This Month In Africa!
Hey Renaissance Kids,
If you’re reading this, you’re amongst our first subscribers and fortunate enough to be part of this amazing journey in its infancy…
Welcome to “This Month In Africa”, where we take you on an amazing journey through Africa on the first Sunday of every new month. We aim to share opportunities, insights and ideas at the forefront of the African Renaissance that we are currently witnessing. The purpose of the newsletter is to consolidate all the important gems once a month and share them with you- our awesome community!
For the fifth edition, we will take a trip through May.
According to Sunday Times, the South African ruling political party ANC has compiled a new policy document which calls for an end to DSTV’s exclusive broadcasting rights on sporting channels. This is an interesting move – competition is great for the consumer and if this bill is successful, Multichoice will get a real run for their money.
As of May 1st 2022, funding raised by startups in Africa this year is more than half the funding raised in 2021; this is according to The Big Deal :
Egyptian FinTech startup Paymob raised a $50 million series B funding round led by PayPal Ventures, Kora Capital and Clay Point. Paymob’s omnichannel payment infrastructure allows them to accept payments via various methods – they plan on introducing a new checkout platform and the launch of cards to enable B2B transactions.
Their progress thus far is inspiring; they have plans to reach a million SMEs in the next few years.
On this month’s podcast, we featured Jessica Nono; the amazing founder of Cameroonian flagship blockchain for building sustainable projects with ground-breaking impact for Africa called Filparty.
If you want to learn more about Filparty and the different use cases – you should definitely read their whitepaper.
Our conversation is available on this link.
Swedes were catching smoke on Twitter – apparently sharing isn’t so popular in their culture…Africans and Asians were caught by surprise as this is not common in their cultures:
Elon Musk’s Starlink (satellite internet division of rocket company SpaceX) has been approved by Nigeria and Mozambique to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband internet in Nigeria and Mozambique. They promise to provide 150mbps and 500mbps for their standard and premium plans respectively – this is quite fast. I really hope this trend continues and Starlink democratizes internet access for more remote areas in Africa, this will help a lot of people. Getting access to Starlink right now costs an arm and a leg; the company however has plans to decrease the costs substantially overtime…
Chidi Nwaubani, founder of a new initiative called ‘Looty’ aimed at reclaiming artwork that was looted from Africa by colonial powers. The idea was sparked by the growing conversation around NFTs (provide public proof of ownership of digital files). There are quite a lot of African artworks and artificats
They’ve managed to create approximately 25 different art pieces – with their sights set on a lot more!
We are pleased to have you as a reader and subscriber – we look forward to consistently sharing the most amazing and valuable insights around Africa with you.