Author: Elan

Johannesburg, South Africa** For the best experience, download the free Africa Private Equity News app Android | iOS **The International Finance Corporation has disclosed a proposed commitment of up to $40 million in the Capitalworks Private Equity Fund IV. The funding also includes a co-investment envelope of $40 million. Capitalworks IV is a South Africa-focused, generalist private equity fund. It targets significant influence in growing mid-market companies across multiple sectors, such as fast-moving consumer goods, industrial services, logistics, retail, hospitality, and tourism.The fund is targeting to raise total commitments of $350 million. Want to know who is raising, investing, and…

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We often talk a lot about women succeeding in tech, especially cybersecurity, but far less about what it actually takes to grow a tech career while navigating motherhood. In October 2021, Blessing Ezeobioha enrolled in a cybersecurity training program while still working as a social media manager and recovering from childbirth. This was a one-year intensive and practical training at Tech4Dev in her three months postpartum. Starting in a new field while juggling motherhood tested everything she knew about endurance and focus. But, Blessing was resilient enough to build her tech career from 0-100, attaining a top leadership role within…

Marcello Schermer, who leads international expansion at Yoco, a South African digital payments startup, wants African fintechs to create products that nudge customers toward smarter decisions in real time. For him, fintechs should be more of a financial partner. Conversations about African startups today almost always circle back to fintech, a “leapfrog effect” that has reshaped how the world views the continent’s innovation.  That shift is happening at scale. Africa now hosts more than 5,000 startups, a sharp rise in just a few years. Even as global venture capital cooled in 2024, the continent proved resilient, and fintech attracted over…

If you have spent hours manually renaming hundreds of files, you definitely know the pain. Sometimes, even simple tasks like organizing work documents, screenshots, and images can become a frustrating slog. I also found myself in such situations a lot of the time. That’s why I started looking for tools that could rename my files sensibly and consistently. After testing a few options, I finally found an app that does the job perfectly. After trying it, I realized how much time and mental energy on manual renaming. Now, I set up a rule once and let the app do that…

Addis Abeba — On 18 February, 2026, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) marked its 51st anniversary against a backdrop of renewed political tension in Tigray. Few political entities have influenced the Ethiopian landscape as profoundly–or as controversially–as the TPLF. Over the course of five decades, the organization has functioned as a liberation movement, a governing elite, and a primary architect of the modern state. Yet, it remains a deeply polarizing force whose enduring legacy continues to be the subject of intense debate. Founded in 1975, the TPLF played a decisive role in the armed struggle that culminated in the…

For many African startups, raising venture capital feels like the ultimate milestone. But in reality, the moment investors truly anticipate is the exit. A venture fund exit is when a venture capital firm sells its stake in a startup and converts equity into cash. It’s the point where early risk translates into measurable returns. And for Africa’s tech ecosystem, exits matter more than funding headlines. What Is a Venture Fund Exit? Venture capital funds invest with a long-term objective: scale, maturity, and eventual liquidity. An exit happens when investors sell their shares, ideally at a multiple of their original…

A new scramble for Africa is underway. It is not marked by warships or colonial flags, but by battery supply chains, green transition targets, and high-level trade delegations. The race is for lithium, cobalt, graphite, manganese, platinum group metals and rare earth elements — the minerals powering electric vehicles, renewable energy systems and digital infrastructure. This scramble is quieter than the 19th-century version. But its implications could be just as profound. The difference today is that Africa is not politically fragmented in the same way. The continent possesses regional economic blocs with the institutional capacity to shape outcomes — if…

Nigerian crypto startup operators have said the increased minimum capital requirements, introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on January 16, will place a “disproportionate burden” on early-stage startups. In a position paper submitted to the SEC, the Stakeholders in Blockchain Association of Nigeria (SiBAN), an advocacy group comprising startups such as Dantown, Roqqu, and Breet, asked the SEC to review and refine the hiked capital thresholds for virtual asset companies. The increased capital requirements require Digital Asset Exchanges (DAXs) and Digital Asset Custodians to maintain a minimum of ₦2 billion ($1.4 million) in their operating coffers, up from…

When Joshua Nwankwo looks back at his childhood, he doesn’t recall a specific moment of inspiration that led him to software engineering. Instead, he remembers his mother’s phone. He was the kind of child who was always “looking for what’s not there,” driven by an innate curiosity to poke around and discover new features in every piece of hardware he could get his hands on. That early inquisitiveness laid the foundation for a career that has transitioned from low-level programming in Nigeria to leading developer relations for global crypto agencies. And Nwankwo’s work sits inside a larger truth about how…