which sold to Onafriq, and now the Founder of the FX platform GTXN. This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in Africa Summit in New York City. Download their FinTech in Africa research report, publi...
May 16, 2024•33 min
In this episode, we're joined in a panel conversation with the CEOs of three of Nigeria's biggest digital banks: Moniepoint's Tosin Eniolorunda, Kuda's Babs Ogundeyi, and FairMoney's Laurin Hainy. This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in Africa Summit in New York City. Download their FinTech in Africa research report, published in March 2024. 00:00 - Intro 01:18 - Moniepoint's distribution-first strategy 02:45 - FairMoney's credit-led approach 04:46 - Kuda's neobank strateg...
May 09, 2024•43 min
In our first episode of this series on jobtech platforms and the future of work, we argued that the future of work is a tech-enabled portfolio of work. But what does a portfolio of work really look like? And what happens next? We know we need to create more formal jobs in Africa, and we need to boost the productivity of the informal sector. But how do we get there? Considering the context of the markets in question, the future of work isn’t going to be designed or endowed; it’s going to be boots...
Apr 18, 2024•8 min
In January 2024, we hosted a live show in Lagos with The Subtext's Osarumen Osamuyi on the relationship between the tech ecosystem and the media. It was a follow-up to a 2020 episode we published entitled Much Ado About the Media . A lot of founders still feel the media is acting in bad faith amidst more accountable media coverage. In this episode, we explore this tension and have an important discussion with the ecosystem players themselves. 00:00 - Intro 01:22 - Reflecting on 2020's episode 08...
Apr 04, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Live from the BIG Summit, a platform hosted by investor and 2x NBA All-Star Baron Davis, at the 2024 NBA All-Star Game, a conversation with three operators connecting Africa to the world through culture and commerce. In this conversation, we're joined by Clare Akamanzi, the CEO of NBA Africa, Abdul Karim Abdullah, the Founder and CEO of AfroFuture music festival, and entrepreneur and private equity investor Tuyee Yeboah. 00:00 - Intro 02:38 - NBA Africa 05:32 - AfroFuture 08:34 - Investing acros...
Mar 28, 2024•27 min
The African continent has the highest levels of poverty, the lowest levels of formal employment, and its population is going to double in the next 30 years. African countries need to create more jobs. But what kinds of jobs? And how? What if I told you that the way governments and development organizations are trying to create jobs in Africa is all wrong? To make a dent in this problem requires an understanding of the realities on the ground and how that has impacted the preferences of the labor...
Mar 14, 2024•11 min
Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it? This episode is the last episode of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a dif...
Mar 07, 2024•38 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it? This episode is the fourth of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a different...
Feb 29, 2024•47 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it? This episode is the third of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a different ...
Feb 22, 2024•58 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it? This episode is the second of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a different...
Feb 15, 2024•35 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Despite research showing that female founders outperform their male peers, startups with a solo female founder or an all-female founding team raised a mere 2% of all the funding in Africa last year. There is a huge gender funding gap. How do we close it? This episode is the first of a five-episode series on gender lens investing, co-hosted by Eloho Omame, Founding Partner of First Check Africa, an early-stage fund backing female-led startups. Each episode of this series will explore a different ...
Feb 08, 2024•58 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Today's guest is Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, Chairman of Coronation Capital and former Group MD and CEO of Access Bank. Aigboje is one of the most successful and esteemed businesspeople on the continent. In 2002, he led the acquisition of Access Bank, which under his 11-year leadership grew into the largest bank in Nigeria and one of the largest in Africa. This wide-ranging discussion with the Chairman took place during the 2023 UN General Assembly in New York at an event hosted by the early-stage V...
Jan 26, 2024•48 min•Season 5Ep. 9
Today's guests are Natalie Kolbe, Ngetha Waithaka and Lexi Novitske - Partners of the $205 million growth fund Norrsken22. In this episode, we'll talk about investment strategy, valuations, perspectives for the ecosystem, exits, and much more. 00:00 - Intro 00:48 - Norrsken22's $205m fundraise 09:36 - Investment strategy & process 12:43 - Investing in asset-light marketplaces 14:37 - Expansion 18:04 - Investment theses 27:26 - Macro perspectives 30:22 - What are the partners focused on and t...
Jan 11, 2024•43 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Today's guest is Perseus Mlambo, Co-founder and CEO of Union54, the developers of the social commerce app ChitChat. The company started as Zazu, an agtech startup, which pivoted to Zazu the neobank. After issuing virtual cards for their users and seeing the demand other fintechs had for virtual cards, they pivoted to Union54 the card issuing API, which after massive traction in the fintech ecosystem and subsequent issues with fraud, has pivoted once more to ChitChat. With many pivots come many l...
Dec 14, 2023•41 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Today's guest is Adia Sowho, one of the most experienced and thoughtful operators in the African tech ecosystem. After starting her career in consulting and telecommunications, Adia led growth at the digital credit startup Migo, before leading the turnaround as Interim CEO of the embattled agriculture finance company Thrive Agric. In this episode, we'll learn from Adia about her lessons working across both big and small companies, about the importance of sharing those lessons learned, and so muc...
Nov 30, 2023•47 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Today's guest is Ham Serunjogi, the Co-founder and CEO of Chipper Cash. In 2021, Chipper raised $150 million Series C extension, valuing the startup at $2 billion, but has since cut its valuation, reportedly by 70 percent, has engaged in three rounds of layoffs, reducing its headcount by nearly 175 from its peak of 450, and has drastically pulled back from its aggressive growth and expansion strategies across the continent. This conversation with Ham comes at an interesting time for Chipper and ...
Nov 16, 2023•48 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Today's guest is Dare Okoudjou, the Founder and CEO of MFS Africa, which this week has rebranded to Onafriq. The new name represents a new chapter in the company, which is a very different looking company than when we first had Dare on the show back in 2020, after their acquisition of Beyonic. Since then, they've also acquired the card issuer, GTP in the US, and the agent network Baxi in Nigeria. This current period of the African tech ecosystem is one of increased consolidation and company shut...
Nov 02, 2023•42 min•Season 5Ep. 4
