Technology
What’s Next for the African Tech Revolution?
By Kay Akinwunmi
In many parts of Africa, a tech revolution is underway. It’s predicted 475 million people will be mobile internet users by 2025.
Devices, networks and emerging forms of technology are proliferating, not least in Nigeria which, through R&D, has the potential to become a regional leader in AI and Blockchain.
Driven by an exploding population, (the average age of which is just 19.7 years old), Africa can become a tech powerhouse.
According to the World Economic Forum, between 2015 and 2020 tech start-ups receiving financial backing was six times faster than the global average. Despite the challenge of retaining later-stage funding, it’s an exciting time to be an African tech start-up, whose strength lies in retaining a local identity.
When Uber launched in Nigeria, it was forced to change its payment options to include cash, and this is a small example of a much bigger truth: in Africa, models that work elsewhere can rarely – if ever – be replicated without some adjustments having to be made to cater for local tastes and modes of behaviour.
This is not unique to Africa: China’s WeChat, described as an “app for everything”, has an interface many Westerners would find awkward to use, ugly, or undesirable; the same is probably true of Western apps looked at from a Chinese point of view. And this is one reason why anyone starting a business for the African market must have a presence on the ground in Africa: so that whatever they build looks and feels local.
But it is also one reason why the tech boom is so exciting: it gives Africans the power to develop African products that are uniquely, visibly African. Africans are best-placed to identify African opportunities, as well as African problems. Through tech, they can develop solutions in a distinctly African way.
And this is something that has been denied to Africans for a long time. The reality is that big corporations can have a homogenising effect as they expand overseas, diluting local cultures.
Tech, though innately international and borderless, celebrates diversity by giving power to the individual, wherever they happen to be. And that means that over time, through tech, Africa will be able to shape its own commercial identity: its own principles around user experience, brand and design.
By giving companies and the products they produce a uniquely African identity – an identity that reflects African people and culture – tech can strengthen that culture and showcase it to the world.
Tech also has the power to help Africa address a wealth of more serious issues, some of which have not just been persistent but seemingly intractable.
EdTech, for example, provides a solution to limited access to education for Africans, especially in poorer rural areas. Start-ups like PataTutor, based in Kenya, connects students with qualified private or online tutors, while uLesson, based in Nigeria, sells digital curricula through SD cards.
HealthTech, too, could give Africans the means to speak to medical professionals via video call or assess any symptoms they might have. In 2020, capital for health tech start-ups on the continent rose 257.5 per cent from 2019, according to a Disrupt Africa report, spurred in part by the pandemic, which shed light on the gap in healthcare services and forced healthcare providers to adjust their models and digitalise quickly.
Increasing internet penetration also means that remote working is likely to increase across Africa, and that may mean that those working abroad can return home. Some in the diaspora are returning home already. And as the cost of data comes down and the internet gets faster, the tech wave will build and roll over more of the continent.
We may not even be able to conceive at this stage of the kinds of brands, products, services and new forms of technology that might emerge out of a bustling and uniquely African tech scene. And with all this comes greater foreign investment in Africa and less brain drain, which strips Africa of some of its most talented people.
There is still a way to go before Africa’s tech industries become sustainable and world-leading. Significant problems remain later-stage funding, supply chain disruption and cybercrime:
Nigeria has more tech hubs than any other country on the continent but is also plagued by mobile malware. But through innovation and the need to diversify its economy, Africa will advance. At Zazuu, we’re proud to be part of Africa’s growth, using tech to meet the needs of African people.
Kay Akinwunmi is the co-founder of Zazuu
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the players in the Nigerian gaming industry, Secure Electronic Technology (SET) Plc, has appointed Ms Leticia Otomewo as its acting secretary.
This followed the expiration of the company’s service contract with the former occupier of the seat, Ms Irene Attoe, on January 31, 2026.
A statement to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited on Thursday said Ms Otomewo would remain the organisation’s scribe in an acting capacity, pending the ratification and appointment of a substantive company secretary at the next board meeting.
She was described in the notice signed by the Managing Director of the firm, Mr Oyeyemi Olusoji, as “a results-driven executive with 22 years of experience in driving business growth, leading high-performing teams, and delivering innovative solutions.”
The acting secretary is also said to be “a collaborative leader with a passion for mentoring and developing talent.”
“The company assures the investing public that all Company Secretariat responsibilities and regulatory obligations will continue to be discharged in full compliance with the Companies and Allied Matters Act, applicable regulations, and the Nigerian Exchange Limited Listing Rules,” the disclosure assured.
Meanwhile, the board thanked Ms Attoe “for professionalism and contributions to the Company during the period of her engagement and wishes her well in her future endeavours.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Russian government on Thursday confirmed it has blocked the WhatsApp messaging service, as it moves to further control information flow in the country.
It urged Russians to use a new state-backed platform called Max instead of the Meta-owned service.
WhatsApp issued a statement earlier saying Russia had attempted to “fully block” its messaging service in the country to force people toward Max, which it described as a “surveillance app.”
“Today the Russian government attempted to fully block WhatsApp in an effort to drive people to a state-owned surveillance app,” WhatsApp posted on social media platform X.
“Trying to isolate over 100 million users from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” it said, adding: “We continue to do everything we can to keep users connected.”
Russia’s latest move against social media platforms and messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram comes amid a wider attempt to drive users toward domestic and more easily controlled and monitored services, such as Max.
Russia’s telecoms watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has accused messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp of failing to comply with Russian legislation requiring companies to store Russian users’ data inside the country, and of failing to introduce measures to stop their platforms from being used for allegedly criminal or terrorist purposes.
It has used this as a basis for slowing down or blocking their operations, with restrictions coming into force since last year.
For Telegram, it may be next, but so far the Russian government has been admittedly slowing down its operations “due to the fact that the company isn’t complying with the requirements of Russian legislation.”
The chat service, founded by Russian developers but headquartered in Dubai, has been a principal target for Roskomnadzor’s scrutiny and increasing restrictions, with users reporting sluggish performance on the app since January.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian startup, Decide, has emerged as the fourth most accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for spreadsheet tasks globally, according to results from SpreadsheetBench, a widely referenced benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world spreadsheet problems.
According to the founder, Mr Abiodun Adetona, the ranking places Decide alongside well-funded global AI startups, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Mr Adetona, an ex-Flutterwave developer, also revealed that Decide now has over 3,000 users, including some who are paying customers, a signal to the ability of the startup to scale in the near future.
SpreadsheetBench is a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to push Large Language Models (LLMs) to their limits in understanding and manipulating spreadsheet data. While many benchmarks focus on simple table QA, SpreadsheetBench treats a spreadsheet as a complex ecosystem involving spatial layouts, formulas, and multi-step reasoning. So far, only three agents rank higher than Decide, namely Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent.
Mr Adetona said SpreadsheetBench measures how well AI agents can handle practical spreadsheet tasks such as writing formulas, cleaning messy data, working across multiple sheets, and reasoning through complex Excel workflows. Decide recorded an 82.5% accuracy score, solving 330 out of 400 verified tasks.
“The result reflects sustained investment in applied research, product iteration, and learning from real-world spreadsheet workloads across a wide range of use cases,” Mr Adetona told Business Post.
For Mr Adetona, who built Decide out of frustration with how much time professionals spend manually cleaning data, debugging formulas, and moving between sheets, “This milestone highlights how focused engineering and domain-specific AI development can deliver frontier-level performance outside of large research organisations. By concentrating on practical business data problems and building systems grounded in real user environments, we believe smaller teams can contribute meaningfully to advancing applied AI.”
“For Decide, this is a foundation for continued progress in intelligent spreadsheet and analytics automation,” he added.
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