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Airtel to sell a 30% stake in its Kenya business Twitter chooses Ghana Twitter execs: L-R: Parag Agrawal (Twitter CTO), Mike Montano (Engineering Team Lead), Jack Dorsey (CEO), and Kayvon Beykpour (Product Lead) Twitter has made the big decision to have a physical office in Africa having acknowledged that the region is replete with talents. It has chosen Ghana as the location. Shocking or expected? Maybe both. It was clear from the team’s African tour in 2019 that it had its eyes on Nigeria f...

Facebook’s COVID-19 vaccine move How to own a drone in Kenya A quick notice:  Yesterday, we wrote about Innoson’s supposed partnership with an admittedly strange cryptocurrency, Zugacoin. Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing has come out to debunk any claims of such partnership, quelling other questions we had about the announcement. Still, could that really be the full gist? NITDA fines Nigerian fintech company Advertisement The story: The Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NI...

Innoson’s reported acceptance of crypto payments Clubhouse’s first anniversary The fate of USSD in Nigeria On March 12, 2020, the Association for the Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), an umbrella body for the likes of MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9Mobile, released a statement that it would withdraw USSD services from Nigerian banks. Advertisement Why? Nigerian banks apparently owe the mobile network operators a whopping sum of ₦49 billion ($102.4 million), and both partie...

Apple’s first Nigerian appointment Bolt’s play for Nigeria’s food delivery market Flutterwave becomes a unicorn The big news: Africa-focused fintech company, Flutterwave has raised $170m Series C. The Series C round was led by New York-based private investment firm, Avenir Growth Capital, US hedge fund, and investment firm, Tiger Global. Advertisement Impressive milestones: Apparently, Flutterwave reaped the rewards as COVID-19 moved several Africans towards digital payments. Here’s a q...

Adjusted EBITDA loss decreased by 47.1% A decrease in average loss per order Transactions on JumiaPay, increased by 26.1% and 58% more costumers used the payment service for purchases on the platform. The not so good: Jumia’s financial report looks encouraging, until you compare it with its financial report for 2019. Annual Active Consumers (People who placed orders regardless of cancellation or returns) increased by 12%. In 2019, annual active consumers grew by 54%. Orders on Jumia dropped b...

The Bill will also increase punishments and fines for untrained journalists. For persons with a first degree in other courses, the new Bill will demand that they obtain a postgraduate certificate in Journalism, Media Art, Communication or related field from any other higher institution in Nigeria or elsewhere. Why this matters: The Nigerian Journalism space has been experiencing major shakeups in recent years. The media faces issues with fake news, dwindling revenues, and perceived creative go...

Jobberman appoints new CEO Twitter partners Google Cloud for data Last week Friday, Twitter signed a strategic multiyear partnership with Google Cloud. Twitter will move its offline analytics, data processing and machine learning workloads to Google’s Data Cloud. And this is supposed to take Twitter’s cloud data analysis to another level. In other words, you know this thing that Twitter does with your tweets, retweets, and likes, to determine what makes it to your timeline depending on your...

Google Kenya $10m grant MTN Group fights 5G exclusion MTN Group, one of Africa’s largest telecom companies, is suing the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) to challenge its decision excluding it from bidding for 5G spectrums in the country. Advertisement Let’s back up as usual: 5G is becoming a big deal in Africa, and countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya, are testing 5G’s potentials with exciting trials. In 2019, MTN, the biggest in Nigeria’s telecom...