Category: Technology

1 septembre 2026 Hello , Welcome back to Francophone Weekly by TechCabal, your weekly deep dive into the tech ecosystem across French-speaking Africa. For readers who want to understand Francophone Africa beyond headlines—through markets, startups, and systems. New editions of the newsletter will land directly in your inbox every Tuesday at 12 PM WAT. By default, this newsletter is in French.

If you’re reading this in your email inbox, click the “Read in English” button below to switch to the English version. If you’re reading on our website, you can either click the button below or toggle the language selector at the top right-hand side of the page to view the English edition. Please note that today’s edition is a re-run of an edition from November 2025.

Read in English Le secteur des start-ups africaines regorge de potentiel, et l’Afrique francophone est en passe de devenir la nouvelle coqueluche du continent, grâce à des devises qui restent relativement stables par rapport à celles des grandes économies du continent. Pourtant, les entrepreneurs d’Afrique francophone sont toujours confrontés à des réglementations obsolètes et à une inertie bureaucratique qui ralentissent les progrès.

La réalité sur le terrain pour ces fondateurs est une lutte acharnée contre des systèmes qui semblent conçus pour entraver le progrès. Aujourd’hui, une nouvelle évolution entre le Ghana et le Rwanda met la région à l’épreuve.

Lors du FinTech Forum qui s’est tenu à Kigali il y a quelques mois, la Banque du Ghana (BoG) et la Banque nationale du Rwanda (NBR) ont signé le premier accord africain de passeportage de licence, permettant aux fintechs agréées dans l’un ou l’autre pays d’opérer sur les deux marchés avec un minimum d’autorisations supplémentaires.

Cette initiative pourrait enfin rendre les paiements transfrontaliers interopérables et plus fluides entre les deux pays. Examinons le cas

This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday. When you buy cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether on a local exchange, you are often trusting the platform with one simple task: to keep your funds safe. But what happens if the exchange is hacked, freezes withdrawals or suddenly shuts down?

Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wants cryptocurrency companies to have better answers. Under proposed rules released on August 20, crypto exchanges and other digital asset firms would have to separate customer funds from their own, strengthen how they safeguard cryptocurrencies, and report major losses, cyber incidents, and other material operational failures to the regulator.

The framework, which is open for public comment, brings a rule already familiar in the traditional banking sector to the digital asset industry: when something goes wrong, the regulator expects to know about it quickly. Like banks, crypto firms would have to notify their regulator of certain incident reporting within 24 hours with further updates where necessary; the SEC’s proposal also requires digital asset firms to submit a detailed incident report within 48 hours.

The SEC is also proposing higher financial requirements for digital asset businesses. Digital Asset Exchanges and Digital Asset Custodians (DACs) would each need minimum paid-up capital of ₦2 billion ($1.5 million) while Digital Asset Platform Operators (DAPOs), Digital Asset Offering Platforms (DAOPs), and Real-World Asset Tokenisation Platforms (RATOPs) would require ₦500 million ($371,600). Virtual Asset Service Providers would require ₦200 million ($149,000). The proposal also requires a current fidelity insurance bond covering at least 25% of the applicable minimum paid-up capital.

The rules are aimed at strengthening investor protection and reducing the risk that customers lose access to their

Allawee, a Nigerian card-issuing fintech, will close its business and personal account services on December 1, 2026, after Paystack acquired the company in 2025 in a deal that was not publicly announced, according to emails sent to Allawee customers.

In two emails seen by TechCabal, Allawee said its technology now operates within Paystack and told customers that “any payment sent to your Allawee account number from December 1 will fail,” adding that its cards will stop working regardless of the expiry date printed on them. Allawee is the second fintech brand Paystack has acquired and folded into its operations this year, after it folded business banking startup Brass into its microfinance bank in June.

Since January, Paystack has also acquired Ladder Microfinance Bank, giving it a banking licence, and restructured under a new holding company. The deals show Paystack, Nigeria’s largest payments processor, assembling the pieces of a financial-services business through acquisitions rather than building each one from scratch. Allawee and Paystack declined to comment on any part of this article.

Customers have until November 30 to withdraw their balances, share new bank details with anyone who pays them, and replace saved Allawee card details on subscriptions. “Your money will remain yours,” Allawee said in the email. “It won’t expire or be forfeited, and any remaining balance will stay safely recorded. However, you’ll need to email support@paystackmfb.com to request a manual payout.

Because this process may take longer, we strongly recommend withdrawing your balance before the deadline.” Founded in 2022 by Ikenna Enenwali and Oreofe Olurin, Allawee has changed direction twice. It launched as a credit card lender, then became a credit-risk software that other companies could plug into to check whether a borrower was likely to repay, before settling on card infrastructure—the systems banks and fintechs use to issue

For South African startups, getting customers is only half the battle. Even after people start paying for their products, raising enough money to grow can remain difficult. That is the funding gap Mamor Capital Ventures wants to target with its first venture capital fund.

The black women-owned and managed firm has raised R300 million ($18.8 million) in the first close of its inaugural fund, with the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), South Africa’s largest asset manager, as its anchor investor. Mamor is still raising towards its R550 million ($34.375 million) target and says it will invest in South African technology companies that already have paying customers.

Mamor’s fund points to a bigger problem in South Africa’s startup market, where companies can have paying customers and a working business yet still struggle to find investors willing to fund their next stage of growth.

Mamokete Ramathe, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Mamor Capital, revealed that the firm spent more than three years raising the fund and found that many traditional investors, including pension funds and banks, remain cautious about venture capital. Some investors, she said, have mandates or risk limits that make it difficult to invest in early-stage companies. Others still associate venture capital with backing businesses that have not yet proved that their products work.

“The fundraising journey reinforced that institutional appetite for venture capital in South Africa is still developing,” Ramathe told TechCabal in an interview on Monday. Mamor is trying to reduce some of that risk by investing in companies that have already shown that customers will pay for their products or services. Ramathe said the firm does not require companies to be profitable before investing.

Instead, it looks at whether they have paying customers, can retain them, have a market they can grow into, and have a