Author: Samuel Suru

At the recent National MSME Conference 2025, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) hosted a critical masterclass session to highlight a pressing and escalating concern within Nigeria’s burgeoning creative and cultural industries. The core issue raised was that creators across the country are consistently losing the fundamental ownership and subsequent commercial value of their work due to a pervasive weak understanding and insufficient enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights. The session, strategically titled “Who Owns It? Rethinking Intellectual Property in Nigeria’s Creative and Cultural Economy,” conducted a thorough examination of how persistent gaps in IP education, necessary regulation, and effective…

Africa is widely recognized as a powerhouse of mobile innovation and entrepreneurial activity, consistently pioneering new applications in diverse sectors. These groundbreaking mobile-first solutions range from revolutionary mobile money services like M-Pesa to expansive e-commerce platforms such as Jumia and Takealot, efficient smartphone-powered retail solutions like Yoco, and sophisticated business-to-business platforms, including Twiga Foods, which seamlessly connects small-scale farmers directly with urban vendors. This rapidly expanding ecosystem of mobile-centric applications serves a user base of approximately 416 million mobile internet subscribers and constitutes a substantial part of the continent’s wider mobile economy, which contributed an estimated $220 billion to the…

Fusepay, a fintech startup founded in Seychelles and focused on developing specialized payment solutions for frontier markets, has officially launched its proprietary digital payment platform. This platform is designed to help businesses, including retailers, wholesalers, and billers, streamline their financial operations and facilitate a transition away from outdated, slow, and paper-based transaction processes. The launch is a direct response to the Seychelles’ business ecosystem’s heavy reliance on manual processes and paper cheques, which historically slow cash flow, introduce operational inefficiencies, and increase susceptibility to fraud. This initiative aligns strategically with the Central Bank of Seychelles’ overarching push toward fully digital…

Black Swan, a Mauritius-based FinTech startup, has been crowned the overall winner of the MEST Africa Challenge (MAC) 2025, following a competitive Grand Finale held at Innovation City, Cape Town on November 26, 2025. Organized by the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST Africa) and powered by Absa Group, the Challenge is one of Africa’s premier pitch competitions aimed at providing early-stage startups with crucial funding, mentorship, and global visibility. AI-Driven Credit Intelligence The 2025 edition focused specifically on FinTech, spotlighting solutions that drive financial inclusion and digital transformation. Black Swan’s winning value proposition is its mission to “Make Africa…

Zoho, the renowned global technology giant specializing in cloud-based business software, in collaboration with Avetium, one of Africa’s foremost transformation consultancies, successfully hosted the “Beyond Digital 2025” event. This high-impact conference was strategically organized to convene influential business leaders, industry innovators, and digital transformation experts to explore a critical challenge: how African enterprises can effectively convert simple digital adoption into clear, measurable business outcomes and operational clarity. Held as a hybrid event at The Antonia Hall by Civic in Ikoyi, Lagos, the gathering successfully connected hundreds of participants across the continent, quickly establishing itself as a pivotal and strategic conversation…

The narrative surrounding African startup failures often defaults to a lack of funding, yet the deeper reality points toward a systemic weakness in operational execution and market strategy. The recent shutdown of Joovlin, a Nigerian fintech that boasted over 2,000 active resellers but couldn’t generate sustained revenue, exemplifies this challenge. Joovlin’s story is far from unique; the African startup graveyard is filled with ventures that achieved rapid user acquisition and raised significant capital only to fold due to internal structural issues, premature scaling, and unclear market fit. Experts conservatively estimate that approximately 70% of African startups fail in their first…

Afretrade has officially unveiled a new digital platform strategically engineered to bridge the gap between employers and rigorously verified African talent, while simultaneously working to expand trade opportunities, strengthen essential skills, and facilitate global market access for Africans seeking economic advancement. The company announced its ambitious organizational goal to empower 100 million new businesses within a five-year period by establishing a transparent and trusted digital ecosystem for connecting skills, services, and cross-border trade throughout the African continent and its diaspora communities globally. During the product launch event held in Lagos, the firm meticulously detailed how the platform operates. It functions…

The estimated $100 billion credit shortfall faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Africa is now compelling established financial institutions, major telecom operators, and nimble fintech startups to forge deeper, often unexpected, collaborative partnerships. This massive, continent-wide figure comes from a detailed assessment conducted by the African Development Bank (AfDB). The AfDB identifies the persistent constraint on SME financing as one of the most critical and enduring economic obstacles, cautioning that this limited access to essential credit continues to severely hinder crucial job creation, slow industrial growth, and impede broader economic diversification efforts across the region. The AfDB’s estimation…

African Startups Raise £1 Billion in Seven Months It’s impressive to see the growing momentum of African startups. The ability to raise $1 billion in just seven months is a testament to the increasing investor interest in the continent’s tech ecosystem. Key Implications: Increased investment: This trend signals a significant increase in investor confidence in African startups. Job creation: The growth of these startups is likely to lead to job creation and economic development in the region. Technological advancement: The influx of capital can fuel innovation and drive technological progress in Africa. Competitive landscape: The competitive landscape for startups in…

 In a massive leap for Africa’s connectivity, Meta and its consortium partners have officially activated the core 2Africa subsea cable system. Hailed as the world’s longest open-access subsea network, this monumental project is set to fundamentally reshape the digital landscape and deliver a staggering increase in internet capacity for three billion people across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe. Conceived in May 2020, the 2Africa system is an engineering marvel that spans roughly 45,000 kilometers, circling the continent and establishing the first-ever continuous link between East and West Africa in a single system. Developed in partnership with titans…