Hey, Sheriff here 👋
Today, I’m talking about an industry that’s nearly 4,000 years old.
It’s a core need for most people and businesses.
And for all intents and purposes, Africa might be the one place where it’s most needed.
Yet, this industry is almost nonexistent in many parts of Africa.
But before we dive in, I have something to share.
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Tech across Africa is built on a handful of strange experiments that worked.
Over the last 16 years, founders have tried to solve Africa’s hardest problems using every trick in the book.
The ones that stuck rarely fit the global startup textbook.
For instance, embedded finance was bent to fix vehicle and device ownership for gig workers.
That gave us Moove, Watu, and Asaak, lending against a driver's behavior and future earnings instead of an official credit score they didn’t have.
Pharmacies and telehealth got turned into last-mile healthcare, reaching people that hospitals never would.
Think about the kinds of questions that must have birthed these ideas.
What if we used pharmacies as diagnostic and health insurance sales centres?
What if we taught young people how to write code and connected them to global companies?
What if we gave bikes to young men on credit and let them pay it off by picking up customers we give them?
Some of Africa’s most impactful companies have come out of questions like these. This is Asaak, a mobility fintech in Uganda. Image Source: Techpoint
Now someone is pointing one of Africa’s proven tools at one of its biggest problems.
The tool is agency banking. The market is insurance. And the man holding the hammer has done this before.
But we talk about the hammer and the nail, let’s talk about…
The eleventh visit
In 2011, shortly after my uncle died, his wife walked into the headquarters of one of Nigeria's biggest insurance firms.
The plan was simple. Redeem her husband's life insurance, ease the family's finances, and move on.
That visit was the first of many. Over the next year, she went back 11 times. A document here. Some paperwork there. Each one declared necessary before the firm would pay out a claim she rightfully owned.
After the 11th visit, she gave up.
She walked away with no payout and a deep distrust of the word "insurance." Today, she carries none. Not for her health, not for her car, not for her life.
You can hardly call her an outlier. Across Nigeria, there are millions like her.
A continent with no backup plan
In September 2024, a disaster hit Maiduguri, a city in northeast Nigeria.
A dam upstream gave way and released a flood that swallowed thousands of homes.
By the end of the week, hundreds were dead, 400,000 people were homeless, and acres of farmland were gone.
The deeper tragedy? Almost none of them were insured. Not their lives, homes, nor farms.
This was Maiduguri after the disastrous flood of 2024. No, the body of water parting the street is not a river. Image Source: African Cities Research Consortium.
For those families, the only safety net was government aid and whatever charity showed up. It is a familiar story across Africa, where people are left to absorb the full force of a bad day on their own.
The numbers back the story up:
Insurance is worth about 3% of Africa's GDP, less than half the global average of 7%.
A handful of countries hold almost the entire market. Nine countries capture 93% of the continent's premiums, and South Africa alone is roughly 68% of it.
Strip out South Africa, and penetration across the rest of Africa collapses to around 1%.
Here’s what insurance penetration looks like across most of Africa. Image Source: Consultancy Africa.
Look at those numbers long enough, and you hit a conundrum.
The odds of something going wrong in Africa are high.
In Nigeria, road crashes are the third-leading cause of death, and the WHO counted 36,722 road deaths in a single year, fourth-most in the world.
When illness strikes, nearly 75% of health spending comes straight out of people's pockets. Life expectancy sits at 54 years.
High risk should mean high demand for protection. It doesn't.
The strange part is that financial services come in three parts: banking, investments, and insurance.
For a large slice of Africans, the first two are mostly solved.
You can send money from your phone, pay across borders, and buy into a stock market with as little as $10.
But insurance, the one tool built for exactly these moments of chaos that’s everyday life for many Africans, is barely used.
Nigeria’s insurance market is, in fact, growing. However, this is mostly driven by corporate activity. Image Source: Intelpoint
The little that exists mostly serves big companies, buying cover for staff as an employee benefit. The market is built for corporations, and everyone else is on their own.
But this serial founder sees things differently
Sim Shagaya is an OG of Nigeria's tech scene.
He built Konga, the e-commerce platform that once went toe to toe with Jumia.
He built uLesson to make grade-school learning better.
Sim Shagaya is often regarded as one of the earliest founders in Nigeria’s startup scene. He has an engineering degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Image Source: Weetracker
Then he started Miva Open University, an online school that crossed 20,000 students less than three years after launching with 500, and is aiming for 100,000 by 2027.
Shagaya keeps picking problems that are uniquely Nigerian and uncomfortably large. His newest one sits in one of the most underserved markets in the country: insurance.
Enter Myka.
Myka is a digital insurance broker.
It runs on one core belief: Nigeria's empty insurance market isn't a demand problem. It's a trust and distribution problem.
The desire for protection is there. What's missing is a clean way to reach people who have never been sold structured protection in their lives.
Today, insurance is abstract, hard to understand, and physically far from the people who need it most. There is no simple, affordable way to pay a premium. And making a claim is worse.
How much worse? Until last year, there was no hard deadline forcing an insurer to pay you.
Claims could drag for months, sometimes longer, exactly like my aunt's 11 visits.
Here’s what companies and insurance sellers have identified as the core problems with selling insurance products in Nigeria. Source: Techpoint
Nigeria's new insurance reform act finally set a rule: every claim must be settled within 60 days, with penalties for delay.
You can tell how broken a system was by the law it takes to fix it.
Myka works in three parts.
One, it is an aggregator.
It plugs into 17 underwriters, including AIICO, Leadway, Coronation, Tangerine, and Cornerstone.
You compare and buy policies across all of them in one place, then get your policy document on WhatsApp. There’s no need for an office visit or paperwork.
Two, it is a distribution network.
Myka recruits intermediaries who refer buyers at the exact point of sale.
Picture a pharmacy selling you health cover.
A car dealer offering motor insurance as you sign for the car.
A gadget seller adding device protection at checkout. It’s the agency banking model, simply applied to something other than banking.
Three, it fixes the claims pain.
Myka layers in strong identity checks, AI tools, and a network of vetted repair shops for cars and gadgets.
Crack your phone screen, report it, walk into an approved repairer, and get it fixed without paying up front.
The friction that made people give up is the thing Myka is engineering away.
The company already raised a pre-seed round led by Ventures Platform, TLcom, and a host of angel investors.
Myka is Sim Shagaya’s fourth venture, and it’s off to a well-funded start. Source: TechCabal
It is also already testing inside the regulator's sandbox.
If the model feels unusual, that's the point. Across Africa, the unusual is often what works.
The man with a (good) hammer
There's an old line: to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It usually has a negative connotation, implying that you keep forcing the same tool onto problems it doesn't fit.
But every so often, someone is holding a genuinely good hammer, and the thing in front of them really is a nail.
Agency banking is that hammer. Here is why it fits insurance so well.
It runs on community. Moniepoint didn't win Nigeria with a slick app. It won with more than 400,000 field agents sitting inside markets and street corners, close enough that merchants trusted them.
In a country where trust is built face-to-face, proximity beats polish. Myka is wiring that same human layer into how insurance gets sold.
It rebuilds trust at the moment trust broke. People stopped believing in insurance because claims went unpaid.
Myka verifies claims fast and routes them through its own repair network, so the payout becomes a fixed phone or a fixed car instead of a phone number that never picks up.
It builds the world that comes after the claim. Repair shops. Vetted vendors. The boring infrastructure that decides whether a promise on paper becomes help in real life.
Put together, Myka takes the parts that made agency banking win and re-points them at insurance. Same hammer, new nail.
Whether it lands is the open question. Distribution is hard, trust is harder, and Nigeria has humbled smarter plans.
But if any wedge can crack a market where 99 out of 100 people own nothing, it might be the one that already worked for another big problem.
Do you think Myka's model will finally fix insurance across Nigeria?
→ Tell me here.
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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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