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Today, I’m talking about how tech evolves by building on older technologies.
Read to the end, and let me know what you think.
But before we get into it, here’s a question for you…
How can Africa's Diaspora Build Back Home?
Africa's diaspora has been one of the continent's largest sources of external capital.
In 2024, remittances to the continent crossed $95 billion.
Remittances are at record highs, but the bigger story is what comes next: diaspora investing, building, and moving back.
That's what we’re talking about in May at Tech Safari.
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There’s a payment system in Nigeria that processed roughly $700 billion (₦1.07 quadrillion) last year.
Over 20,000 transactions flow through it every minute.
That’s 29 million transactions a day, 900 million a month, and 10.5 billion a year. And each one gets processed in 30 seconds.
It’s called NIBSS Instant Payment, or NIP for short.
It’s the sixth-largest real-time payment system on earth.
And Nigerian fintech’s reputation for instant transfers is built on it.
At the end of 2022, the value of NIP transfers made that year was ₦387 trillion. By 2025, it had grown to ₦1.07 quadrillion. Sources: The Paystack Blog, NIBSS
Yet, it barely makes global headlines. And that’s the point.
When infrastructure works, it often disappears.
It’s just like how you don’t think about the road when the car is moving.
In this edition, we’ll be talking about the roads laid in African tech long before the space was a thing.
Because when Africa’s tech story is being told, all we see are the layers near the surface.
But there’s a world of infrastructure underneath.
And when we trace their origin, they’re not being built by startups. They’re built by central banks, institutions, and sometimes, governments.
This chain of technological ancestry is almost a necessity.
To understand why, we have to go back to the 1970s.
Before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley
The internet wasn’t invented in a garage.
In 1969, the US Department of Defense funded a four-node computer network called ARPANET, the immediate ancestor of today’s Internet.
This is what the first internet message processor looked like. It was the first node of what eventually became the Internet. Source: JSTOR
But even then, the idea behind it wasn’t “build the internet.”
It was “let a few researchers collaborate and share computing power.”
Over the next twenty years, government agencies built the key protocols.
TCP/IP, the language computers use to talk to each other, was developed at DARPA and became mandatory for military networks in 1983.
The National Science Foundation funded the internet’s physical backbone from 1984 to 1994, then privatized it.
NSF also funded the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, which became the consumer internet.
Here’s a view of the first graphical internet browser, which was created by Eric Brin and Marc Andreesen while they worked at the National Science Foundation. Source: WIRED
Then the government stepped back, and in came the private companies.
Companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and Facebook built trillion-dollar businesses on top of these rails.
But they didn’t lay them.
And that speaks the cardinal truth about infrastructure: the people who capture most of its value are rarely its creators.
TCP/IP doesn’t have shareholders. ARPANET didn’t IPO. And the NSF was a line item in a government budget.
Yet, all the value flowed to whoever was smart enough to build on top.
While the government created TCP/IP in 1983, it wasn’t until Cisco introduced the AGS router in 1986 that it became possible for ISPs like AOL and Earthlink to emerge, using that infrastructure to provide businesses and households with internet access. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
That same pattern is unfolding across Africa right now.
The difference is, instead of military spending and federal research agencies, it’s central banks and multilateral organisations doing the building.
The first stacks get built, and that makes everything else possible.
Think of what it takes to make a bank transfer possible via an app in Africa.
To even get started, you need internet access, then a phone, then a form of digital identity, then a wallet or bank account, then the code that moves value around.
It’s a series of stacks all the way down.
So, let’s look at the stack tech in Africa is built on. Starting with…
Counting people
You can’t have a digital economy if you can’t verify people’s identities.
Every time you sign up to use a fintech app, open a bank account, or take out a loan, someone has to confirm you’re real.
Before digital identity systems, the process was slow, paper-based, and easily faked.
In 2014, Nigeria’s Central Bank and the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System created the Bank Verification Number (BVN).
It’s a unique identifier for every person in Nigeria’s banking system. And the government mandated citizens to sign up for it.
By 2015, 12 million people had signed up. Today, it’s nearly 70 million people.
Without the BVN, the Nigerian fintech boom wouldn’t have happened.
Fintech’s core promise is that most banking can be done without showing up in person.
It’s hard to make good on that promise without knowing who’s who.
So, it’s no surprise that nearly all fintechs today have identity verification as a core part of their product.
Paystack wouldn’t be able to onboard 400,000 merchants. And Moniepoint wouldn’t be able to verify its agent network.
In 2025, Nigeria’s CBN mandated that all POS agents verify their addresses. While BVNs are one way of knowing who’s who, other data points like addresses help them know where’s who. Source: TechCrunch
Ghana launched its Ghana Card in 2003, a biometric national ID tied to the tax system, banking, and SIM registration.
Kenya built eCitizen, a portal that hosts 16,000+ government services and is now integrated with mobile money.
Rwanda created its first digital ID system in 2008. By 2013, it was issuing land titles digitally.
Today, it’s gone much further with e-governance portals and drone-delivery licensing systems, all built on reliable identity infrastructure.
Rwanda’s Smart Card comes with a barcode that can be scanned to retrieve a person’s details. Source: Rwandan Inspirer
Notice something interesting about all these pieces of infrastructure?
Most of them were built between 2008 and 2015, just before Africa’s tech boom happened.
That’s not a coincidence.
Just as the creation of TCP/IP led to Cisco’s AGS router and the Mosaic browser led to the invention of Netscape, innovation in Africa is often built on simpler, more foundational infrastructure like the NIP.
And these products, many in fintech, in turn become infrastructure for other products.
Looking at this, one could argue that for Africa, everything built in certain sectors now serves as infrastructure for what comes after:
Flutterwave and Paystack were built on internet banking primitives.
Even PAPSS, the Pan-African Payment Settlement System, is built on the individual payment switches run by central banks across Africa.
It’s stacks and stacks all the way up.
There’s just one big difference between Africa’s trajectory and Silicon Valley.
Some sectors are missing the right stacks
When Amazon started in 1993, all they had was a website and a warehouse.
Their deliveries were handled by the US Postal Service, a public postal system built 70 years before they launched.
Jeff Bezos credited this existing infrastructure for Amazon’s fast growth.
Using the US Postal Service, Amazon was able to ship books that would’ve cost it $4 - $5 per book via FedEx or UPS for $2. In those early days, Amazon’s entire physical distribution infrastructure was the USPS. Source: Quartz
In 2009, when Jumia launched, there was no postal service for them to rely on.
In addition to building the supply networks, warehouses, and offices, they had to import delivery bikes, train drivers, and teach people how to order online.
This adds cost, and cost slows growth.
It takes a lot to scale an online bookstore into the world’s biggest internet retailer.
But looking at Jumia vs Amazon, having that infrastructure sure helped.
Now, imagine what would have been possible if there had been a functional nationwide postal service for Jumia to rely on.
Despite being public for over six years, Jumia is still trying hard to crack profitability and has had to pull out of some African countries. Source: Rest of World
The truth is, outside fintech, many sectors are missing the right foundations to build a stack.
In logistics, roads across Africa are broken, and most places don’t have formal addresses.
In banking, most people don’t have a credit score.
And in healthcare, most Africans don’t have health insurance or digital health records.
These basic problems cost a lot of money and time to fix. So they’re best done through organizations that don’t need profits in the short term, like governments.
But, as we’ve seen, the value of these pieces of infrastructure is far more than any single entity could capture.
Here’s where it all adds up
African tech is still super early.
If we’re defining timelines by when we started to have “startups”, it’s less than 20 years old.
And if we line this up with the growth of other ecosystems, like Silicon Valley, we could argue that this is the 1980s for Africa.
The critical infrastructure that’ll define what the continent grows into is still being built.
And the most foundational ones aren’t coming from companies, but institutions.
The good thing is, in certain sectors, institutions are starting to use technology to build the foundations faster.
This week’s feature image. Image Credit: Ben Clinton Ibe/Tech Safari
For instance, Nigeria’s postal service wants to make it possible to send a parcel through your phone.
And Kenya’s MPost launched a product that lets Kenyans use their phone number as a P.O box.
These might seem small, but they’re pieces of infrastructure that make it a little easier and faster to build in Africa.
What other pieces of infrastructure do you think Africa’s digital economy is missing?
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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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