Category : StoryLab

It began in neighbourhoods where shop owners still ran on trust, thin margins, and whatever stock they could find that day. The idea sounded almost too straightforward at first… what if small retailers could get inventory reliably, quickly, and without the usual friction that slowed them down? With that simple

It started with a question that felt almost naive. Why is it so hard to get the medicines people need? Not rare cancer drugs or experimental therapies. Just everyday prescriptions. Blood pressure meds. Insulin. Antibiotics. The things pharmacies should never run out of, yet often do. Gregory Rockson saw that

Far from the world’s major tech hubs, in southern Tunisia, an unlikely experiment in artificial intelligence began to take shape. It did not start in a modern lab or a well-funded innovation center. It began at home, with a few used computers, slow internet, and a belief that talent shouldn’t

In Africa, where infrastructure is patchy, procurement is opaque, and logistics are risky, a handful of companies are rewiring the system from the inside. One of such companies is VIEBEG Medical, a Rwandan-born startup that has aimed at one of the continent’s most persistent bottlenecks: the medical supply chain. What

What immediately stands out about Twiga Foods is helping smallholder farmers reach city markets while allowing urban vendors to avoid inflated costs driven by middlemen. Now imagine cutting out many of those intermediaries, using technology to fix the logistics, and connecting farmers directly to vendors. The potential is huge. So,

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

Across Africa, millions of households remain excluded from both reliable energy access and formal financial systems. This double exclusion has historically limited productivity, slowed educational progress, and perpetuated cycles of poverty. In response, a new generation of enterprises has emerged to bridge these gaps by leveraging technology, mobile money, and