Stories that begin with something visible and ask what larger system is quietly being revealed.
The 2021 forecasts promised shared platforms, open data, blockchain registries and state digital currencies. Five years on, the survivors share one trait the predictions ignored: somebody was willing to pay to keep the pipe running.
Africa Business Stories · 10 Nov 2026 · 6 min read
Eight state-linked funds carried Kenya Pipeline for 237 days, sold a near-control stake to Dangote for less than a Treasury bill would have paid, and no regulator has asked why in public.
Africa Business Stories · 27 Oct 2026 · 21 min read
In 2019, Redmond came to Nairobi hunting for scarce software developers. Seven years later, a $190bn compute bill and a three-gigawatt grid bottleneck have turned Africa’s premier coding centre into a government sales account.
Africa Business Stories · 15 Oct 2026 · 11 min read
The journey from an idea to a functioning business is less about polished strategy than survival, improvisation and learning which mistakes can kill the company before it develops scale. Ian Ortega argues that capital can sometimes postpone rather than remove that apprenticeship, while founders who bootstrap their way from zero to one learn the suppliers, customers, hidden costs and informal rules that no business-school framework can fully teach.
Africa Business Stories · 13 Oct 2026 · 6 min read