The former Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) chairman, Babatunde Fowler, announced Nigeria’s decision to tax digital transactions in 2019. The new legislation dubbed The Finance Act (2021) was signed on December 31, 2021.

A section on Nigeria’s Finance Act focuses on capturing value from non-resident technology companies and calls them to act as VAT collectors for digital goods and services traded within Nigeria. The minister for finance, budget and national planning, Zainab Ahmed, said during the presentation of the 2022 budget that the taxable digital platforms include apps, high-frequency trading, electronic data storage, online advertising, and several others.

In addition, Meta had already issued a notice on December 9, 2021, before releasing the new financial regulation, saying that Meta ads in Nigeria would be subject to a value-added tax (VAT) at the applicable local tax rate. The VAT applies to advertisers whose “Sold to” country on their business or personal …

While the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports US$300 billion of annual investments in developing countries, only 20 per cent of the implementing practitioners have the sufficient data required to successfully meet the needs of the communities they work with.

According to Rural Senses CEO Yau Ben-Or, this is because most projects are still built solely on quantitative data.

“Although necessary, quantitative data doesn’t reveal what success looks like for the local communities. Existing tools for the collection and analysis of qualitative data are time-consuming, costly and often introduce biases and ambiguous results,” Ben-Or notes.

As a result, important insights are missed, organisational learning is compromised, and projects’ sustainability is limited, he added.…

According to a report published by Partech, an investment platform for tech and digital companies in 2021, 640 African tech start-ups raised a total of US$5.2B across 681 equity rounds. This is 3.6 times YoY growth that makes Africa tech VC-; the world’s fastest-growing ecosystem.

In 2021, Partech tracked a total of 681 equity rounds raised by 640 start-ups. This is a 92 per cent increase in growth YoY compared to the 359 rounds raised by 347 start-ups in 2020.

However, 73 per cent of total funding went to the top 4 countries, with half of it going to Nigeria alone. According to the latest report, in equity funding the West African country took 1.8 billion which is 34 per cent of the total. Nigeria recorded 185 equity deals representing 27 per cent of all deals.…

• Majority of private equity investment in Sub-Saharan Africa is from outside the continent and represents only a fraction of the capital required
• African startups surpassed the US$ 1 billion mark in capital raised over the first seven weeks of 2022
• The bulk of the funding (76%) and of the deals (78%) have been claimed by startups headquartered in one of the ‘Big Four’ (Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt)

Africa continues to show strong growth prospects, with an expectation of a significant rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic that has spanned over two years, which has also affected African growth less than in developed markets. 

International investment plans and programmes to promote investment in Africa support growth potential given the correlation between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Currently, the majority of private equity investment in Sub-Saharan Africa is from outside the continent and represents only a fraction …

• M-KOPA enables underbanked customers in select African markets to access a broad range of products and services without collateral or a guarantor.
• M-KOPA has raised $190 million over the past decade
• M-KOPA is known majorly for its pay-as-you-go (PAYG) financing model that allows customers to build ownership of appliances over time by paying an initial deposit followed by flexible micro-payments
• M-KOPA is looking to expand its flexible daily and weekly payments model by scaling financial services products such as health insurance, cash loans and BNPL merchant partnerships

M-KOPA began commercial sales in Kenya in October 2012 following 2 years of piloting and development.

The young startup expanded to Uganda a year later and commenced operations in Tanzania in late 2014. 

The company, led by co-founder and CEO Jesse Moore started with solar-power home systems targeted at lower-income and rural customers without electricity in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Known majorly for …

Cryptofund is part of UNICEF’s innovation fund, which allows the organization to hold, receive and disburse funds in cryptocurrency. The CryptoFund is a pooled fund of bitcoin and ether, distributed only in crypto, targeting to create visibility and transparency accounting to donation distribution and investment processes.

CyrptoFund will facilitate startups registered in UNICEF’s 190 programme countries as a prototype Fund that seeks to explore the use of digital currencies in these countries. Forty-one of the nations are African.

Startups registered in the 190 countries and have an operational, open-source blockchain prototype or are willing to make their startup open source are eligible to get the fund.…