Author: Elan

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a three-part series on the state of venture investment to Black-founded startups in 2026. Driving these reports is data from Crunchbase’s Diversity Spotlight feature, which offers insight into diversity in startups’ and investment firms’ leadership teams. Read Part 1, exploring the data on funding to Black founders, here. Part 3 will be published next week. Only around $942 million — or just 0.32% of total U.S. venture funding — went to startups with a Black founder or co-founder last year, per Crunchbase data. That’s one of the lowest shares in years, and…

Malawi has recorded a welcome improvement in its inflation outlook, with the latest figures from the National Statistical Office (NSO) showing that the pace at which prices are rising has slowed, largely due to a decline in food prices. According to the NSO’s Consumer Price Indices report for May 2026, the country’s year-on-year inflation rate dropped to 23.4 percent in May from 24.3 percent in April 2026. The decline signals a modest but significant easing in inflationary pressures that have weighed heavily on households and businesses in recent years. The NSO attributes the improvement mainly to lower food inflation, which…

Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payments startup, has tapped payments-focused blockchain network Tempo to expand its stablecoin payments infrastructure, eight months after announcing a similar partnership with Polygon.The partnership, announced on Thursday at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, will see Flutterwave integrate Tempo as a settlement layer for stablecoin transactions across its consumer remittance product, Send App, and its enterprise payments platform, Flutterwave for Business (F4B).Once deployed, the integration will support wallet-to-wallet transfers using dollar-backed stablecoins USDC and USDT, enabling individuals and businesses to move money across borders through digital currencies.The partnership is the latest signal that African fintechs are increasingly…

The Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) latest directive requiring all payment-related data to be stored and processed within the country has triggered a fresh wave of concern across Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem, raising questions around infrastructure readiness, disaster recovery resilience, migration risk, and the long-term cost of compliance. In a circular released on Monday, June 15, 2026, the apex bank directed that all institutions facilitating payments in Nigeria must ensure that data generated within the financial system is hosted and managed domestically. The policy is expected to take effect from January 2027, giving banks, payment companies, and fintech operators roughly six…

Global smartphone shipments are expected to decline by 15% in 2026 as increasing memory prices driven by AI technology push up device costs, according to research firm CCS Insight.Some entry-level phones have seen their prices rise by over 50% since last year. The primary smartphone market shrank by 4.4% in the first quarter of 2026, despite carriers stockpiling inventory, indicating further declines are likely for the rest of the year.Meanwhile, the used phone market is projected to grow by 15%, as consumers increasingly turn to pre-owned devices to avoid higher prices on new models.What’s Driving Smartphone Price Increases in 2026The…

foot in mouth Democratic Alliance leader Geordin Hill-Lewis’s letter to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa asking for a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle has been met with resistance from the African National Congress. By Carien du Plessis in Johannesburg South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa at Tuynhuys in Cape Town, 13 March 2025. © Rodger Bosch/AFP Published on June 18, 2026 at 16:53 pm (GMT +1) The request from the Democratic Alliance (DA) that South Africa’s agriculture minister John Steenhuisen be moved to the position of deputy minister of trade, industry and competition comes days after his long-running row with farmers’ organisations over his…

Africa’s new trade and investment paradigm: Reality or rhetoric? – African Business Africa’s new trade and investment paradigm: Reality or rhetoric? – African Business

In brief Trace Finance raised a $32 million Series A round led by CoinFund, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, and more. The funding comes as Brazil reclassifies cross-border crypto flows as foreign-exchange operations, pushing institutional volume toward bank-grade providers like Trace. The company plans to use the funds to expand beyond its U.S.-Brazil corridor into other Latin American markets, the U.S., and Asia-Pacific. Trace Finance, a financial infrastructure company that links banks in Brazil and the United States to stablecoin settlement networks, said Wednesday that it has raised $32 million in a Series A funding round led by…

This article is based on a conversation from Voices & Visions, a podcast produced through a partnership between Tutto Passa Agency and TechCabal, which explores the people and ideas shaping Africa’s innovation economy. The world’s biggest climate challenge at the moment may not be raising more money, but deploying the existing capital differently.  In Africa, investors have committed $44 billion annually, up nearly 50% from a few years ago, yet founders building technologies to help farmers survive droughts, businesses reduce emissions, and communities adapt to changing weather patterns still struggle to access capital.  According to Victor Ndiege, the CEO of…

Imagine you need to extract a simple number from a complex string, such as a product code with region-specific abbreviations or a column of phone numbers stored in four different formats. To make matters worse, because the data came from an external source, it might also contain trailing spaces, inconsistent formatting, or other small errors. To handle these problems, you could build a formula using MID and FIND, rely on Flash Fill to guess what you want, use Excel’s Find and Replace tool, or bring out the heavy hitters like Power Query or VBA UDFs (user-defined functions). While all of…