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Is it just me, or are institutions getting chummier with tech companies lately?

President Trump just got back from China with over 20 Fortune 500 CEOs.

Anthropic’s co-founder just spoke at the Vatican, urging the pope to help them understand AI.

And the Rwandan Government signed a deal with ALX and Anthropic to bring AI to thousands of learners in the country.

What does this tell us exactly? This week, we’ll answer that question.

But before we do, we have another question to ask you.

Now, here’s a fact you may not know.

Apple hit a $4.47 trillion market cap last week. That’s bigger than the combined economies of Africa’s 54 countries.

Amazon made $716.9 billion in 2025, more than the combined GDPs of South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria, Africa’s largest economies.

NVIDIA briefly crossed the $5 trillion mark in October 2025, making it richer than every country on earth except the US and China.

Looking at this trend, most people reach for one of two takes:

It’s always framed as a face-off: Big tech against big government.

But that’s not the case at all.

What’s happening is far more interesting. Companies are teaming up with countries.

In 2024, Microsoft put $1.5 billion into G42, a UAE state-backed AI company. 

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) is now one of the largest venture LPs on earth, with positions in Lucid, Magic Leap, and most of Silicon Valley.

And just last week, Donald Trump visited China with a school of America’s Fortune 500 CEOs.

But there’s something really curious about these team-ups.

Historically, big tech and big gov have been seen as antitheses of each other. 

Big govt likes control, order, and big budgets, while big tech wants profit, speed, and constant innovation. 

But what if the reason they seem so opposite is the same reason why teaming up makes sense?

Because, as it turns out, they have a lot to learn from each other.

Two things stand out as quick learnings governments can take from tech.

Most government services are designed by lawyers who want people to follow rules. 

Tech services, on the other hand, are designed by people who watch users struggle with form fields. 

But when governments design for users instead of rule-followers, the results are often great.

A good example is the redesign of the UK government’s official website.

In 2010, the UK central government ran more than 2,500 public websites. 

Some were maintained by departments that no longer existed. 

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude asked Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of lastminute.com, a UK travel startup, to review the whole mess. 

What she found was a lot of redundancy, like phone lines being maintained full-time, which only got four calls a year.

Her recommendations? 

Tear up the old system and create a new one → Build one site for all services → And put a single team in charge with the power to override departments.

Minister Maude accepted the report in full. 

The Government Digital Service (GDS) was set up inside the Cabinet Office in March 2011. GOV.UK launched in beta on 29 February 2012 and fully replaced Directgov later that year.

But anyone can look at this mess and decide a simpler system is better. This is where the UK government took many pages out of big tech’s book.

They designed for the user instead of the bureaucracy. The design team famously published seven design principles, the first of which was "Start with user needs (not government needs)." 

That sounds obvious until you realise government sites are normally organised by which department happens to own the information. 

A citizen renewing a driver's licence doesn't care that licences sit under the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), which sits under the Department for Transport (DfT). 

They just want to renew the licence. 

GOV.UK was structured around what users were trying to do, not which department owned what.

They also made government services digital by default.

If it was cheaper and better online, that's where it moved. Everything else became a backup.

GOV.UK won the Design Museum's Design of the Year in 2013, the first website ever to win.

By 2015, GDS had reportedly saved the UK government around £3.56 billion through a combination of consolidation, contract renegotiation, and digitisation. 

GOV.UK now handles billions of visits annually and remains one of the most-visited sites in the UK. 

2. Hiring and firing speed. 

Government hiring takes 18 months on average. Tech companies can hire in two weeks. 

Governments take longer because attrition is bad for stability, but it also means they can’t make quick decisions around talent.

And this leads to efficiency problems.

In 2025, Nigeria’s Civil Service Commission recruitment drew over 450,000 applications for 10,000 jobs.

The application window opened in late January. Six months later, applicants were still waiting for computer-based tests.

There are many more examples across Africa.

In Kenya, the Public Service Commission takes an average of 73 days to make a hire, and as long as 180 days for some roles. In contrast, Apple takes 21 days to hire.

In Ghana, public service workers never really get fired. 

That’s why, in 2025, an audit of Ghana’s public sector payroll found that 53,000 people had retired, resigned, or been terminated, and were still drawing pay. 

This payroll fraud accounted for 5.3% of the country’s total wage bill.

Rwanda, on the other hand, has a better system.

The country has a hard cap on how long government hiring should take, and it’s just 30 days. 

It also runs a performance contract system called Imihigo, where civil servants sign annual performance commitments.

If they perform below average, they get fired.

But governments aren’t the only ones with a page to take out of someone’s book. Tech does too.

Two things also stand out here.

1. Thinking about second-order effects. 

Governments know that every action has consequences. Some are intended, while others aren’t.

These unintended consequences are called second-order effects. And when governments make decisions, they have to plan for them too. 

Tech companies barely bear that burden.

In 2018, Facebook was found to have played a key role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar by optimising for user engagement over truth.

The slew of hate speech resulted in the Rohingya Genocide, which led to the deaths of an estimated 24,000 people.

Uber optimised for convenience, but it also broke down the protections drivers used to have, like benefits and stability. 

Crypto is optimised for the permissionless movement of money and extreme risk-taking. 

It’s not a bad thing in itself, but it produced FTX, where 2 million people lost $8 billion.

"Move fast and break things" is a workable doctrine when the thing being broken is a dating app. 

But when the thing being broken is a democracy or human livelihood, it becomes less so.

2. Universal service 

Governments are forced to serve the unprofitable user. 

The rural farmer, the disabled citizen, the village with 400 people. 

Tech systematically does the opposite, building for the most monetisable users and ignoring the rest. 

M-Pesa's reach into underserved Kenyan counties only happened because the Central Bank of Kenya pushed for it, not because Safaricom found it lucrative on day one. 

Imagine what Meta's products would look like if it had to serve every village in Africa under the same terms it serves Manhattan. 

Turns out, even African companies sometimes get away with what they can. 

And other times, they work with governments to make a good impact.

Three cases on the continent make the point.

1. Kenya and M-Pesa. 

M-Pesa was launched on March 6, 2007, by Safaricom with seed funding from the UK's DFID. 

The Central Bank of Kenya had no regulatory framework for mobile money at the time. 

After multiple product demos, the CBK issued a letter of no objection, and M-Pesa went live ten days later. 

For the next two years, the Kenyan Bankers Association lobbied for the CBK to rescind approval. The CBK held the line. 

The formal regulatory framework only came in 2011, four years after launch. 

Today: 40 million monthly active users in Kenya, more than 11 billion transactions a year, available in seven countries. 

Ghana, which required mobile operators to partner with banks until 2015, lost roughly seven years of catch-up. 

Even for governments, speed is an advantage.

2. Rwanda and Zipline. 

Rwanda and Zipline, a US drone company, began a partnership in 2016. 

It was the world's first national drone delivery service. And it dropped blood delivery times from four hours to fifteen minutes. 

In-hospital maternal mortality reportedly dropped by 88%. 

By December 2022, Zipline became Rwanda's national drone service provider for things outside of health. 

In February 2026, the partnership expanded under a $150 million pay-for-performance award from the US State Department. 

Zipline’s innovation solves a national problem, and the Rwandan government provides it with a mandate of problems to fix.

3. Nigeria and the CBN. 

The Bank Verification Number launched on February 14, 2014. 

It was a $50 million biometric project built by the CBN and Bankers' Committee with German firm Dermalog. 

Today, it has 67.8 million enrolments and serves as the identity layer beneath every fintech in the country. 

NIBSS Instant Payment, the rail every transfer in Nigeria runs on, processed close to 11 billion transactions in 2024, up from 5 billion in 2022. 

Nigeria rolled out nationwide real-time payments in 2011, before the United States or India. 

The entire Nigerian fintech wave (Flutterwave, Paystack, Kuda, Opay, Moniepoint) is riding the rails the state built. 

Across the world, companies are getting bigger than countries on the balance sheet. The balance sheet is not the only ledger. Impact is also one.

And team-ups between companies and governments are proving to be one way of assuring both balance sheets are in the green.

The countries that have done this best (Singapore, Estonia, increasingly the UAE and Rwanda) treat the relationship as ongoing mutual education. 

And the best companies (Safaricom, Zipline, Aadhaar's architects) treat governments as partners rather than obstacles. This is not to say that it’s always perfect, but it’s bearing fruit.

What are the best examples you’ve seen of companies and countries teaming up? 

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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