Author: Chibuike Orji-Oko

Wave Mobile Money (known as Wave) has rapidly rewritten the rules of mobile payments in West Africa. Launched in Senegal by Americans Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk, Wave set out to fix what they saw as a broken system, mobile money run by telecom monopolies charging high fees for cumbersome

In the early 2010s Nairobi’s roads were familiar terrain for Meshack Alloys. At just 13 he was coding, once teaching himself at Laser Hill Academy, and later at the University of Nairobi’s College of Architecture and Engineering. His first startup, Merlloyds Technologies, came in 2008; followed by MTL Systems in

There was a time when saving money in Nigeria felt like a test of willpower, or worse, a gamble. Banks weren’t exactly built for young people trying to set aside a few thousand naira at a time. Hidden fees, clunky systems, and a general sense of mistrust made it easier

In 2016, a small group of Nigerian technologists and entrepreneurs set out to solve what felt like an invisible but deeply frustrating problem – “African businesses could not move money easily”. Not within the continent, not across it, and certainly not beyond it. For a continent with talent and trade

The LifeBank story is not merely about a startup; it is about the power of one entrepreneur’s vision to reshape healthcare access across Africa. Giwa-Tubosun, inspired by her personal encounters with maternal health challenges, built LifeBank as both a business and a mission. Today, the company stands as one of

In less than a decade, Zipline has transformed from a Silicon Valley robotics pivot into the world’s leading drone logistics company, reshaping how essential goods are delivered in some of the hardest-to-reach communities. What began as an experimental effort in Rwanda in 2016 has since evolved into a multinational logistics

Paystack has evolved from a scrappy Lagos startup to one of the most influential fintech companies in Africa, redefining how businesses accept and process payments across the continent. It emerged at a time when Nigerian merchants faced broken digital infrastructure: payment integrations were slow, expensive, and riddled with failure. By

In the mid-2010s, Africa’s e-commerce and fintech sectors were buzzing with optimism. Internet penetration was climbing, smartphone adoption was accelerating, and a young, tech-savvy population was eager for innovative solutions that could make life easier. Among the bold startups that emerged during this wave was Lipa Later, a Kenyan-born fintech

Inside M-Pesa’s journey lies one of the most remarkable stories of technological innovation reshaping the financial industry of Africa and beyond. Launched in Kenya in 2007 by Safaricom and Vodafone, M-Pesa (short for “mobile money” in Swahili) emerged as a bold experiment to address the limited access to banking services

In 2002, long before “fintech” became a buzzword in Africa, one Nigerian engineer saw a broken financial system and envisioned a seamless digital payments network. That engineer, Mitchell Elegbe, would go on to found Interswitch, the company that built the rails for Nigeria’s electronic payments ecosystem and became a blueprint