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Author: Sam Wakoba
Sam Wakoba
Taking you on tour through Africa's tech and business ecosystem, one story at a time since 2010! Based out of Nairobi, Kenya, Sam is the founder and managing director of Moran Media, which runs TechMoran.com, various other digital platforms and a startup incubation hub for Kenya's youthful entrepreneurs. Drop me a mail at sam@techmoran.com
In a bid to improve ride-hailing industry safety, Bolt, the on-demand mobility platform in Africa, has permanently blocked over 6,000 drivers from its platform due to non-compliance and safety-related matters. Bolt says this move is part of it’s ongoing commitment to providing safety for its ride-hailing and online ordering sectors. The purge, which affected both drivers and riders reported for misconduct and non-compliance, took over six months. In a statement, Weyinmi Aghadiuno, the acting Head of Regulatory & Policy Africa, said: “At Bolt, maintaining the highest standards of safety and trust is paramount. We understand the trust our customers place in…
Samsung Electronics is set to launch a new flagship smartphone in the Kenyan market targeting the high-end and mid-range market segment, according to device leaks we cannot disclose right now. Remember that in February, Samsung launched its highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy S24 series in Kenya, bringing the power of Galaxy AI to local consumers. Following a successful global launch and pre-order period, Samsung is excited to offer the new devices across the country. The Galaxy S24 series saw Samsung introduce a new era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) phones with the Galaxy S24 series, aiming to go beyond the traditional smartphone…
Climate risks pose serious threats to Kenya’s sustainable development goals and development gains, as Kenya’s economy is largely dependent on rainfed agriculture, tourism, and natural resources, sectors which can easily be hit by drastic climate or weather changes. Between 2008 to 2011, Kenya suffered a major drought that slowed GDP by an average of 2.8 percent and resulted in US$12.1 billion in damages and losses. In 2018, floods displaced more than 300,000 people and the 2020 flooding affected more than 800,000 Kenyans, including 300 deaths and 100,000 people being displaced. The 2019 and 2020 heavy rains also created conditions that…
NCBA Bank has today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Inchcape Kenya for an asset financing campaign expected to run until 31st March 2025. This initiative aims to provide exclusive financing options for Changan, BMW, Jaguar, and Land Rover vehicles. Under this initiative, NCBA will offer financing solutions for both new and pre-owned vehicles tailored to meet the diverse needs of our esteemed customers. The financing options include up to 90% of the value for new vehicles and up to 80% of the value for used cars. The maximum repayment period is up to 60 months or 5 years and…
Mumbi Ndungu, with over a decade of experience advocating for education, economic empowerment, and gender equality founded Power Learn Project (PLP), a pan-African tech talent development organization to equip young Africans with market-ready tech skills and engage them through comprehensive talent development, including training, acquisition, management, and mobility, to support them in achieving gainful livelihoods. She is a distinguished social entrepreneur, pioneering initiatives aimed at addressing pressing societal issues and has founded multiple enterprises, including Ibua Africa and Nora Impact Africa. TechMoran caught up with Mumbi Ndungu and she told us why she launched the Power Learn Project (PLP) and…
iZola, an AI-powered health-tech startup specializing in solutions for parents of children with neurodivergent conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), has appointed Dr. Leah Kirumbi, MBChB, M.MED OBGYN as Chief Medical Advisor, to further its growth in Kenya.Dr. Leah Kirumbi, a pioneer and leading specialist in the care of the mother and child brings over 30 years of experience as a distinguished medical doctor specializing in maternal and children’s healthcare and policy development in East Africa. She also performed the premier in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Kenya in 2004 and has more than 40 years of experience as a…
Founded in 2021 by Mumbi Ndungu, the Power Learn Project (PLP), a pan-African tech talent development organization, democratizing tech education to the continent’s youth has trained over 10,000 graduates and built a thriving community of 30,000 passionate young people. Mumbi Ndungu says PLP’s mission is to empower Africans with market-ready skills, foster comprehensive talent development, encompass training, acquisition, management, and mobility to enable them to secure meaningful livelihoods. In a mission to equip young Africans with the essential tech skills they need to succeed in the digital age, PLP aims to train 1 million young people and empower them with…
Rishi Sunak, an Oxford and Stanford alumni, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, caused outrage online after his tweet about university education went viral. Rishi in a tweet yesterday said, “You don’t have to go to university to succeed in life,”even though he himself has gone to the world’s best universities. Some Rishi supporters agreed with him saying education in itself doesn’t guarantee success, but is very important to prepare one for the real world. “Education doesn’t guarantee success, but formal education is very important,” posted Daniel Regha on X platform. “Let’s be realistic. University prepares one for…
Roam Electric, Mogo Auto and BasiGo have each received $10 million in debt from the US government to support the design and development of electric motorcycles and buses as well as charging stations for motorcycles and buses throughout Kenya. The $30 million was part of the more than $250 million new DFC financing package, announced as part of President Ruto’s State Visit to Washington, D.C., includes several multimillion-dollar commitments for critical projects in Kenya, such as financing new, affordable student rental housing in Nairobi, bolstering digital connectivity throughout the country, and advancing e-mobility and renewable energy, building on longstanding DFC…
BasiGo, a Nairobi-based electric vehicle startup, has received $10 million to revolutionize Kenya’s public transport, announced the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s (DFC) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Scott Nathan. BasiGo’s $10 million direct loan will facilitate procurement of buses and batteries for sale in Kenya, supporting Kenya’s ambitious climate goals. BasiGo leases and sells electric buses to public transport bus operators in Kenya and Nathan says the loan will help advance e-mobility in Kenya, also in support of President Ruto’s Africa Green Industrialization Initiative, building upon DFC’s longstanding support for the e-mobility economy in Kenya. “The U.S. and Kenya have…
M-KOPA, a fintech platform that connects underbanked customers to financing and digital financial services in Kenya and four other African markets has received a $51 million loan that will support digital connectivity throughout the country by helping underserved communities access affordable smartphones. M-KOPA received the $51 million loan from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) which has given more than $250 million in a new financing package to various Kenyan firms, announced during President Ruto’s State Visit to Washington, D.C. DFC alo announced it was going to open a regional office at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi to support…
Agriculture in developed markets is a different ball game with as farmers are well-funded and mechanised, have access to knowledge, financing and tools and markets for their produce unlike their counterparts in Africa. Mercy Corps AgriFin has embarked on a journey of scaling agriculture in Africa and says there is hope for the African farmer as Agrifin is seeking to remove handcuffs and through its initiatives change the ballgame for small scale producers (SSPs). TechMoran met up with Sieka Gatabaki, Mercy Corps AgriFin Program Director on what the program is doing for smallholder farmers in Africa and other low income countries.…
Mercy Corps AgriFin believes that digital financial services can improve farmer livelihoods by helping them gain direct access to a range of inclusive and empowering financial, information and market access services. Though digital financial services, digital information, advisory services, market access, logistics, climate smart activities and gender inclusivity, AgriFin brings together innovative organizations to design and deliver quality products and services tailored for smallholder farmers. “Our aim is to connect smallholder farmers to products and services that increase their productivity and income by 50%, with a 40% target population of Women and Youth,” said Collins Marita, Technical Director Strategic Learning,…
Though Agriculture is the biggest sector in Africa, findings by the European Union show the sector remains unattractive to the youth who prefer to move to urban areas and cities instead of taking up agriculture leaving mostly smallholder farmers practicing subsistence farming. Mercy Corps AgriFin, led by digital innovations practitioner Sieka Gatabaki is working towards on-boarding more youth into agriculture and rural economies using digital systems attract the youth, in addition to building transparency, to enable access to needed information and financial services. Agriculture is the biggest sector in Africa “Digital services can capitalize on the growing market of youth…
Launched in 2012, Mercy Corps’ AgriFin program which designs, tests and scales digitally enabled products and services for small scale producers (SSPs), says digital innovation can revolutionize the way smallholder farmers feed the world. “With access to the right tools, small scale producers (SSPs) can build the resilience they need against climate and emergency shocks and continue to feed their communities,” says Sieka Gatabaki, Mercy Corps’ AgriFin Program Director. Though the government and private sector partners are best suited to deliver those tools, and that technology is a critical accelerator. Mercy Corps’ AgriFin, whose primary target group is un-banked SSPs…
Mercy Corps AgriFin program which works with public and private sector partners to design, test and scale digitally enabled products and services for small scale producers (SSPs) to increase their productivity, incomes and resilience, has announced it has reached over 21.5 million SSPs with critical digital services. With plans to reach 5 million more small scale producers by 2025, Mercy Corps AgriFin’s the current iteration of the program (AgriFin Digital Farmer II) has reached over 4.6 million SSPs with critical digital services since inception in 2021 and a total of more than 21.5 million since its launch and even being…
According to the SME Finance Forum, the financing gap for MSMEs in Ethiopia and Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be US$4.3 billion and US$331 billion, respectively. MSMEs are major job creators in Africa, contributing to 80 percent of employment, according to McKinsey & Company. It is therefore critical to address the access to finance constraints as an underlying requirement on the pathway for creating and sustaining jobs on the continent. Using alternative data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) credit scoring, which tailors relevant products to MSMEs and reduces the costs of finance and management of small-value loans for the banks, the Mastercard…
IBM has expanded its software portfolio to 92 countries via AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors (ISVs) in a move expected to make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In Africa, IBM has said the it has made its software available in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad,Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Morocco, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia and Uganda. Clients in these new region will therefore have more access to IBM’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) and data technologies…
Last year, Kenya detected over 1.2 billion cyber threat events, which represented a 943.01% increase from the 123 million threat events detected in the previous period (July to September 2023). According to the report by the Communications Authority during the three month period between October and December 2023, the exponential increase is attributed to the increased exploitation of “system vulnerabilities” aligned to global trends, and relates to the global surge in the deployment and use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices which are inherently insecure. In a move to help detect, prevent and respond to cyber threats, Cisco today launched…
Kenya’s GoBeba, Ghana’s Kola Market & South Africa’s NewForm Foods have raised $200,000 each from Madica, a Flourish Ventures-backed pre-seed fund for startups in Africa. The three will also join Madica’s comprehensive investment program which includes 18 months of hands-on mentorship, week-long founder immersion trips, executive coaching opportunities, and access to madica’s global network of investors for follow-on funding. According to Emmanuel Adegboye, Head of Madica, “We’re excited to announce our first set of investments, which showcase the remarkable talent and innovation in the African tech ecosystem. Each one of these startups represents the untapped potential of African founders who…
Bolt and M-KOPA, have today launched an electric bike fleet in Kenya to allow new and existing drivers an opportunity to lease electric motorbikes at a discounted price. The 5,000 electric motorcycle rollout aligns with the recent launch of Kenya’s National E-mobility Policy, aimed at promoting local production and assembly of EVs. According to Caroline Wanjihia, Regional Director, Ride Hailing Operations, Africa & International Markets, “By leveraging electric vehicles, we are not only reducing our environmental footprint, but also aim to enhance driver earnings and improve overall economic stability within the communities that we serve.” The deal saw M-KOPA ,…
Meera Dhanani Shah was part of the former Jumia executives who raised $8 million to launch Kapu, a B2C e-commerce grocery startup with a mission to help consumers buy groceries at lower prices through online and offline channels. Born and raised in Kenya, Meera pursued further education in the UK, where she eventually worked with a German investment bank focused on credit products, an area that did not exist in Kenya when she moved back. She used this transition as an opportunity to venture into something new. After her return, she had an eat pray love moment and trained to be…
Ghana-based healthcare startup Rivia, has acquired Waffle, a Ghanaian SaaS company specializing in software for small and medium-sized businesses in a move to accelerate the digitization of Rivia’s network of primary care clinics and streamline the company’s operations. The acquisition brings Waffle’s hospital and inventory management software under the Rivia umbrella, which was recently rebranded as RiviaOS. Waffle founder, Victor Nara, joined Rivia as its chief technology officer. The RiviaOS platform functions as a Healthcare-as-a-Service (HaaS) solution, allowing healthcare providers to access features like appointment scheduling, a booking engine, services storefront, video consultations, e-pharmacy, e-lab, vitals capture, billing, expense, and…
The cloud offers agility and innovation, with promises of performance optimization, security, operational excellence, reliability and most importantly, cost optimization. The experience of most organisations is, however, a near perfect opposite. The reason for the bad experience is largely the large-scale inefficiencies in the Cloud customers’ workloads: poor practices, architecting and engineering. Cost readily provides the lens to estimate the level of inefficiencies in the usage of the Cloud: Recent surveys (Gantner, 2023, Forbes 2023) indicate that 30% of cloud spend is wasted, a whopping $147 billion of waste. Those are wastes arising from over-provisioned resources to unused or underutilised…
Faulu Bank has reaffirmed its commitment to developing innovative financial products tailored to the unique needs of its women clientele. With over 108,000 women customers, the bank offers a comprehensive range of financial solutions aimed at supporting women in various aspects of their lives. These include but are not limited to business banking, trainings on financial wellness, education, insurance, and investment. For the professional woman, the bank provides an array of products designed to provide financial stability and security. These include access to finance for emergencies, education policies for children, easy access to their funds, investment channels, among others. Core…
The World Health Organization and UNICEF estimate that each year, over 30 million women become pregnant in malarious areas of Africa and although the vast majority of women with malaria infections during pregnancy remain asymptomatic, infection increases the risk of maternal anemia and delivering a low-birth-weight (LBW) baby. LBW (<2,500 g) is an important risk factor for infant mortality, and this review focuses on the impact of malaria during pregnancy on LBW and subsequent infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. A new application developed by a family physician seeks to end these adverse outcomes in pregnancy by giving mothers the opportunity…
OX Delivers, UK-based emobility start-up, has received a £1.2 million ($1,5m) funding grant from Energy Catalyst to ready its next-generation affordable all-electric OX4 truck for production in Rwanda. OX Delivers will start building the third generation OX4 truck in March and the funds will help it to expand the rollout of its transport-as-a-service offering across the Global South, starting on the African continent. According to Simon Davis, Founder & CEO of OX Delivers: “We are delighted to not only receive funding from Energy Catalyst but also have the OX Delivers transport-as-a-service model validated as part of the solution required to…
Like any instrument, the internet is not inherently beneficial or harmful; it is our responsibility to use it wisely and ensure our safety. Comparable to how fire has transformed human existence, the internet has revolutionized our way of life. It falls upon each individual to adopt measures to protect against unauthorized access by hackers into their systems. Today we celebrate the Safer Internet Day, which is a global initiative aimed at promoting a safer and more secure internet environment for all users, particularly children and young adults. Originating in Europe in 2004 under the European Union’s Safe Borders project, this…
Branch MFB, Kenya’s 1st Neo-bank and Solv Kenya, a full-stack B2B marketplace for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME), have entered into a strategic partnership to extend loans, business development support and market linkages to Kenyan MSMEs. The deal will see Branch offer loans of up to Ksh 1 million ($6,000) from its Ksh 300,000 limit ($1800) without collateral. Before the partnership, Branch was offering loans from Ksh 500 to Ksh 300,000 for 1 – 12 weeks at interest rates of between 17% – 35%, depending on your loan option and repayment history. Branch MFB will provide loans and working…