04 February 2021

Mobile money, affectionately known as MoMo to many, has been a staple of the east African economy for years. After more than a decade since its emergence, the service has evolved as the formal financial service of choice for many underserved groups in developing countries.

Pre-pandemic days, the rapid adoption and widespread use in this part of Africa wasn’t necessarily to do with convenience, but on its necessity, since it bridges gaps for the “unbanked” population that the existing banking sector doesn’t.

04 February 2021

I remember walking through the halls of GITEX in Dubai and AfricaCom in Cape Town last year and not being able to move for talk about 5G. Whether it was infrastructure, monetisation, masts or who would “get there first”, the pure hyperbole associated with next-generation technology was, arguably, becoming tiresome. It almost reached the stage where I took off my lanyard so that I couldn’t be easily identified as a member of the press fraternity.It’s a bit like Brexit in the UK. It was a staple news diet for a few years and then it was like it never happened.

Then, at the turn of 2020 rumours started that someone ate a bat purchased from a wet market in Wuhan, China - and the world was suddenly bracing itself for a pandemic not seen in a very long time. While we still don’t know for sure how the novel coronavirus and Covid-19 came into being, what we do know is that the pandemic has caused a level of devastation that we weren’t ready for.