Kenn Abuya

Speed made instant payments possible, but the harder task now is deciding who gets access to the rails, on what terms, and who controls the points where those rails meet.

Anne Kinuthia Otieno has stepped down as managing director of Airtel Money Kenya after nearly five years, leaving the mobile money business just months before parent company Airtel Africa plans to list the unit in London.

Absa Bank Kenya said a KES 4 billion ($31 million) technology investment helped automate 71% of its processes in 2025.

Looking back at companies like Moniepoint and Wasoko-MaxAB has changed how I think about resilience in African tech. We tend to tell success stories from the ending, smoothing over the difficult years until painful decisions look like inevitable strategy. They rarely feel inevitable at the time. Employees worry about layoffs, investors question management, founders abandon ideas that once defined their companies, and businesses quietly retreat from markets they once described as strategic.

Airtel Money Kenya is targeting small businesses with a new digital wallet as it seeks to deepen customer engagement after increasing its share of Kenya's mobile money market to 10.9% , signalling a new phase in its challenge to Safaricom's M-PESA.

Cet article est également disponible en anglais Première publication le 2 août 2026 Une vidéo YouTube sur les traumatismes m'a fait réfléchir aux startups africaines.

Cloud9, a Kenyan startup that offers digital banking services for businesses, has acquired social commerce platform Chpter in an all-stock deal, marking its second acquisition in three months after

Rwanda, with about 13 million people, hosts more than four times as many Spiro motorcycles as Nigeria, whose population exceeds 200 million.

Ultimately, the phenomenon of a founder acquiring their own prior startup is neither a scam nor a stroke of pure genius but a mechanical feature of modern corporate finance. When a market demands consolidation, and venture capitalists demand an eventual path to liquidity, overlapping cap tables and recycled founding teams become the path of least resistance. It requires careful legal structuring and board-level approvals to ensure fairness, but if the resulting entity solves distribution problems and scales faster, the market tends to forgive the tangled corporate history.

Kenya's Capital Markets Authority (CMA) has approved a new investment fund from Wall Street Africa (WSA), a Nairobi-based financial media and fintech startup, that will allow investors to buy into a group of listed banks in a single investment.