African

What’s more rewarding for an angel investor than paper returns in a startup? An acquisition that turns those paper returns into a cash payout while still maintaining shares in the company. “The return after dilution was eight times my investment,” said Selma Ribica in an interview with TechCrunch recently. “I kept some stock of the new entity, but a big majority was cash.” Ribica currently serves as the general partner at First Circle Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in fintech SaaS, or fintech 2.0 as she…

The Grow, Unite, Build, Africa (GUBA) Enterprise and Rolling Stone hosted the second annual African Nominee Brunch on Saturday in Beverly Hills, celebrating a landmark year for African representation at this weekend’s Grammy Awards. The brunch is among the more vibrant events in all of Grammy weekend. This year’s celebration marks the second time GUBA has hosted the Nominee Brunch and the first time Rolling Stone has signed on to partner, and this weekend’s gathering was particularly notable as Sunday’s Grammys…

The explosion of Afrobeats has been one of the biggest stories in the music industry over the past five years, with acts like Burna Boy, Davido, Asake, and Tems becoming global superstars. As Africa’s musical imprint around the world continues to become more prominent, its artists now have a Grammy category all to themselves: Best African Music Performance.   “It makes sense, given that reggae or spoken word have their own categories,” says Gracey Mae, a U.K.-based PR and marketing consultant and Recording Academy…

It may seem like Sony is ubiquitous, but there are a few regions where it has yet to fully establish or penetrate the gaming market. Africa as a whole has been largely neglected by the company, usually lumping it in with Europe when it comes to matters of release days. That may be about to change soon, thanks to an investment in Cape Town-based publisher Carry1st. The company specializes in facilitating Africans buying games using local infrastructure, but it’s been creeping its way into the development market as well,…

by Stephen Wessels, Benjamin Schoville, Jayne Wilkins and Sechaba Maape, The Conversation Screenshot of the Ga-Mohana Hill 3D model visualization. Credit: Archaeologies (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11759-022-09460-3 These days, if you want to visit remarkable archaeological sites such as Great Zimbabwe or Petra in Jordan you don't even need to leave your house.…

A pioneering curator, writer and programmer of African film is to receive Bafta’s outstanding British contribution to cinema award.June Givanni is the founder of a London archive that has amassed more than 10,000 items – including films, ephemera, manuscripts, audio, photography and posters – documenting Pan-African cinema over 40 years.The volunteer-run archive is one of the world’s most important collections documenting the moving image for the African continent and its diaspora, and includes artefacts that might…

Various rice plants, both control plants and mutants, between three and four weeks after inoculation. Credit: IRD / Laurence AlbarThe so-called Rice Yellow Mottle Virus (for short: RYMV) is responsible for high crop losses in Africa, particularly among small-scale farmers. A research team from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) has now produced rice lines that are resistant to the disease by means of genome editing. The rice varieties,…

Nigerian fintech Cleva, focused on creating a banking platform for African individuals and businesses to receive international payments by opening USD accounts, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by 1984 Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Other participants in the round include The Raba Partnership, Byld Ventures, FirstCheck Africa, and several angel investors. Aaron Michael, a partner at 1984 Ventures, expressed support for Cleva’s founders, Tolu Alabi…

Credit: Mikhail Nilov from Pexels "Pupil stabbed to death at Gauteng school had suffered history of bullying." "Grade 6 learner commits suicide after bullying." "Grade 11 learner takes her own life after taunts over her appearance." These are just some headlines about the occasionally tragic effects of violent school bullying in South African…

Last year presented a tough period for African tech startups. Venture capital was hard to bag (as predicted earlier), bridge and down rounds became the norm, and news of fire sales, layoffs and startup closures reverberated across the continent. With the overall amount of VC funding raised in Africa dipping significantly across the year, according to initial reports, after steady growth over the last decade (and the windfall of the previous two years), startups and scale-ups in the continent have suffered…