The Flip

Drive through cities in Africa and you’re likely to see a waste problem. In the streets, the sewage, in the waterways…540 million tons of waste goes uncollected every year across sub-Saharan Africa. 

It's a $16 billion opportunity. But much of the infrastructure is still missing. What would it actually take to build it at scale?

In Nigeria, a company called Scrapays is paying people to collect it. In Kenya, Plas-tec...

In Lagos' Computer Village, Nigeria's largest electronics market, everything is imported from China. But how merchants access dollars and pay their suppliers is a challenge.

Nigeria imports $20 billion from China every year, yet dollar access problems and legacy banking systems create friction for those doing global trade. 

So how do countries like Nigeria and China trade with each other?

In this episode, we head to Lagos, Nigeri...

If you're a freelancer or a remote worker from the global south, you likely have a harder time getting paid and participating in the global economy. 

Maybe a global payments company doesn't operate in your country. Maybe they banned your account or froze your funds. 

Remote workers and freelancers from emerging markets often have to jump through hoops to get paid, incurring additional costs along the way.

Meanwhile, more peo...

Bolivia is facing a severe economic crisis. The country is literally running out of dollars. Their foreign reserves have collapsed from $15 billion a decade ago to just $50 million today. 

In June 2024, Bolivia legalized cryptocurrencies, and digital asset transaction volume exploded - growing over 500 percent in the past year.

To participate in the global economy, businesses are turning to stablecoins for access to dollar asset...

Argentina's decades-long economic crises and hyperinflation has a major impact on how Argentine's participate in the economy.

The recent story that's been told about Argentina is that people are adopting stablecoins to protect against inflation and currency devaluation. But that's only part of the story...

The real story involves long-standing distrust of government and the banks, and overbearing taxes that drive Argentinians to the ...

This year, $160 billion in remittance payments will be sent from the US to Latin America. $65 billion will be sent from the US to Mexico, the world's largest remittance corridor. 

Yet, the majority of payments will be sent via brick-and-mortar stores like Western Union or Moneygram. 

The future of payments is already here, yet most people are queuing in line, paying in cash, taking a photo of their receipt, and sending it t...

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qoA105xnIpU

Khaman Maluach was just drafted 10th overall in the NBA Draft. He’s a South Sudanese refugee who grew up in Uganda and only started playing basketball when he was 13 years old. 

After first playing the game at Luol Deng’s basketball camp, Maluach played at the NBA Academy in Senegal, and played three seasons in NBA Africa’s Basketball Africa League, be...

Watch this episode on YouTube.

2025 is the year of stablecoins. 

Transaction volumes have grown to over $33 trillion in the past 12 months. The top Dollar-denominated stablecoins are the 17th largest holder of US treasuries globally. Tether, issuer the largest stablecoin by volume, USDT, announced $13 billion in net profit in 2024. Circle, the USDC issuer, is going public.

But what got the hype train going was Stripe’s acqu...

There are 1,696 active players in the NFL. Just 138 are African. 

But if it were up to Osi Umenyiora, 11-year veteran and 2-time Super Bowl Champion, there would be many more. 

Osi is the Founder of The Uprise, the NFL's lead in Africa, and he's pioneering American football on the African continent. 

At the NFL's camp in Lagos, Nigeria, young athletes are vying for a shot to join the NFL Academy in London or to go strai...

Farming is the number one source of employment in Africa, yet its agricultural productivity is the lowest of any region in the world. 

The opportunity is immense—60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land is on the continent—but rural communities are suffering from a lack of economic opportunity.

So young Africans are building innovative solutions to tackle the problems that are impacting their families and co...

Reports suggest that climate change is set to cost the global economy $38 billion per year by 2049. Emerging markets need close to $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to meet the climate goals. That's 4 times what is currently invested. 

But high capital costs are stalling clean energy investment across Africa. If you want to build a renewable energy project in Sub-Saharan Africa, the weighted average cost of capital would be up to ...

Nigeria’s energy crisis has persisted for decades. Africa's largest country is largely powered by fuel generators. They're noisy, dirty, and bad for the environment. But they also provide power to millions of people in a country with an unreliable grid. 

The removal of Nigeria's long-standing fuel subsidy in 2023 caused the price of fuel to quadruple, leaving Nigerian consumers searching for options. And many are going so...

Can Africa be a leader in the global fight against climate change? 

While the continent has contributed just 3 percent to global carbon emissions, it is the most impacted by climate change. But it also has a range of natural endowments that leave it well-positioned to build green industries that will have a positive economic impact locally and can play a significant global role in getting to net zero.

In this episode, we're join...

These climate investors are funding climate startups using a hands-on venture-building model to support founders across Africa. 

In this episode, we’re joined by James Mwangi from Africa Climate Ventures, Maxime Bayen from Catalyst Fund, and Lyndsay Holley Handler from Delta40.

We discuss why African ventures and climate startups, in particular, benefit from the venture building model; the limitations of the traditional tw...

There are millions of Moniepoint point-of-sale terminals in use across Nigeria. These point-of-sale devices power Nigeria’s offline economy, and while there are many competitors in this space, Moniepoint appears to beating them all. 

How did they do it? How did Moniepoint grow so quickly? And why has it become the preferred choice for agents and merchants across Nigeria?

In this episode, we hit the streets of Lagos with Ez...

Small retailers in Nigeria power the economy. But they’re going through some tough times. Devaluation, food inflation, and overall poor economic conditions have made it especially hard for these small businesses to operate.

To better understand how retail works, and how these small businesses can grow, we hit the streets of Lagos with Deepankar Rustagi, CEO of OmniRetail.

OmniRetail was ranked Africa's #1 Fastest Growing Compan...

One of the African tech ecosystem's largest exits was the 2020 sale of Sendwave to WorldRemit for $500 million. 

Sid Sridhar was Sendwave's Head of Business at the time, and in this episode, Sid shares his M&A lessons for the African tech ecosystem.

Sid is now the Head of Business at Wave, the mobile money company spun out of Sendwave that's competing head-on with the telcos in Francophone West Africa. Wave raised a $200 mil...

There is a $330 billion credit gap, according to the IFC. But why is it so hard to lend in African markets? 

We explore that question with Chijioke Dozie, Co-founder and CEO of Carbon, and Mark Straub, CEO of Smile Identity.

This episode was recorded live from the FT Partners Fintech in Africa Summit in New York City. Download their FinTech in Africa research report, published in March 2024.

00:00 - Introduction
01:36 - The cr...

In this episode, the third in our docuseries on jobtech platforms and the future of work, we dive deeper into the value chain, because the problems that small businesses have across the continent are multi-layered. 

In an environment of demand constraints and a lack of infrastructure, platforms need to solve multiple problems across the value chain. This is what makes jobtech platforms so hard to build in Africa. 

But for t...