Hey, Sheriff here 👋

In 2024, every VC on the continent combined put about $2 billion into African startups.

That same year, the diaspora sent home $100 billion.

The single biggest stream of money into Africa isn't venture capital. It's the Africans who left.

Today's issue is about how tech really works here, and rule one is that it runs on income, not hype. And nobody moves more income than the diaspora.

Now a growing number of them want to move themselves; they want to come back to the continent. That's who we built The Big Move for.

Next Friday, we’ll launch The Big Move as a platform for the diaspora to find pathways to move and contribute their skills to the continent.

If you want to join thousands of professionals in the African diaspora who want to have an impact back home, you should sign up.

Now, let’s get into today’s edition.

Since then, I've learned a lot.

And I've shared a lot of my learnings with you. All 60,000 of you.

Today, I want to dive into some of the most insightful frameworks (your words, not mine!) that I've developed over the years.

Welcome to…

Tech Safari's Theory of Everything

There's an apocryphal saying in physics, often attributed to Ernest Rutherford, the man who figured out the structure of atoms.

He said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

Now, I'm no physicist. But I have been collecting stamps. Not real ones. Small, unique pieces of evidence for what works in African tech markets.

These stamps don't explain everything. But they explain a lot.

In physics, there's a quest for something called the Unified Theory of Everything. One theory that unites all the other theories and explains reality in a single breath.

Different scientists have taken a swing at it. The search is still on. Maybe no such thing exists. But the quest has been worth it, because so much brainpower has been poured into it.

I believe most thought leadership in African tech is a quest to do one thing: to explain how tech really works across the continent.

But just as physicists have struggled to find their one theory, so have the thought leaders. And we plead guilty too.

So we've decided to run through all our theories of "success" in African tech. That, to us, is as close as we can get to a unified theory.

We're starting with…

Every successful African company has been a jobs company in disguise.

Not in the traditional sense of hiring thousands of staff. In the sense that they put money in people's pockets.

Here's why that matters. The internet doesn't scale with eyeballs here. It scales with income.

And income is scarce. The average Nigerian lives on $807 a year. The average Egyptian, $3,339. That's four times more to spend. 

Nigerian households spend 59% of their income on food, the highest share in the world.

So a bread delivery startup that raises $10 million in Cairo and gets laughed out of the room in Lagos. Same idea. Different wallets.

This leaves founders with two options. Extract value, or create earners. You can't extract from poverty. So the winners chose to create earners.

Moniepoint handed shopkeepers POS machines and turned them into mini-bankers. It now processes $20 billion a month. 

Paystack turned 200,000 small businesses into online sellers, and Stripe bought it. 

Andela trained 6,000 developers and put them on global payrolls. 

Moove financed cars for 45,000 drivers and tied repayments to their earnings.

The common thread isn't "how will people pay me?" It's "how will people earn more by using me?"

Call it Return-on-Income. Grow your customers' income, and you grow your own market.

Tech follows Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Different products win at different stages of a country's growth.

Picture Maslow's pyramid, but for technology. 

At the base sits the survival stuff: power, payments, logistics, and internet. 

At the top sits the futuristic stuff: AI, biotech, space, quantum computing.

Africa sits at the bottom. Not by choice, but by need. 

While Tesla builds self-driving cars, Autochek helps people buy used ones on credit. 

While Silicon Valley teaches robots to do backflips, M-PESA helps people send money without a bank account.

That's because tech is built on other tech. And here, the foundation is thin. 

It's hard to run logistics on broken roads. It's hard to run e-commerce when people don't have addresses. Africa contributes just 0.3% of the world's tech exports. Strip out telco and mobile apps, and there isn't much "tech" left.

But sitting at the bottom has one quiet advantage. You get to watch the markets ahead of you and copy what worked.

That's what China did in the 1990s. Copy, then improve. 

The trick is copying the right teacher. Not Silicon Valley, but markets that climbed the same pyramid we're on: India, Southeast Asia, Brazil. Gokada, one of Africa's first bike-hailing startups, was almost a clone of Bangladesh's Pathao.

The pyramid is a cheat sheet. It tells you what to build, and when.

The startup-and-VC story is just the tip of the iceberg. The real mass of African tech sits below the surface, and it rarely features a startup at all.

Take Baba Ijebu. In the 1960s, a bored salesman named Kessington Adebutu started a lottery business run on paper and cash. 

He grew it with "agents," people who lived in communities and took bets on his behalf for a small cut. 

Forty years before anyone said "agent banking," he had already built it. 

Today, his network runs 16,000 agents turning over billions of naira a month. OPay and Moniepoint borrowed the same model and built unicorns.

Or take the women writing erotica in Northern Nigeria. 

After censors burned their books, the readership simply went underground, onto WhatsApp. They used free chapters to build an audience, and cliffhangers to hold it. Then a paywall right at the climax. 

One writer, Oum Hairan, charges ₦300 (25 cents) for the regular group and ₦1,500 ($1.1) for the VIP one. No publisher. No printer. Out of reach of the censors.

Or take Abu, who runs a stall in Abuja. 

He charges phones for people who get four hours of power a day, and sells them pirated movies for ₦100 (10 cents) each. 

He had built Blockbuster from scratch, without ever hearing the name.

This is the equivalent of quantum physics of African tech. Not in complexity, but in “weirdness”.

The rules you thought you knew stop applying. 

To see it, you have to lose the scaffold of an app, an API, a clean interface. Sometimes a corner stall will do.

Africa's opportunity isn't Big-Four-or-nothing. The fastest growth is hiding in the cities and countries nobody puts in headlines.

Start with cities. In 2021, students in Ibadan couldn't get food delivered to their dorms. 

So Heyfood launched to serve them, and skipped Lagos entirely. 

Ibadan is 41% cheaper than Lagos, less crowded with competitors, and home to 4 million people. 

Heyfood became the city's go-to app within a year, then spread to Benin, Abuja, Abeokuta, and Port Harcourt.

Yet 88% of Nigerian startups still cluster in Lagos, 60% of South African ones cluster in Cape Town, and 90% of Tanzanian startups are in Dar es Salaam. 

That's a lot of overlooked ground.

The same holds for whole countries. 

The Big Four (Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa) take more than 75% of all VC funding.

But the growth has moved on to other countries. 

Mobile money transactions in Kenya recently grew at their slowest pace in 16 years. In Zambia, they jumped more than 50%.

pawaPay saw this early and bet on the smaller markets. 

It now connects every mobile wallet in Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, runs in 18 countries, and crossed a billion transactions faster than almost anyone.

The next big market is rarely the headline one.

Africa's most successful product isn't a fintech app. It's religion. And the way it's built holds a lesson for every founder.

The scale is hard to picture. 

The Redeemed Christian Church of God has 9 million worshippers and 40,000 branches across 190 countries. 

Its camp outside Lagos is the size of a small city, with its own banks, supermarkets, and a 25-megawatt power plant. Its main auditorium seats a million people. 

Across the continent, 95% of people believe in a deity.

In product terms, religion is unbeatable. It's 10,000 years old. 

It has billions of users. And it keeps them active daily and weekly, through prayers, sermons, and scripture.

But the part founders should study is the business model. The biggest churches aren't just churches. 

They own schools, universities, hospitals, banks, and TV networks. Living Faith owns Covenant University. 

Christ Embassy owns a bank and built KingsChat, a messaging app with 14 million users. 

The Adventist college that became Babcock University produced the founders of Paystack.

The playbook is simple. Win people with community. Then build an ecosystem around them. 

Their kids attend your school. They bank with you. They watch your channel at night. That's a kind of loyalty most startups can only dream of.

What religion sells underneath it all is hope. Economists call it utility, but utility is usually finite. 

Coffee gives you energy, but only to a point. Water kills your thirst, but too much of it is bad. 

Religion gives you the belief that something better is coming, and that belief knows no bounds.

 On a continent that runs on hope, nothing sells harder.

Probably not. The physicists never found their single equation either. But the search handed them most of what we know.

Our stamps work the same way. The Theory of Jobs explains who pays. 

The Pyramid explains what to build. The Iceberg explains where to look. 

The Tier-Two Theory explains where to go. And Heaven as a Service explains how to keep people once you have them.

No single one explains African tech. Put together, they get us close.

That's our theory of everything. For now.

Which framework did you find most useful? And which stamp are we still missing?

Tell me 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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