The Africa B2B Tech Report

Issue No. 83. Africa-Middle East B2B & SME tech news & insights for 7 August 2024.

Charles Laughlin

Aug 07, 2024

This edition of the Africa B2B Tech Report is supported by Realm Digital

Your Trusted Strategy and Technology Partner

“Empowering industry leaders through innovative business solutions”

Please visit RealmDigital.com to learn more.

Realm’s recent Guest Post shows how AR/VR is creating real value for African corporates.

Read Now

Create your Guest Post for the Africa B2B Tech Report and share your subject-matter mastery with our audience of AME builders, investors, and decision-makers.

Learn More

The Africa B2B Tech News Digest

B2B Tech News & Insights for 7th August 2024

Google’s Africa AI Talent Play

We are overdue to write about an important question. Is AI a unique opportunity for Africa? We believe it certainly is.

But AI is also a risk for the continent should it fall too far behind or fail to capitalize on the opportunity. One opportunity we see that may be uniquely rich for Africa is to use AI as a force multiplier to allow founders to do far more with less. This could make difficulty accessing early-stage venture capital less of a success barrier for African founders, for example.

This is a broad theme that Open AI founder Sam Altman loves to talk about, at least as a general matter, if not specifically about Africa.

So how is Big Tech thinking about AI in Africa? Google, in part at least, is focused on talent development.

Last year, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s subsidiary that seeks to build a “safe and responsible” artificial general intelligence (AGI), signaled its interest in Africa when it partnered with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences to create the AI for Science Masters Program. DeepMind backed this up with a $4.5 million grant.

This was, ostensibly at least, part of Google DeepMind’s effort “to help build a stronger, more diverse and inclusive global AI community.”

The program recently graduated its first cohort. We presume that at least some of these graduates will be among the continent’s AI leaders in the near term.

The graduates are Béria Chingnabé Kalpélbé (Chad), Olivier Mahumawon Adjagba (Benin), and Diffo Mboudjiho Annette Dariose (Cameroon).

Each Deepmind Scholar who has graduated this summer has a pet project that they hope to apply AI to address.

Kalpélbé is focused on food sustainability.

“I hope to develop solutions for sustainable agricultural development that will benefit both people and the planet by integrating principles of renewable energy, precision farming, and ecological preservation in my work,” he said.

Adjagba wants to use AI to better understand the pathology of dengue fever.

“Using advanced AI techniques, I hope to create more accurate prediction models to inform public health strategies and interventions, ultimately contributing to the control and prevention of this viral disease,” he said.

And Dariose’s interests extend beyond the continent and the globe. Her interest centers on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is the planet’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope.

“By applying Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques, I hope to improve the accuracy and efficiency of extracting these faint signals from SKA data, potentially leading to more precise cosmological models and a deeper understanding of the future evolution of the universe,” she said.

We are not going to pretend to know what MCMC is.

Whenever Big Tech invests in Africa, it’s important to ask what is in it for them. Ultimately any Big Tech initiative, however couched in the language of inclusivity, is really about market development.

So what is in this for Google? We can only guess that in the race to AI dominance, talent is going to matter as much as almost anything. Except perhaps for the massive computing resources required to train AI models. (On this point, Microsoft is investing in data centers in Africa.)

So Google appears to be asking itself, why not be leading the way on AI talent development in Africa?

Recommended Reading

The following is a curation of content from around Africa and the world related to big tech, digital marketing, small business, startup life, venture funding, M&A, and more. Please vote with your clicks to tell us what we should curate for you in future editions.

Is WhatsApp on the Verge of Exiting Nigeria?

Is Decentralization Coming to Nigeria’s Payments Industry?

A Look at Tanzania’s Innovation Ecosystem

How Digital Payments Fuel African MSME Growth

Nelly Agbogu’s Mission to Elevate Africa’s SMEs

Jumia Narrows Losses to $19M in Q2 ‘24, Currency Challenges Cited

Bahraini Fintech Robos is Now MenaMoney

Saudi Becomes Haven for Web3 Startups Seeking Funding

SA’s AdBot Among Irish Tech Challenge South Africa 2024 Winners

Is Open AI Too Good to Fail?

Found on LinkedIn

We like to share infographics about tech in Africa that we come across on LinkedIn. This graphic, courtesy of Max Cuvellier Giocomelli and Africa: The Big Deal, shows the course of tech deal activity (from funding rounds to M&A) in Africa from 2019 through July of this year.

This graphic also shows us, as Max points out in his LinkedIn post, that “July 2024 has been a very good month in terms of start-up funding…This is actually the best month of July on record, since we started tracking in 2019 - and by quite a margin.”

The $420 million raised by African startups in July was more activity than the continent generated in all of Q2 this year.

As is often the case, a small number of big deals propelled the big fundraising number. Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan raised $157 million in July. The company also acquired Turkish finance firm Tam Finans for $300 million in July.

And d.light, which offers solar power solutions for developing markets, raised $176 million to finance off-the-grid power in Africa.

The Big5D Podcast

The BIG5D Podcast features in-depth conversations with the leaders who are building, investing in, or taking to market the digital products and services designed to make businesses more successful in Africa and the Middle East.

The BIG5D Podcast is available here on Substack as well as on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please follow, comment, rate, and review the BIG5D Podcast. Your engagement will help others discover this podcast so they can learn more from the amazing builders and thought leaders we feature on the show.