Category : Inside Africa

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

On a hot Wednesday afternoon in Lagos, a young founder sits across from a potential investor at a café in Lekki. Between the hum of air conditioning and the clatter of coffee cups, they’re arguing, quietly but firmly, over a single clause in a document. “It’s just a simple agreement

Somewhere between a founder’s first seed cheque and their big dream of expansion, something tends to break. It’s rarely a single thing. Sometimes it’s cash flow. Sometimes it’s regulatory quicksand. And sometimes it’s simply that what worked well in Lagos makes no sense in Nairobi. The result is a familiar

Imagine your startup is based in Nairobi. Your founding product lead is in Lagos, the operations co-founder is in Accra, and the head of engineering is working from Addis Ababa. Your team never meet in a central office every week. Instead, you coordinate across Zoom, Slack and WhatsApp, pulling together

In cafés, co-working spaces and late-night WhatsApp threads, founders are rethinking what it means to launch a startup in Africa this year. The continent’s ecosystem is no longer just about bold dreams, it’s increasingly about hard numbers, stretching scarce capital, and calculating cost in ways that reflect unique local realities.