Hello Africa!
We wrap up this week’s big 5 with some interesting tech news across Africa.
We kick off with news from Nigeria.
Parcel-it has secured an undisclosed investment fund from German-based Greentec Capital. Parcel-it, an alumnus of the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program is an on-demand logistics start-up launched in 2017 and it’s aimed at targeting over 20,000 daily delivery requests around Lagos, Nigeria which is a $13 Billion annual market.
In the same vein, SA’s blockchain-based solar micro-leasing marketplace, The Sun Exchange has secured a $500,000 seed investment from Alphabit. The company invests in companies that solve real-world problems by applying blockchain and decentralisation.
Moving on, the Farmer-to farmer digital network start-up, Wefarm has reached over 1.1 million users across Kenya and Uganda. The farmers have also asked and answered more than one million questions through Wefarm in a single calendar month.
The first smartphone manufacturer in Egypt, Silicon Industries Corporation (SICO), is planning to enter the bigger African market later this year or early next year as it seeks to boost exports. SICO was established in 2017 with a capital of 150 million Egyptian pounds ($8.4 million), sells phones under the brand name Nile X and has said it uses a Chinese design of 3G/4G US technology.
Nigeria Communications Week investigations have revealed that Nigeria internet ecosystem has achieved a significant milestone with the exchange of 110 gigabyte per second bandwidth of traffic locally. This feat represents an increase of 10,000 percent over the past five years and 40 percent of telecommunications operators and internet service providers (ISPs) traffic in the country.
That’s all for the week.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for our weekly news round-up