Startup Acts: What They Deliver, and What They Do Not
Several countries now have dedicated startup legislation. The tax relief tends to arrive; the harder promises tend not to.
AfroTech Horizon Newsroom
The AfroTech Horizon editorial desk. Bylines are replaced with the reporting journalist once a story is commissioned — this account exists so the site has a working author profile before the newsroom is staffed.
Articles by AfroTech Horizon Newsroom
Mobile Money Interoperability: The Rule That Quietly Changes Everything
When a regulator forces wallets to talk to each other, the competitive shape of an entire market changes. It is the least discussed and most consequential fintech policy on the continent.
The Cables Have Landed. Why Is Bandwidth Still Expensive?
International capacity into Africa has multiplied. Retail prices have not fallen nearly as far, and the reason sits between the landing station and the customer.
Power Is a Software Problem Too
Unreliable electricity does not only raise costs. It shapes what applications can be built, and most engineering advice written elsewhere quietly assumes it away.
Data Centres and the Question of Where Your Data Actually Sits
Local cloud capacity is growing. Whether to use it is a legal question as often as a technical one.
Why Language Models Struggle With African Languages
The gap is not linguistic difficulty. It is that the text these systems learn from was scraped from a web that barely contains these languages.
What AI Is Actually Being Used For, Once You Look Past the Announcements
The deployed applications are less exciting and more useful than the ones that get launch coverage: document handling, triage, translation and fraud detection.
The Compute Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Training capacity is concentrated in a handful of countries. What that means for everyone else is a question of strategy, not sentiment.
The Remote Work Arbitrage, and What It Costs Locally
Foreign employers paying foreign salaries have been transformative for individual engineers and difficult for the companies trying to hire at home.
Why Tech Communities Outlast the Companies That Sponsor Them
Meet-ups, user groups and unpaid volunteer organisers have done more for engineering capacity on the continent than most funded programmes.
Open Source Contribution Is a Career Strategy, Not a Hobby
For engineers without a recognisable employer on their CV, public work is the most reliable way to be judged on what they can actually do.
Stop Calling It the Next Silicon Valley
The comparison flatters nobody and misdescribes what is actually being built. It also imports a set of expectations that do not fit.