TechCabal

French aerospace company Thales Alenia Space and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) have been selected to build Nigeria’s next communications satellites, as the government moves to expand broadband capacity and replace its ageing NIGCOMSAT-1R.

There is a particular kind of distance between Wall Street and Lebowakgomo, a township in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. One is synonymous with global finance, enormous transactions and institutions moving billions of dollars across markets. The other is where Grace Legodi grew up in a family shaped by the horrors of apartheid, an enforced system of racial segregation, where her parents, a teacher and a social worker, placed an unusually high premium on education.

Rodgers Mwijukye and Ronald Asiimwe have known each other long enough to disagree without making much of it. They met in high school in Uganda in 2015, attended the same university, and took degrees that pointed towards very different careers. Mwijukye studied water and irrigation engineering; Asiimwe studied computer science. Mwijukye imagined postgraduate study, perhaps a PhD and a career in academia or public service. Asiimwe was the software guy, happiest behind a computer.

Nomba, a Nigerian fintech, and Synafare, an asset financing company focused on the renewable energy sector, have announced a ₦2 billion ($1.4 million) lending commitment to finance solar energy systems for small and medium-sized businesses in Nigeria. The companies said the capital will be deployed over 24 months to support about 300 SMEs in acquiring solar panels, inverters, and batteries.

OGBOMOSO, NIGERIA | 21 AUGUST 2026 SQI College of ICT has completed the deployment of new high-performance, private AI and server infrastructure, giving the institution greater control over the computing environment used for teaching, research, software deployment and institutional operations.

Nigerian digital lending has spent the last few years living across channels: USSD for feature phone users, WhatsApp for casual borrowers, web portals for the more deliberate applicants, and agent networks for everyone the internet hasn’t quite reached. Credit Direct, one of the older players in that space with close to two decades of lending history, has now added its personal loan product to its mobile app, as well.

Nigerian digital lending has spent the last few years living across channels: USSD for feature phone users, WhatsApp for casual borrowers, web portals for the more deliberate applicants, and agent networks for everyone the internet hasn’t quite reached. Credit Direct, one of the older players in that space with close to two decades of lending history, has now added its personal loan product to its mobile app, as well.

OPEYEMI KAREEM, in this feature, tells the story of how former British Army officer Wayne Hennessy-Barrett arrived in Kenya with little experience in finance and a simple question: what do small traders need to keep their businesses moving? Thirteen years later, that question has helped build 4G Capital into a lender that has disbursed more than $1bn in loans.

Honestly, these choices were driven for the same objectives; how we connect different choices and channels to achieve user satisfaction. If somebody is holding a balance and can’t easily use it, everything else we build is decoration. Mesh is distribution, it puts the wallet inside hundreds of platforms people are already in. The partner programme is the merchant side, which is what decides whether a payment is possible at all, not just whether it is fast.

Honestly, these choices were driven for the same objectives; how we connect different choices and channels to achieve user satisfaction. If somebody is holding a balance and can’t easily use it, everything else we build is decoration. Mesh is distribution, it puts the wallet inside hundreds of platforms people are already in. The partner programme is the merchant side, which is what decides whether a payment is possible at all, not just whether it is fast.