It took a white man, CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey, to point out one of the most powerful, yet underrated stories coming out of Africa, when he said “ Africa will define the future of Bitcoin.” I am here to tell you that story. After years of poor governance and corruption, the time has now caught up with Africa’s states. They are unable to generate enough job opportunities for the millions of digital native Africans that spend 6 hours every day glued to their WhatsApp, Tik Toks, selfies and hyper-localized
It’s fair to say Kenya’s predominantly informal sector is currently under shock, due to the impact of the ‘rona’ and the measures and mitigations that have followed: quarantines, social distancing rules, curfews, restrictions and possibly lockdowns. M-Pesa inextricable link with Kenya’s biashara economy [small trader economy] fully exposes it to this shock. Newly appointed CEO Peter Ndegwa of Safaricom and M-Pesa admitted to Reuters , that the mobile payments darling of Africa and East Africa is fully dependent on the economy of Kenya. It has only been a month of subdued biashara,
The importance of informal finance arrangements is a reverberating theme across Africa. Informal doesn’t necessarily mean bad or evil or dirty, it’s just that rather than rely on the heavy hand of the law, some communities prefer to place their trust in reputation and social networks for all trade commerce and financial relationships whether offline or online. Others, will turn to informal institutions of trade and finance when faced by adversity in an immediate harsh environment such as war, political instability, structural programs or lack of reliable services. For example,
“In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company” – Mark Zuckerburg The rise of virtual internet platforms such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Kakao is challenging established regimes of state and sovereignty, monetary policy and issuance of currency, control, ownership and governance of virtual resources in developing countries in Africa. Billions of users, including Africans, are spending more time on virtual networked platforms that command the attention of far greater audiences than the populations of individual nation states. WhatsApp has 1 billion, Telegram 200
A spat between the UK Government, PayPal and Kenya freelancers has got everyone mixing up issues. “Thousands of jobless graduates from Kenya who help lazy university students in developed countries to cheat academically could soon be forced to find something else to do after the UK government started clamping down on essay mills. On Thursday, international digital money transfer service, PayPal, announced it was withdrawing its services to essay-writing firms selling to university students. This was after weeks of pressure from the UK government, which insists on stopping payments for
Facebook is plotting a new cryptocurrency dubbed ‘Libra’ for its vast social network scheduled for release in 2020. Libra Coin, a virtual currency, will be governed by Libra association, a conglomerate of 28 American and European corporations who will decide everything from who can join the network, process transactions and how much currency will circulate. As an African, it is my opinion that the peoples of Africa, its governments and central banks should be concerned, because we risk ceding more control, from the little we have now, to a digital
