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Analysis: Beyond the Signal: Why Africa’s Next Telecom Era Will Be Built Beneath the Surface
The subsea cable buildout underway represents the most significant transformation in the continent’s digital infrastructure since mobile telephony arrived in the 1990s. But capacity without distribution remains an abstraction; redundancy without policy coordination remains a vulnerability.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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MTN Leads Bid to Share African Digital Infrastructure Costs
The GSMA, the industry’s main lobby group, has reinforced the message, calling for “urgent, coordinated action” between governments, regulators and companies to treat telecoms as infrastructure and adopt a “shared responsibility.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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‘Deep Pockets’ vs. ‘Long Pockets’ in DPI: What Instant Payments and Open Finance Tell Us About Sustainable Funding for Digital Public Infrastructure
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) is gaining traction in emerging markets around the world. But as David Porteous at Integral: Governance Solutions and Rafe Mazer at Fair Finance Consulting explain, while the financial cost of building DPI may be modest, operating it at scale requires ongoing costs to be allocated across the ecosystem over time, making DPI sustainability fundamentally a governance issue centered on pricing policies. They explore how two of the three broadly accepted categories of DPI, instant payment systems and open finance, can develop credible mechanisms to finance long-term costs — while maintaining incentives for participants and trust among users.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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IFC Discloses Proposed $25 Million Investment in Admaius’ Virunga Africa Fund II
The fund is targeting $500 million to invest in mid- to large-cap African companies.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Africa’s Startup Surge Hits $705 Million as Investment Momentum Builds
Venture capital flows into African startups accelerated sharply in early 2026, signalling a maturing ecosystem with broader geographic reach and more sophisticated funding structures.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Ghana’s National ID Cards Can Now Make Payments
The NIA’s aim for developing this feature is to bolster financial inclusion within the country.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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UnblockPay Raises $4.5 Million Seed Round Led by Prelude
UnblockPay builds infrastructure that allows financial institutions to process cross-border payments using stablecoins.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Latin America
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Analysis: African Citizen Digital Health Data Is Now a Condition of Global Health Funding
"The United States has signed 26 bilateral health Memorandum of Understanding with African governments under the Trump administration’s America First Global Health Strategy, the framework that replaced USAID and restructured PEPFAR." . . . "Each MOU comes bundled with two sub-agreements that should concern every digital health practitioner in a signatory country."
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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