Onafriq
Be the wire not the storefront
Asili Africa
Asili Africa — origin stories of Africa’s biggest companies
Naivas
Correction (4 October 2026). Three points in this episode are out of date or wrong. The episode says the High Court had stayed collection of the value added tax assessed on Achievo until its appeal was heard. The appeal has been decided: on 22 September 2026 the High Court allowed it and set the assessment
Uchumi — Kenya’s First Supermarket, Two Collapses, One Brand Still Standing
The Uchumi Story: Crossing Borders to Scale *(carried from prior generation By November, twenty twenty five, the share price of a small company on the Nairobi Securities Exchange had risen about three hundred and sixty-five per cent on the year. The move was large enough that the Capital Markets Authority opened a governance review of
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Nakumatt — The Mattress Shop That Ate East Africa
The Nakumatt Story: Redefining African Business Horizons *(carried from prior generation In March, twenty eighteen, the man appointed to run a collapsed Kenyan supermarket chain put a report in front of its creditors. The chain was Nakumatt. Three years earlier, it had been the largest supermarket chain in East Africa. In the year to December,
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Shop2Shop — The Man Who Sold Pepkor an Informal Market Twice
The Shop2Shop Story: How a Cape Town founder built two informal-market fintechs for the same buyer, and turned South Africa’s two-hundred-billion-rand shopkeeper economy into a listed asset class On the twenty second of July, twenty twenty six, five days before this episode was written, a listed South African retail group called Pepkor filed an announcement
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Fuzu — The Finnish Thesis, the African Bet
The Fuzu Story: The AI Pivot That Beat The Odds Nairobi, twenty ten. As Jussi Hinkkanen tells it, Nokia was hosting a conference in the city, and it needed one driver to chauffeur its VIP guests. It advertised the job. Fifteen hundred applications came back. The organisers agonised over how to choose. Fifteen hundred people
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Tugende — Let’s Go
The Tugende Story: How a boda-boda lender in Kampala took Silicon Valley crypto money, defaulted live on the internet, and rode back on an electric motorcycle In December of twenty twenty two, on the other side of the world from Kampala, an analyst at a Silicon Valley crypto lending platform called Goldfinch opened a quarterly
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Roam Electric
Two Swedish engineers — Filip Lövström and Mikael Gånge — walked away from Sweden in 2017 to build electric motorcycles from scratch inside Nairobi rather than importing kits from Asia, then bet the company on manufacturing every part in-country while every other African EV player assembled elsewhere and shipped in; in June 2026 one of Roam’s own riders drove 1,600 kilometres from Nairobi to Addis Ababa on a single machine to prove the point, opening the door to an Ethiopia expansion in a market Spiro, BasiGo and half the continent’s e-mobility companies are all racing into
MAX (Metro Africa Xpress) — The Bank on Wheels
The MAX Story On the twenty seventh of January, twenty twenty, the Lagos State Government called a press conference and announced that from the first of February, five days later, all commercial motorcycles and tricycles would be banned across six of the most economically important local government areas in the city. Ikeja. Apapa. Eti Osa.
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