Author: Elan

Listen to this article Tokyo is redefining its engagement with Africa, transitioning from traditional aid-based approaches to strategic venture capital (VC) investments focused on long-term partnerships, innovation and capacity building. Several Japanese private companies are making Japan’s presence felt in Africa’s VC landscape, particularly in high-growth sectors such as fintech, climate tech and mobility. Growing demand for innovative, technology-driven solutions in Africa has drawn increasing interest from international investors. VC funding in Africa rose from over US$2 billion in 2019 to a peak of US$5.2 billion in 2022. Though investment declined to around US$3.6 billion in 2023, the continent’s start-up…

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Long before investors placed billion-dollar valuations on African startups, before global venture capital firms arrived in Lagos, Johannesburg, and Cairo, many of the continent’s most celebrated entrepreneurs were students sitting inside lecture halls, writing exams and building the foundations of ideas that would eventually transform industries.The founders behind companies such as Flutterwave, Interswitch and Moniepoint did not emerge from the same institution or a particular academic system.Their paths were diverse, stretching across African universities and some of the world’s most prestigious global institutions.These universities did not “create” unicorns, as entrepreneurship depends on far more than education, but their classrooms, networks…

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Safaricom’s chief financial services officer, Esther Waititu, will leave the company at the end of July, becoming the third senior executive to exit Kenya’s largest telecommunications company in five months. “I wish to announce that Esther Waititu, our chief financial services officer,  will be leaving Safaricom to pursue other opportunities,” Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa said in an internal email to employees seen by TechCabal.  Waititu’s last day will be July 31, according to the email. Safaricom has appointed Boniface Mungania, its Director of Public Sector Digital Transformation, as interim chief financial services officer. The departure marks another leadership change at…

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The common rule of thumb is to never “block” the browser’s main thread when running JavaScript tasks. But is this a hard rule? Victor Ayomipo describes a use case he encountered involving a screenshot extension where he made an exception to the rule and decided that blocking the main thread was absolutely the right thing to do.We’ve all heard of the sacred rule in modern web development, the rule never to be broken. The rule of “Never block the main thread.”You almost can’t miss it as a web developer; it’s in almost every performance guide, and to be fair, it…

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Johannesburg, 15 July 2026 – Digital marketing has never been better at measuring performance. Brands can now track every click, scroll, conversion and customer interaction in real time, while artificial intelligence helps optimise campaigns faster than ever before. Yet as marketing becomes increasingly data-driven, a growing debate is emerging across the industry: has the relentless pursuit of optimisation come at the expense of creativity? According to Penquin, a South African integrated marketing agency specialising in brand strategy, creative communications and digital marketing, the industry’s focus on performance metrics may be contributing to a growing “homogeneity crisis” in advertising—one in which…

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Martijn Proos, co-head of emerging market alternative credit at Ninety One** For the best experience, download the free Africa Private Equity News app Android | iOS **The Emerging Africa & Asia Infrastructure Fund (EAAIF), managed by Ninety One, has announced a $30 million senior secured corporate loan to Egypt’s Hassan Allam Utilities. The loan facility will primarily support the Minya 1,000 MW solar and 660 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project.The Minya project is being co-developed with Infinity Power, a joint venture between UAE’s Masdar and Egypt’s Infinity. Upon completion, the project will be one of the single largest…

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Sixteen months ago, Nigeria handed its Securities and Exchange Commission the keys to crypto regulation. The Investments and Securities Act, 2025, was unambiguous about it: virtual assets were securities, and the SEC, not the CBN, was the apex regulator, full stop. Director-General Emomotimi Agama built out an entire onboarding pipeline around that mandate, the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, and exchanges and crypto protocols queued up to get licensed under it. On Friday, 17 July, President Bola Tinubu signed something that quietly complicates that picture. The Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026, announced by presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga, sets…

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