The African Exponent

ON A WEEKDAY morning in Lagos, somewhere between the time a customer downloads a fintech app and the moment she taps "deposit", her face is photographed, matched against a national identity database, scored for liveness, and either approved or rejected. The whole exchange takes a few seconds. It costs the fintech a few cents. Somewhere in the middle, a company called Smile Id...

IN JULY of last year, in offices in Nairobi and London, lawyers from Clifford Chance closed a deal that few outside the off-grid solar industry noticed. Sun King, a seller of small solar systems to East African households, raised $156m in Kenyan shillings (equivalent), backed by the future repayments of roughly 1.4m of its Kenyan customers. Five Kenyan commercial banks—Absa, ...

Rado has created a niche when it comes to luxury timepieces which easily merge luxury with durability. Women Rado watches are not accessories but a form of expression, a form of sophistication, and innovation. The watches are constructed bearing the thought of the modern lifestyles and are easily blending the frontier of fashion and functionality, giving the ladies ...

In recent years, many expected African digital publishing to consolidate. The assumption was that declining ad revenue and shrinking platform traffic would push smaller publishers to merge into larger, more resilient companies. 

Current data does not support this theory. There have been no major mergers and acquisitions of digital publishers by traditional media ho...

The Rise of E-Commerce in Africa

African e-commerce is booming. From Lagos to Nairobi, online stores are connecting millions of consumers to products and services previously unavailable or hard to access. Mobile phones and digital payments are at the center of this growth. However, effective communication and