Category : Inside Africa

Imagine waking up, grabbing your phone, and finding a flexible job, maybe you’re a driver, a freelance designer, or a delivery courier. It sounds liberating, right? That’s the allure of the gig economy in Africa. But here’s the catch, while it promises freedom, flexibility, and income when traditional jobs are

If you’ve ever backed an African startup (or are thinking of doing so) you’ll know the excitement: the tech‑enabled business, the growth potential, the massive under‑served markets. But then there’s the question that often gets whispered: How and when do we get out? In other words, what’s the exit strategy?

If you’ve ever been to Aba in southeastern Nigeria, someone has probably mentioned Ariaria. It’s impossible to talk about the city without it. The market is massive and magnificent all at once. But Ariaria is more than a market. It’s an idea, a living symbol of African ingenuity and the

Walk through any major African city, and you’ll notice something that looks chaotic at first but runs like a hidden machine. Piles of shirts folded on tarpaulins. Stalls stacked with laptops, car parts, and baby strollers. People bargaining, fixing, reselling. It’s noisy, messy, alive. This is the second-hand economy, a

Across African cities right now, you’ll find young companies tackling two of the continent’s biggest headaches: energy and waste. These may sound like isolated efforts. But together, they point to something bigger, a fast-emerging cleantech movement led by African startups tackling energy and waste with creativity and urgency. And it’s

It started with payments. Mobile money, digital wallets, and remittance apps changed how Africans moved money fast, cheap, and across borders. For nearly a decade, that was the heart of Fintech in Africa. Startups like M-Pesa, Flutterwave, and Chipper Cash built the rails that connected millions of people to the

Not long ago, artificial intelligence felt like something far away from Africa, a high-tech idea from Silicon Valley that didn’t really touch everyday life here. But that’s changing fast. Today, AI is quietly becoming part of how Africans live and work. It helps banks make quicker decisions, doctors spot illnesses

If you walked around the main co-working spaces of Lagos or Nairobi five years ago, you might have felt the hum of ambition, but you might not have seen the scale that’s visible today. In 2025, something is different. The venture-capital flows are stronger (though still fragile), the number of

When the Nigerian naira lost nearly half its value in a single year, many startups didn’t feel it all at once. It crept in slowly. First, infrastructure bills doubled. Then investor reports, once proudly showing $1 million in annual revenue, now displayed $600,000 for the same naira figure. The story

At a co-working hub in Lagos, a Nigerian investment executive leans back and observes the room. “We’re not just receiving the leftovers from global funds now,” she says. “We’re writing our own tickets.” In much the same way, across other African cities, there is a subtle but growing shift. Local