Africa’s Telco API Playbook

Building in Africa can feel like shipping with the road changing under your feet. One month you’re sprinting on product, the next you’re stalled by telco fragmentation, compliance paperwork, and “go talk to another office” delays. That’s why we brought on Michael Kemadi (MK), Head of Developer Community at Africa’s Talking, to get specific about what it takes to scale real infrastructure for customer engagement across the continent.

We unpack how Africa’s Talking works as a CPaaS platform that integrates with 80+ telecom operators and exposes SMS, voice, USSD, OTP, and KYC capabilities through developer-friendly APIs. MK explains why most businesses can’t realistically buy “pipes” from each telco, how regulation and licensing shape who gets access, and why reliability at scale changes everything for banks, governments, hospitals, and fast-growing startups. We also get into the impact stories that rarely make headlines, from maternal health messaging to logistics and drone delivery workflows.

Then we zoom out to the operating system behind the product: an engineering-first culture built on open source SDKs, free learning resources, and hackathons that function as a long-term education pipeline. We talk Marketplace 2.0, recurring revenue for developers, AI and Gemini experiments that revive voice as an interface, and the hard questions around data sovereignty, cloud dependency, and who benefits when data gets monetized.

If you care about African tech ecosystems, telecom infrastructure, developer communities, and practical strategies for scaling across 23 countries, hit play, then subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review with your biggest challenge building for African markets.

Transcript

Collaboration And Learning From Failure

SPEAKER_06 0:03

And within Africa, what I see personally is a collaborative space where we can create value across multiple different sectors and across multiple different countries. And what does that require? It requires each individual to play their part. And more so than that is also for us to be able to collaborate to make sure that we are maximizing the value that exists in the market.

SPEAKER_07 0:25

A lot of big founders here and a lot of developers here can attest that sometimes we build MVPs for even four months, six months, only to put it in the market and realize it's not going to work. People don't like it, it can't do anything. And then you have to build again for six months before you know it is one year. The best gift you can believe by anybody is a chance.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Exactly. A child that does not cry will die in the career.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

There are too many problems in the world for us not to be the solutions to them. There are too many of us pointing fingers, looking for other people to solve the things that we know innately. We have a piece of the puzzle for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Think about the failures you've had in your life. Don't you learn more from failure than you do from success? I have.

SPEAKER_03 1:15

Absolutely. That's one of the biggest lessons.

Welcome And First Impressions Of Joburg

SPEAKER_09 1:21

Morning, gents. Morning. Welcome to the Angle Podcast. Nice. How are you guys doing this morning? Good, good. A bit cold, but hey. Ah. We survived.

SPEAKER_12 1:32

Yeah? We haven't slept. You never slept.

SPEAKER_09 1:37

That explains it.

SPEAKER_12 1:38

Hey, that I have too much energy.

SPEAKER_09 1:42

It's like you had two cups of energy drinking and coffee. And husband, how's South Africa been for you so far? You want me to start?

SPEAKER_11 1:50

I know South Africa is uh, but you don't have a marketer, so uh but South Africa is perfect, yeah, but also imperfect. It's like a beautiful, no one who is beautiful or handsome.

SPEAKER_12 2:01

Yeah, there's always the like this they are they are beautiful or they're handsome, but there's something. God never gives you the perfect guy or the perfect girl. I'm like South Africa.

SPEAKER_05 2:12

There's energy, there's energy.

SPEAKER_11 2:15

What's this something that you saw in this country? No, no, uh it's what I see and also what I read. So now I'm here to reconcile what I read and what I saw. And so far, no, it's I've been to the nice neighborhoods only. So, but I think South Africa is doing it's on a good journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good journey. No, nice, Michael.

SPEAKER_03 2:36

For you, how is it? I think it's a bit modest. You know, this this this one person I always say that every city in Africa should give him a marketing game because before we leave Nairobi to anywhere, yeah, it tells us you cannot believe what you'll find in Jobag.

SPEAKER_10 2:54

Like I like not in Jobak, or if it's Cape Town, you cannot actually understand the energy for the citizenship, the energy, yes, people give it the cats.

What Africa’s Talking Actually Does

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Oh my friend, by the time you are leaving, you're like, I want to be in Joba, I want to be in Cape Town, and it's it's the same for every city, and I think he's one believer who says that he he he will change Africa in his lifetime, yeah. But today is a bit modest because I'm always like, dude, you promise too much, yeah. Too much marketing. Where is it by say about market? What do you expect? So I reconcile, but for me, jobag has been really like as expected, okay, and it actually reconciles the story of Africa, like from the point of where we can be, what is possible and what needs to be done. Yes. And I'm a bit realistic in every in every situation where I'm like the the the country is as good as its people, the city is as good as its people, and and what I've experienced here so far, there's a lot of work that is needed to reconcile that the people and the city and the culture. Because you you can't actually get there with a section of people. Yeah, you need everyone to be on the same board to be able to achieve it. So that's my feeling, and uh, and and in the line of work that I do, which we'll talk about, I think there is so much work that needed to happen in in South Africa at large to make sure we get there fast. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 4:20

So uh why don't you guys tell us why you're here, why you're in Joven? What you what are you up to? Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 4:26

Oh, wonderful.

SPEAKER_11 4:27

You wanna go first? Yeah, so let me first introduce what I do. So, my I'm I'm working as a marketing and partnership lead at Africa Stocking. Africa Stocking is a communication platform as a service. Uh, we basically integrate 80 or so telcos in Africa, and most likely in a couple of years, we may end up being also an infrastructure provider, but still on the telco slash cloud area. So, one of the offices we have is in Jobag, and we are here to just in our pipeline uh for the products we sell, we work with developers, software developers, startups, SMEs. I help them communicate through the various channels that come through the telco. So in uh South Africa, we haven't really done a huge developer engagement since we started. So this is one of the key things. But also we have a partnership with Google where they're targeting at least to have activations in three cities in Africa Nairobi, Jobag, and Lagos. So this is a Jobag session of that partnership where we introduce developers to building with AI, building with uh Gemini, and also building with Africa stocking. So we see that voice is probably the biggest product in our portfolio that will deliver some of the capabilities of AI to the contact center and to companies.

SPEAKER_05 5:53

I I gotta be honest, I I mean I checked you guys out obviously before we before we uh say the thing, you know, before you are very crazy. I don't entirely understand Africa Stocking, like in terms of in terms of your size of what you do and how you do it. To be honest, I don't maybe just unpack a little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_11 6:07

Yes. So Africa Stocking is really an engineering company because most of the value we create is by doing in technical integrations to the telco. So we create an interface that ordinary businesses can use to interact with the resources from the telco. So the resources of the telco can be SMS, can be voice, uh, USSD short codes, KYC, sim swap. So the telco has a lot of resources that based on their models, they release through partners' channels or you know. So Africa Salking is this layer that sits on top of the telco infrastructure and then exposes what the telco has for businesses to use. So we end up being like salespeople for the telco, but we are using a technical channel. We we our biggest customer will start being a developer or a technical team that wants to automate their contact center, and it has to be a scale because the to integrate to the telco, you're talking about millions of sessions a day. So if you're a sm if you're a small business, it may not make sense for you to go to the telco directly. You look for an Africa stocking or other hundreds of such platforms.

SPEAKER_09 7:27

So it's the the business is mainly geared toward content, contact centers, it's mainly geared towards customer engagement.

SPEAKER_11 7:36

Okay. But now for many companies, that's simplified as a contact center. But for others, it's when you do your OTP, when you're doing your banking, the SMS that confirms your your code, when you're topping up your electricity, when you're running um a channel for a government institution, you want to maybe register or you want to check your status or something. All these channels that are open to the public are through the telco. We support that.

SPEAKER_09 8:05

Okay. Now excuse the ignorance. Yes. But if I'm a contact center, why go to you? Why can't I just go to the telco directly? Good, good question.

SPEAKER_11 8:13

Because we will integrate to so the way the telcos work, it's quite interesting. Is that each telco does not share its traffic with the other telco?

SPEAKER_08 8:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_11 8:24

So when you make a call, there are a lot of things that are assumed. Basically, for example, I could call you, but you're on a different network.

SPEAKER_08 8:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 8:33

But I don't notice. But when they are selling their inventory, they don't mix their inventory. So there needs to be somebody who takes all the pipes and orchestrates them such that it's like one channel to a business. Otherwise, the business will have to go to each telco to get a pipe dedicated for each traffic. And the problem with that is the cost of, first of all, the human resource cost, you need some engineers to get that infrastructure running. But also the cost of inventory. The telco will be like, I'll only listen to you if you're buying 10 million messages. Are you buying 10 million messages? No. But company like Africa's talking will buy the 10 million messages and then distribute it to 10,000 customers.

SPEAKER_05 9:15

And the telcos are okay with that. They don't okay with you, you know.

SPEAKER_11 9:19

Yes. So ideally, what are now you're you get unregulated under a regulator license. Okay. Ideally, the telco would never even give us that integration.

SPEAKER_05 9:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_11 9:28

Because they are like, we are at risk. Or, you know. So what happens is that you first have to get a license from the government that you know signals the telcos, you can work with these guys. And then if there's an issue, the regulator will handle both your side of the story and their side of the story. So there's always some regulation, which also complicates the business. Yeah. And also anybody just waking up and saying, I'm gonna get my own integration from Vodah.

SPEAKER_05 9:58

So you guys, I mean, you seem to be more there the I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but uh you seem to be more than just uh I don't want to say just a service provider because it's not a large service provider, but what I mean is there's there there's almost like there's a there's a culture around you guys.

SPEAKER_11 10:15

But this chief is the chief category.

The Developer Community And Free Resources

SPEAKER_05 10:18

Yeah, maybe maybe talk to that because there's there's there's it's not just oh, there's a service provider here, so there's a vibe, there's something going on.

Marketplace 2.0 And How Devs Earn

SPEAKER_03 10:24

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my name is Michael Kemadi. If you find that mouthful, call me MK. I work with Africa Stalking as head of the developer community across Africa and beyond. I also host a podcast by the name Impact Masters, and it's just basically highlighting some of the African movers and shaker stories uh made being creative software engineering and whatnot. And we we believe in disrupting the status quo. And what I mean here is that there's been always what has been accepted, but if it's changed, actually changes a lot of things and it creates opportunities. And one of those things is where we believe that we we we can actually empower all the developers across Africa. By the end of last year, we had 1 million devs across Africa. Uh 1 million devs research done by Google. So our target was to get 70% rich of this million devs. And as of last year, we have 250,000 devs in our portfolio. And these are not just devs, just active devs. People were building, people were creating opportunities, people who are at the CTO level, mid-level, senior level, and doing different things. And one thing that AT has always been is like Dev Fast. And the reason why Dev Fast is that if you think about anything today, and even in the next few decades, the engineer is the center of everything. It doesn't matter what the solution is, it doesn't matter the industry, you need a solution engineer, DevOps engineer, you need uh software engineer, and so on and so forth. So when you look at it that way, then you realize how powerful it is to really ensure that these guys are well equipped. The learning curve is not as steep. And thanks to AI now that you can see different change and dynamics are changing, that even someone who really thought that maybe this is not achievable, they can actually come back and and see how they can go around it. Because also the resources are becoming available every day. So just to delve into the culture of AT, so the culture of AT is engineering first. Also, we we believe that everything should be free. Like you should not have an excuse why you should not get into get something done. And with that, we always look at partners who actually align with that. We know everything costs a lot of resources to happen, but definitely when you look at long-term, the benefits are more than even actually charging people for some of these. So we try to keep our events free, most of them, and also we try to keep our resources free. With that, also we have some benefits. So most of our SDK's APIs are open source, and we have seen different devs really put in work to make sure that they're accessible. Yes, and just to mention a few like our Go, SDK, Flutter Wrapper, Java wrapper, they are all created by devs. And these devs just created out of necessity. In fact, one of the biggest MPESA API in Kenya for Ruby is Built by Dev. And actually they updated it a month or two ago. And the usage and downloads are it's it's crazy. So if you look at that alone, you can see if you enable that pipeline, if you if you if you really create that culture, how many doors you're opening, how many opportunities you're creating. And for me, it's always been like, what can we do different? So as you speak right now, it is moving from a point of now we have the devs in the house. What are these opportunities look like? One of the key things is the marketplace 2.0. So you realize that when you're building on telco, you are dealing with like 52 industries from tourism, hotel, you know, logistics and so on and so forth, healthcare. So, like 52 of them. And in that, we have seen people actually in every academia that we do every month, people build solutions that are out of this one. In fact, we saw two years or three years ago, someone integrating USSD with the GPT API and actually being able to scrub the GPT generator, package it, and deliver it using 2G, which which is a game changer. Yeah, so we're like, if this is published on marketplace, then it changes everything because you can actually find your hospital, or if you are visiting Jobag, you can find the nearest hospital, you can find the nearest maybe I don't know, package delivery service and so on and so forth. But if maybe these customers who are FedEx or uh you know the government can't find this in a marketplace, then definitely they will hire the resources to do all this in house, which sometimes is not so easy to do, or it takes time. But with the marketplace, just uh maybe subscribe ten dollars per user or whatever, the dev makes their money, a team makes their money through inventory, and everyone is happy. And also the hospital delivers their service or the government delivers their service. So there's a chain of effect when we open the the empowering the developers across Africa, and also you open that channel to be really flat. Sheesh, that's quite a mouthful.

SPEAKER_09 15:26

250k developers, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:29

Plus, you have to add plus always because as you speak right now, you've got growing, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 15:36

And what's the plan? Is the plan to create this marketplace where people can come shop for the skills on this 250 plus developers?

SPEAKER_03 15:45

Definitely, because if you look even at the established ecosystem like Apple marketplace, right? Yes, it's actually making more money than any product. Maybe it's second to airport second to airports, but it's making real money for them. But I don't look at it from the money perspective. I look at it like if this money, some of it could go to the ecosystem. If this money actually could go to like build dev shops, build startup, you know, and so on and so forth. We have seen even companies from these marketplaces like Google Play Store or I know AWS marketplace, yeah, actually get acquired by the company because the solution they are really delivering is good for the customer. But for us, we're not even going step by step. You're like, you have access to our customers as it is. There are no like, let's wait for two years, see the uptick and all that. But definitely we're saying our customers are your customers as long as you solve for them. So, and we are making it really interesting because you just need a Docker file package, your solution as a Docker file for scalability. Okay, submit it, we see if it's using our products as well as the security aspect, which means also we are sure our customers of the security issues when they install uh or when they subscribe to that solution.

SPEAKER_09 16:52

This is very and do you do you charge a subscription fee for the developers to come on, or is it a market-related thing where you charge the customer uh for what do you call it, a sales charge or something?

SPEAKER_03 17:05

Definitely what we are charging is the usage, like if you use the customer. So the dev is not paying anything, the dev just focuses on building the solution. Once they get the customer, the of course they are using the inventory, so that's a charge that is not really like divided among us, the whatever, unless you are what we call market development partner. Yes, that's an opportunity that is already existing and devs are making money with it. So if you bring a new customer and you are maintaining them, which means you are maintaining their software, you're helping them with the bugs and stuff, you get 60% after the cost of goods, we get 40%. If you're maintaining that customer, you get 40%, you get 60%. That's already there. You don't need a marketplace for that. But even with the marketplace, we see those developers coming in, dev shops coming, bringing in the customers. But on the flip side, for the marketplace, purely is that once you you have a subscription model, which now the customer is subscribing for this extra service, yes, they're gonna pay for the inventory. So it's definitely not the one who is paying. But if you MDP, you still can make money, like there's a way you could do that to make money. Okay, but if you're not making money, you're purely providing the service. Once you get paid ten dollars, you just get three dollars, you get seven dollars, which is a fair you know, uh exchange. But also, not only that, we're also offering cloud, which means you don't need to move outside the marketplace, you don't need to worry about the setup, you don't need to worry about the scalability. And we're gonna keep it really affordable for the dev so that in fact the they don't find it like you know an excuse to like lose money, but definitely to make more money.

SPEAKER_05 18:39

Yeah, yeah, these and these things being built, it's pretty much all based for for telco infrastructure, or you more broadly, yeah, yeah.

Hackathons As The Education Pipeline

SPEAKER_11 18:47

Yeah, that's that's good. So the interesting thing about the products we have is that eventually they end up somewhere, they could end up in an Android device uh app, they could end up in a website. So as long as you're using any of our APIs, you're welcome. So you could, and as you see now that openSread app, you could be doing an app that's running a logistics farm, you would still be welcome. And if you want it also used by other logistics firms, they'll pay you to use it. But let me also color what you're saying in terms of a pipeline. So selling a technical product is the only one of the ways out is education. Yeah, so we realize that hackathons are like the best way to educate. So we don't even do hackathons like it's okay, it's for fun and for culture, but ideally it's for education. And even we have had some hackathons where the developers are like we did a hackathon for four days, and they see that's the best hackathon than doing it for one day. So some of the tricks we realize is that you can actually build towards the hackathon. We give even a month. Right now, our hackathon schedule is published up to 2029. 2029. Yes. So you can go online, you can sorry about you can go online, you can see what you're going to present in two months and start working on it. Because we are not about the you know the euphoria of the moment. It's let's build so solutions at last. So now from there, the because it's a pipeline, the next thing is that the pipeline should have an exit. That's where the marketplace comes in. So if you're going to do this hackathon until 2029, we need to have you building, releasing, making money, and thinking, wow, what's the next thing I can work on? And then also the knowledge of the time has changed. There is nothing that you're learning in class that would compete with what's happening in the world. In fact, there are some companies that would qualify to create their own education curriculum because they have so you finish your class, then you you come to Africa is talking. We do everything differently. All our tools are open source. It's a different ballgame. So the hackathons can help with that. So you're always you know working with engineering uh solutions or platforms that the environment you're going to work for already uses. And then you package your solution. We encourage you to ship it, and you have the luxury and the time to do that. So yeah.

SPEAKER_05 21:21

So the the hackathon that's going on here today, how does that plug in? What's how does that maybe explain a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_11 21:28

Yeah. So what happens is that our hackathons keep going on monthly, but then we now to spice it up, we work with partners. One of the partners is Google, and we showcase their product, and we showcase our product. So this is pretty much a hackathonslash workshop.

SPEAKER_08 21:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_11 21:48

So we take everybody through like what APIs Africa Stocking has and what APIs uh Google, especially Gemini, has, and then they have time to build. So this Has been happening for the last three months. Anybody, there are already some guys who have come and told us they are finished. They are waiting for Saturday. So Saturday, we are going to be giving the prices up to$1,000 here. So there's some guys who are already ready. But then the hackathons, it's all about also coming, meeting other developers, forming teams, exchanging ideas. So this is plugging right into that process, but it's colored in that it's also partnerships. So we can do partnerships. We've done also partnerships with other companies where we are pushing what they are building, as long as it's targeted for engineers or for software developers or people interested in uh software.

SPEAKER_04 22:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 22:38

So that's also happening here for the whole week. And then Saturday, anybody who's been building before or anyone who came and built here, I think we have over 90 RSVPs. They should be able to come on Saturday and nice and see what we see who wins.

Brand Positioning Through Knowledge Leadership

SPEAKER_09 22:52

And from a marketing perspective, yes, how are you positioning the brand? Okay. Africa stocking? Are you more of an incubation hub or an academy?

SPEAKER_11 23:01

Oh, interesting. So most times when you see us online, you even think, are we an events company? Right. No, no, no. So this year is going to be quite interesting. So this year we are working with every team in Africa Stocking to identify their personas. Selling has changed. So we can no longer say, hey, do you want to buy this thing? We have to position ourselves as knowledge leaders.

SPEAKER_08 23:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_11 23:28

The hackathons is really just us going extra on the cost of doing like our cost of acquisition at sometimes looks a bit higher. But the lifetime value is sometimes even up to 10 years. Like our biggest customer has been with us for 10 years. And that's how. So this is what happens when you're a knowledge leader, it means even the finance guys, even the legal team, they're doing their craft in 23 markets. There is a startup that wants to know how do I handle legal matters in 23 countries. So that's how we take our leadership position.

SPEAKER_08 24:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_11 24:11

How do all these teams identify the personas and tell their stories to those personas to get them aware that we exist? And then maybe we should create some way of them acquiring them by probably giving them packages that make sense to their business. Or giving them more than just SMS and telling them, hey, if you work with us, if you have any issues in South Africa for legal or for space, you can work with us. We can work and see if we give you some of our office space. You see, you're going beyond I'm selling you a product too. Let's partner to build your business and our business in Uganda. Okay. So that is uh how we look at ourselves. Acknowledge leaders, and now allowing every chapter in Africa Stocking to also lead by how they do such an amazing thing in 20 markets. And then we tell those stories with our customers. So that's really how we are thinking about it this year.

Sustainability Behind Free Events And Sandboxes

SPEAKER_09 25:06

Okay. Yeah. And um, I think Michael, you touched on this. You you do a lot of free things or free giveaways. Like your APIs are uh free, you do a lot of open source, most of your events are free for the public to attend. Absolutely. What does your sustainability model look like?

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Yeah, that that's that's really good. So let me let me take you back a bit. So the the essence of community is based on knowledge society.

SPEAKER_08 25:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

So if you go like 40, 30 decades, or even 20 decades, even maybe even 10 decades, you would say most of the societies were not well educated, they were not well knowledgeable. But that is changing really fast. And in fact, AI is really like fast tracking that really fast. So it means that one of the key things is that even a basic person will not just look for a solution because you marketed, or they saw a billboard or whatever. In fact, uh, we were from another agency yesterday, they told us the billboard business is dead, yeah, and every studio is closing down. And I think one thing people should understand is that the business of influencer is stealing it. Yeah, that's true. That's why young people are able to make money. But from the engineering perspective, I saw this like 15 years ago, whereby an engineer is a well-educated person. So they just don't need even, maybe even they don't watch TV, they don't watch to radio, they just listen to podcasts or maybe music and do their thing. So this person you're talking to, you are talking to them from the point of that I know what I need. And one of the things that you really can hack this with is the community perspective because the science itself is still an art. And when you look at it from that point, you need to introduce someone to these products or solutions at a right stage, right? And the best entry point is always Arcadon for us as an engineering company. And what this does is that I know how to build using or integrate using this platform. So even when I get a job, guess what? This is the platform I'll integrate with. But of course, that one will not be for free, right? And hence the cost of acquisition that Graham has mentioned. But also, even when I'm building my startup and I've raised money, I really need to use the tools I'm familiar with because of time, you know, turnaround time, acquisition, and and and you know, the metrics that goes into ensuring that I'm converting and becoming sustainable. So the the APIs are not free in themselves, so they're charged. But for someone who is integrating on trying things out, we build a very nice sandbox platform and a platform where you can test. And the only thing you need to do is change your API key and go live. Okay, so all that is free. In fact, when you sign up on our on our platform, which maybe we should change, you get like a hundred Bob Kenya shillings, or I think one point something run, yeah, like a dollar, right? Yeah, for free, just to test. And you know, an SMS costs like a few sense. Why do you want to change it? Increase it. Oh, so you get more crazy because we had no processing change. Remember also things like WhatsApp, which we're integrating starting last year, yes, they cost, they cost more, and you don't have control on that. And I think also people should understand that it the way it's set up, some of the decisions are are based on telco pricing. So the telco changes, we have no control. You have to make a small margin, which is doesn't hurt you. But for a customer, we always think it is like you know, greedy and stuff. But some some like an engineer doesn't mind doesn't mind. Like I understand what goes into these things to work because like before AT, which is like 15 years ago, you could just go and come in a telco. I don't know if anyone has ever tried to integrate anything with a telco, especially if it's engineering, because they're always like you're a suspect.

SPEAKER_08 28:46

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:49

Especially with mobile money, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:51

Mobile money and paperwork is just high, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:53

And then they're like come three months, then come three months, no one is there. You might end up spending a year, change jobs, you start all this thing.

SPEAKER_05 29:00

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 29:00

Yes, yeah. So, but now with AT, actually, it has lifted for that. There's one place to trust, there's one place enterprise, there's one KYC, right? And that that's changing a lot of things. Uh, so just to answer your question, is that definitely we make money from from these devs, but remember also one dev could be building for five or ten companies. Exactly. That's the beauty of engineering. So you don't just need to like learn 50 things to do one thing, you just need to learn one thing to do million things if you want, and now with the marketplace, that like even like escalates that. I don't know how many times it does that, but by and large, is that also we realize that there are other platforms across the world, and now even people across the world are realizing that. Now, I need also to mention that AT was the first API business in Africa. What it was first API business. This even has been AT for the 15 years, so he should be telling you these things. Okay, there are people like Tilly, the other guys, but API became big after AT success, and even companies started exploring API, especially teleco figuring API was crazy. In fact, uh five years later, yeah. AT had to write some code, especially on the payment platform, to be able to like like expose API and offer payment platform, which we have shown for now. But definitely you can see regulations, yeah. You can see if you are a single dev who is trying things out, how discouraging that could be. And now I am happy to see most companies, even the the AI companies, putting API first, which is good because now it lowers the bar and also it gives people opportunity to create not only to consume but also create localized solutions. Yeah, something else I think Graham mentioned uh around uh Africa and markets, that when you talk about 27 markets, if in Europe, that's a different story because they use the almost similar laws and whatever. But in Africa, if you talk about 23 countries, everything is different. In fact, even in that country, there are some things that you have to go to different offices to make them work. So this knowledge is quite important, and and I think also this maybe to the to the government of the day of different countries to to revise some of these policy because it helps easy the business. And I'm happy on one thing that I need to mention this podcast, which is just a game changer. You know, South Africa, I don't know if it's two years or one year ago, say Kenyans can just come in and do business and you know, do shopping, do whatever. And that's a game changer. Why? Because you realize here there are so many brands, yeah. And here I think also Graham informed me, you don't have second-hand clothes and second-hand stuff. You're buying, which changes everything because that opens business, but also again, it opens more opportunities for South Africans and Kenyans. And I think most countries should follow that. Of course, it should be controlled because not everyone has best interests at heart, but it's a game changer, but it should go now even to the tech, to business, registering business, you know, running business, getting an office, getting an address so that now we open up and expand how much we could be able to do and the market we can tap into.

Why Teams Matter For Real Products

SPEAKER_09 32:02

Okay. Me, I'm just HTML and CSS. I have a place in this 250k out of it. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_11 32:10

Yes. Actually, let me talk about a bit about that and tie it also to the cost of acquisition. So products are never built alone. And one of the reasons why we insist, do you know, like if you do a hackathon in Africa Stocking, we insist that you join a team. In fact, when you come to our platform and you're creating your account, the first thing we make you do is create a team.

SPEAKER_08 32:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_11 32:33

And then you create your app. And yes, and the because a team can have many apps, you could have an app that supports the marketing department, an app that's you know, OTP for the KYC guys, etc. But coming home is this way. And especially for uh an innovation hub that is in partnership with the universities, a product needs the psychologists, it needs the designers, it needs the salesperson, it needs a business person, it needs the lawyer. You see, why are these startups not thinking like that? And the easiest way to get that is in, for example, a university. Also, you multiply the number of jobs you are creating seamlessly, and it means any startup, starting with the hackathons we are doing, already gets the mindset that I can't build a product alone. I need someone to go and make sure we have the right colors. Yeah, uh, the psychology behind that the pricing. There's a reason why it's$4.99 and not five. Yes, that's a psychological psychologist of the market. But also, another thing that has helped us with sustainability is playing the long game. Okay. Uh, when you sell APIs, you realize that the cost of acquisition may be high sometimes because you are the only one believing in your dream. But then your customer may live with you for 10 years, but your customer may convert after a year or after six months. The sales cycle is long, it's long, but once it kicks in, so as a business, you start figuring out what are the hacks you can do to lower this. So partnerships and working with universities becomes critical. Okay. But the idea is that to be sustainable in Africa, you need to you need to think long term. And you need to uh uh uh uh uh create for an ecosystem where while you are waiting for the you know the long term, people are still exchanging value. So, for example, yes, we've told you uh you can use our API, but you know you won't we know you won't use it tomorrow. So, what are the other things we can do? We can start introducing businesses that need an API now but have no engineer. So bring them into the same ecosystem where you they take some of the developers even straight out of the hackathon. So for the sustainability, you need to think about long term, but you now also start need to create new ways of selling. Okay, and new ways of and partnership will be now the automatic thing.

SPEAKER_03 35:03

Yeah, in addition to that, uh maybe this is the point I mentioned. We are top 1% developer community in the world. Top three years, top one percent across the world. Silicon Velican shallow, you can put it in the same place with those girls, and with anyone, they have nothing to tell us. Yeah, we've got three years in a row.

SPEAKER_09 35:22

Yeah, dang.

SPEAKER_03 35:22

So, one of the things that we have tried to do over the four years I've been with AT is to really like wind out the noise and focus on the signal. What I mean here is that like the last year we actually separated communities to front-end, AI, machine learning. We have those communities on our platform where people could actually meet and talk about that. We have JVM languages, which is more focused on the back end, and one of the key things we want to also start is a designer community. Yes, and the reason why this is important is that we have seen people come to our community, meet some you know other intelligent people, build something, go out there, raise money, up to$100,000, employ over six people, and the rest is history. And this is just in the span of two to three years. And if we really amplify that, we can see how much that can you know can can really gear up different cities and make sure that it's happening. Something else maybe of importance is that we we have created a platform where we want, if someone wants something built, a dev in this city should build it. Yes, or Duban or Pretoria. And our key focus is to empower those devs in that ecosystem by, of course, hackathons or meetups or a place where they can have a workshop and learn a few tricks and leave money in that city so that it develops that ecosystem and make sure that those guys are, you know, it's it's one, it's sustainable, but also they have something to spend for. It could be easy to say because we have 60,000 devs in Nairobi and we have like maybe 100,000 devs in in Nigeria, we can actually take this business there. But at the end of the day, we want each city to really be sustainable. Earlier this year, we launched Luxophone communities, starting with Mozambique. And one of the key things we realize is that those guys are even introducing different businesses to those developers in a month, which which shows the the the you know the the uptake when you localize the experience, and actually someone knows this actually belongs to me as it belongs to the developer seated next to me. I thought that's very important to really, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 37:33

Yeah, what what is what was the what was the thinking behind positioning the brand scaling across different countries in Africa? How many how many countries are you present in?

SPEAKER_11 37:45

23. It was an accident, a beautiful one, I bet. What happened? What happened is that when uh co-founders uh raised money, uh maybe that is how God works. If you if you know the problem you are going to encounter, you may not. Yeah, so you know, you're like, these things we can do, we can change Africa in our lifetimes. This is it. You guys are changing it because we believe like technologies are going to be like Kenya is like a few years ahead of say Tanzania in terms of technology, okay. But that pattern repeats everywhere. South Africa may be 10 years ahead of Mozambique. So I hope we are really in terms of the technology. So, what happens is that the things you have already seen, yeah, you can now go and help based on their context, like hey, this is how it happens. But to back to the to the to the question. So, yeah, just like an attinent. Like, let's do it. Yeah, how can we do it?

SPEAKER_03 38:46

Let's just start by setting up business.

SPEAKER_11 38:49

The kind we have the kind, kind of kind of just means let it go, let it go. Let's do it, yeah. Let's do it. Yeah, okay. But then, of course, you quickly run into what's your lifetime value of your customers, cost of acquisition, blah, blah, blah. So I'd say there's like that time when we are just opening up across Africa. Then there's a time where we had to settle down and say, what are our unique economics? And then also going around Africa, you will realize Africa is a village, but also the is not a village. It's okay. Africa is a village with households. And the problem with uh village with households anywhere in the world, the households want to keep their things to themselves and to compete with each other, even though it's a village.

SPEAKER_08 39:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 39:32

So that's like Africa. So even if you want to build something in Uganda, you will not do it successfully as a Kenyan. You will have to bring in the Ugandans and just share what you have, and they'll also share what they have. Cool. So now I see the next couple of years being, and we are working on this now, even the landing pages, the storytelling, the testimonials, we have even the language on the website, we are going to change it to 100% localized. So if you hit the Africa Stalking website for South Africa, you will even see, maybe we'll greet you in the different languages. You get it. Like we'll change it. I know South Africa like has 11 languages, but with AI, that's easy. So we will show you the businesses that are running the social proof for South Africa, will be South African businesses. Your, you know, your colors with the South African context is so this is where we have to go to. And to crack it, we are still going back to the community. So we have a women in tech community as well as an open community. Okay. So we are giving the women in tech community the leeway now to start designing our local sites. So we're going to be having the women in tech design challenge. They're going to be designing the women in tech in Uganda, design the Ugandan landing pages, etc. Then another community that also we are having now, which will come with this push, is going to be the social media community. Okay. So just including everybody. Even if you're building a startup, you're never going to have traction unless you have a very smart social media strategy. Because you don't have a million dollars to ban on ads, right? Yeah. But you can creatively storytelling. So those are the two things that we will bring in to try and contextualize with the learning we've received. Africa is a village, but it's also made up of very yes, very inward-looking households.

Regulation Playbooks And Local Legal Teams

SPEAKER_09 41:37

Yeah, survival of the fittest. Yes, yes, yes. You you you briefly touched on regulation. Yes. And now on to part of part of your sustainability, which is scaling across 23 countries. Yes. How were you able to navigate these regulations that are different as per the households?

SPEAKER_11 41:54

So, yeah, that's that's a very good point. So uh what I learned from the legal team at Africa is talking is that they have a, and which is why we are also implementing with the design, you have uh your core uh legal team or your core people, and then you now work with local legal teams in each house. In each house. Because they're the ones who tell you how to jump over the fence, where is the hole, where is the there's a nasty dog at the order. So that's what's happening. So I think that's something something that people can take in, I mean, can can borrow. You you need to have your core that div defines who you what you do and how you expect your workflow to look like. And then, and that could also include software. Because remember, you have to remember all the taxes, you have to remember all the you know things you need to fill in every year. Then you need now a local chapter that's because also this is about sustainability. You may not be able to have a fully fledged local team. You may have to only have two people, and then when the money comes in, it affords more people to join the team.

SPEAKER_08 43:06

Yeah.

Banking Friction And The KYC Problem

SPEAKER_11 43:06

So you would have a core, and then you would now that call would set the they'll be like the directors to say if you are bringing in a legal support in South Africa, these are the boxes they should tick. Yeah, and then that that you can scale that easily. Same to when you're thinking about banking and also the banks they have let us down.

SPEAKER_09 43:25

Yeah, bank banks are sellouts.

SPEAKER_11 43:27

No, they are not serious.

SPEAKER_12 43:28

Someone will tell you, I mean, 40 countries just try to get try to get ranking in 40 countries.

SPEAKER_11 43:36

You give up. So also the banks there, just to encourage them, if the pan-African dream is going to come alive, you will need to do your KYC once. And then they will need to figure out who you are. Maybe they're also uh hamstrung by the governments, but chief, you can't do 40 KYCs. No, 40 securities, 40. It's not sustainable.

SPEAKER_12 44:02

You are not in the business of opening accounts. You're in the business of looking at everyone's things.

SPEAKER_11 44:08

Anyway, so I think that's a very big, like that's a very big opportunity. Yeah. If you are able to have a API of a bank that does transactions in 20, 30, 40, 50 African countries, I don't even know if we are able we are ready for the amount of wealth that will be generated.

SPEAKER_09 44:26

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that will never happen. Not in this capitalist mindset.

SPEAKER_11 44:31

There are some crazies. There are some crazies. So we're just telling the banks, it's not like they are in a fortified city. They need to wake up because uh people will do people will do it. Yeah, people will do it because technology is changing. And the business makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 44:48

Capitalism wins again.

SPEAKER_11 44:50

Absolutely.

Why Telco APIs Became The Business

SPEAKER_09 44:53

It makes sense. Yeah. Michael, you you you touched on the on the API. What I mean on ATS having one of the first APIs in the continent. What was that API and what was it for?

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Yeah, so API basically is the gateway that helps you access the platform. Sure. In uh layman's language, right? But no one actually had figured out how to really make business of it. Okay. Right? And it has always been guarded. It has been there because, of course, the engineering is part of the engineering, you know, building. But AT actually realized, oh, if we are devs and we are struggling to integrate with the telcos, and these are and you are like graduate from MIT, we know what you are doing, we want you know what you imagine now another engineer who is just trying to figure things out or start up and they are not exposed. And that's the business. The business is not actually the SMS because you can go and buy that. The business is not USSD, you can actually go and integrate as much as it takes two years, but solving that problem of you know, you waiting for long to integrate, that's a real business. And once they integrated, everyone was like, This is it. We want to use you. And some of the companies you hear they've been with us for 10 years, and they're not small companies, uh, the real big companies, governments have been using us. Uh, you know, Parastatus, ministries during election in some countries is like, this is a platform you should use, guys. It will never go down, it will fail you because also our our engineering also works in a very interesting way, and this is the beauty of scale. So if sometime the local network or the local telecoms are not working, you can take international bed and still deliver because it's it's really impossible for everyone not it's for all telecos to be down, over 80 telecos in Africa. So you see the solution actually really works at scale, and I think that's the same thing that banks should know. Yeah, you don't want someone when they need the money not to get the money, it's their money, yeah. Uh so it's the easiest way to say, you know what, I'll just be keeping I just want to be keeping my money under my mattress, right? It's my money, I can do whatever I want. So we take that in this country because but but that's the truth, and this engineering of it, I and I'm saying this with like there's an opportunity. I'm not saying that no, no, no. Everyone wants actually convenience, but and then especially when something is yours, there is some entitlement that it should come with it. Ah man, that's mine, and you know, and then I can't access it because you guys are upside in Kenya is not upside in in South Africa and so on and so forth, but also the opportunities that you lose because also remember Africa, we keep talking about economies not doing well, we're always still in break and mortar kind of economies, but the engineering supports you to really open up even the software side of things. Today, if you talk about the US or even the Europe to some extent, even China, the best economy that really never fails, it is the software economy. Look at California, even with the streaming, Hollywood could not have survived corona without streaming. Imagine if they did not use the technology like Netflix to support streaming. It could be dead on arrival, it doesn't matter how big it is, yeah, right? So if you look at it that way, and now we have figured out Africa, we have figured out 2G technology at large. And thanks to Africa stocking APIs that are always reliable, 99.9%, you know, uh up type. It should be possible to uh avail almost all the services across the spectrum. It doesn't matter where you are because you just need uh uh a feature phone in the remotest part of the of the country, and you get that this is the right fertilizer to use, this is the right pesticide to use, this is the right school that is you should take your kid, these are the marks for your kid, just with a feature phone. So it's it's doable. You just need to the and it's not expensive if you think about it, and at a scale even more cheaper. Yeah, so it's just us actually accommodating and and and realizing that in 2026 you cannot be thinking like 1970 or 1960s. The technology is more accessible. We have engineers in every corner of this continent who are graduating every day. Our Gen Zs are the most educated and most curious people. We should open these opportunities for them. We should not be looking at Gen Z's like we in some countries we look at them and say, you guys complain a lot, you guys, you know, you need to be patient with the system. No, they just want opportunities, and it's normal for every human being who needs to survive. But how we create these, and I'm happy to be talking about this in a digital innovation right now, right? This should be in every industry. I don't know how you guys are divided, but it should be in every township, per se, right? That's true, so that it's more accessible. It's like if someone doesn't have the opportunity, then definitely that's them. And of course you'll have those, but majority, I'm sure, if it's accessible, if it's you know the opportunities are there, people will actually grow economies that you have never seen today.

Impact Stories Across Health And Logistics

SPEAKER_09 49:52

For a an organization, Africa is talking, that is a percent of some of the world's best dev organizations. What are some of the best projects that came out of the organization? Um, maybe from a startup perspective or from a project that you worked for with a with a telco or some private company.

SPEAKER_11 50:11

Yeah, so many. I think uh we look at them also from uh the verticals. Okay, healthcare, for example. There's a platform that runs on our on our on our IPIs that has enabled over one million women to safely deliver. So you what? One million. That's one. There's another platform that has enabled over hundred 300,000 border border motorbike people to have insurance. There's insurance border border, guys. Yes, absolutely. That's just an like one of okay. Let me let me start from the top. Having been in Africa. I hope we have time. That's my hope. Having been in Africa for a while, what we realize is that there is no startup in Africa, yeah. Maybe maybe Egypt, but I'm not sure. But there's no startup in sub-Saharan Africa that has raised money that has not used us.

SPEAKER_12 51:07

So interesting.

SPEAKER_11 51:08

There is none.

SPEAKER_12 51:09

So if they are there, they should tell us. We are there like you. Because we are in we are in a some some WhatsApp group and someone is like, uh, can I get uh an SMS API? But don't tell me Africa's talking. Oh, people are happy to use the service.

SPEAKER_11 51:27

But you they no, they're they're basically saying we know these guys, but just give us some other three or four because our procurement always requires like three of those. But we're saying, like, we have been the salt and light of the uh of the world, you know, we've made a difference. So, yeah, there are some in healthcare that we've seen that there are some countries where we are supporting uh solar clean tech companies. If those solar clean tech companies go down, 30% of the country has no power. 30% 30%. We have there's another time AWS called us. We were with this guy, order us to set up in Cameroon.

SPEAKER_12 52:12

Yeah, then they told us, can you imagine? AWS, they told us, he was is this the future? We were like, What?

SPEAKER_11 52:20

That's what they said, yeah. Okay, but don't quote them because they'll be like, No, that was not our press release. Yeah, no, it was us, but uh yeah, we support central banks, yeah. Uh, we support um education. There was at a time when we used to support quite a huge startup on education, but then they changed their model. So, any vertical you can think of, we probably have a we support uh two or three state-level hospitals, we support a drone delivery business that delivers blood. Blood, yes, and food in like three or four countries. We can't say too much because the brand manager is like I didn't give you authority. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I don't know, but so the impact is there, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. Government services, government services, it's also humbling. I don't even know what to say, but we've done quite a bit on that. It's just that Africa is Africa, yeah, and a big lesson to any startup Africa does not turn around the way you want, at when you want. So if you're going to scale and crack Africa, you have to increase your portfolio of partnerships. And you need to uh hope that or work it in a way that they have the they share the dream. Otherwise, it is very easy. You know, I have seen stories of people who live in Africa until they are 60 and then they leave to go to Canada at the age of 60.

SPEAKER_12 53:49

Because they are like, I've tried, bro. I need to leave now because now we'll take care of my healthcare. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 53:56

I don't trust the souls.

SPEAKER_11 53:57

I don't trust is uh but it's uh you know, it just shows that they really put an effort to try and change Africa. So my concept is people should partner more. We have more to lose when we work in silos, and number two, the turnaround of Africa is it's in the woods. We are not sure. I saw Africa Union is telling us they want the Africa we want in 2063. 63 don't even know that that is like an issue, it's an issue, like like it's 2026.

SPEAKER_03 54:29

Oh yes to 2030.

SPEAKER_11 54:31

But Africa Union believes the Africa we want, guys. I don't even know if you guys the Africa we want should arrive in 2063. Will they be alive for that? Do they do they care of Agenda 2063? No, that's even more concerning because they have already settled into that mode. They are like we are delivering this thing in 2063. Calm down, it's fine, we'll see you in 2063. That's insane. Agenda 2063.

SPEAKER_03 55:02

That's unacceptable.

SPEAKER_11 55:03

That's unacceptable, it's there, and the governments are presidents are very diligently this uh agenda. I will I will leave for the next one to carry out. So I think that points to the fact that in Africa, the turnaround time for a lot of things may be in the woods. My final thing on this uh aspect. As a startup, there might be times you need to just make money, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even though you're like there to change the world or you know, to democratize access to telcos, whatever. There are some days you just need to make money to pay your bills, and that means that some startups may have to think of life more than in one way or in one value chain. Yes, this is critical. This is critical. You the the hard the reason why Africa is hard is that you may have to be changing your your core, your target customer regularly. It's not like if you're in the US or in Europe, where you might handle the same customer for 15 years, the same persona. Here regulations change overnight, economies tank, currencies are decimated. Yeah, there's a time we lost two-thirds of our value in one country because the currency crashed. And that affected you guys.

SPEAKER_12 56:24

Yeah, of course, because we are paid locally. So now today the dollar is one X.

SPEAKER_11 56:29

Yeah, next week it's a hundred X. Yeah, it's a bit of a problem. But anyway, yeah.

Telcos Shifting To AI And New Verticals

SPEAKER_09 56:33

Now, how what does the future look like for eight for Africa stocking in this sense? You guys are building on SMS, USSD, those kind of technologies. Yes, MOs, I'm not sure if this is consistent throughout the continent, but at least in in South Africa, MOs are trying weird things. They are doubling into banks. Yes, they now have financial services that they they want to offer their subscribers. Yes, yes. Now, what they're doing there is they're adding a lot of technologies, your Aze, your machine learning, and and and so you can see there's a bit of a shift from the technologies that they were using in the past to imagine technologies as such. Does that pose a threat to Africa stocking, or does Africa stocking also have a pivot and plan to say as the technology changes, we'll also change our models too? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_11 57:22

So, first of all, I answered that's a good, that's a very good example of just what we've talked about. That as a business, you might not focus on the same persona forever. You can see the telcos are already realizing you know, avenue, aver average revenue per user is tanking. So, um, first of all, I'm not the CEO of Africa Stalking. So I have not just enough for the vision. And I'm not planning to take their job. But um, what it means is this first, of course, Africa stocking will continue to be an infrastructure provider for the telcos. But the question becomes that knowledge we have for delivering that kind of experience to businesses and startups, what can we apply it to in the other tech industries? What can we apply this engineering, the knowledge we've had, integrating telcos and their complexity? Because another reason why, and maybe to what you were saying about being one of the first people to do APIs, it's because the telco would never have given you the API anyway. You're a risk. Yeah, so you need to figure a way of convincing them that actually when they when you connect your pipes, they make more money. And that was done. So when we connected our pipes and they started making more money, then they started to say, like, okay, if you need a referral, a referral across Africa, we'll write the letter. So now SafariCom was writing a letter to MTN that they are they work with these guys, etc. etc. But then also it also meant that they at some point they also realized, wow, these guys are growing businesses that we can harvest.

SPEAKER_08 59:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 59:02

So this relationship has also grown into like sometimes some people will be running on Africa stocking, and then they are very big, and then they are given an offer they can't refuse. So maybe we're also growing a market for the telco. So that creates the relevance. Okay. So now the question becomes which other industries can we positively disrupt? Because as we don't believe in uh just disrupting, there's always a reason why some people exist. So, but the question is can we create space? Are we seeing other dimensions of this business that the incumbents are not seeing? And can we just partner to grow those sides of those businesses where they make money and we make money? Because there is, you know, like there is no progress in in war except for the ones selling the equipment. Apparently, war is the best business for the capitalism. For the equipment makers, but really in the ground it's not. So what we think, or what I think would would eventually happen, is you will see after talking supporting additional verticals. Okay. Additional to say just telco that are complementary or that uh have an engineering problem. And by solving the engineering problem through integrations, etc., that business or that sector will grow. And there are many. Yeah. Even starting with something like cloud, there's a lot of space there. But there are many areas.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:29

And Michael, you are the the the dev guy. And how are you guys thinking about data sovereignty as as Africa's talking? Nice. Um are you are you happy that big tech companies come do business here, host the data in their countries, or are you are you of the view that we must build for Africa with Africans? Or all of that doesn't matter. As long as the technology is alright, we're going to use the technology.

Data Sovereignty And Open Data Realities

SPEAKER_03 1:01:01

Yeah, I think that's a very interesting question. Actually, our end year 2025, well, that was our keynote. Like, how do we think about it? Okay. And it's big for two reasons. One is that Africa needs to be ready. And ready means to so many things, but even some of them are not developer-related. It starts from the policy and not only policy laws, regulation that needs to be implemented to the latter. A good example would be GDPR, right? Africa's no GDPR, but they're GDPR compliant. It's not our thing, right? So we need to reverse that and say this is where the world is, right? Yeah. Today, you know, 10 years ago, there's a lady known as Jessica Colasso, co-founder of HIAP. She used to say in some of the fireside chart, the next oil is data. Today, now we're not even talking about data. No, it's information. Maybe next five years or two years, it will be knowledge. Because now that data that existed 10 years ago, today is knowledge that is being used.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:08

Right.

Infinite Innovators And The Platform Bet

SPEAKER_03 1:02:08

Um, and and with that in mind, we need also to even curate our own knowledge. And what I mean is that remember our African history is mostly erased or misplaced or with individuals, which is really powerful in itself. And if we lose that, then it means even going forward becomes new every time and it becomes slower. So data sovereignty is the most important thing going forward. And the only way we can achieve that is that work with the known to the unknown. And the known here is that the existing technology that really works at scale, most is not largely African-owned, right? And I think AT, to some extent, in fact, has really been data sovereignty champion for some time. I think we moved to AWS like two years ago. Okay, we had set up our own servers. If you go to a Nigerian office, you'll find our servers and then you know other different places. And the reason for this is because we we we don't really appreciate you know what is happening, but also we we want to break things and and and really learn from them. Uh, we also still have some really solid you know cloud providers in Kenya and I think also in South Africa that are really African built and owned that really could implement some of these regulations to the lighter. So there are two two facets of this. One facet is where the government actually uh you know ensures that this is actually implemented because yeah, there's no point because you know setting up data centers is not cheap, it's not a very expensive affair. Electricity everyone wants assurance that return of investment is there, yeah, and the only way to do that is to say at least 50% of your data should be domiciled here, and you have seen that with AWS now trying to set up in Kenya, besides South Africa, and what that does is even makes the business more efficient. Like today, if you are pinging your server, you have to be very patient. It's either go to South Africa, maybe Nigeria, I don't know. Even in Nigeria, I'm sure. Especially for boys, yeah, these kinds of things. Europe. Now, there's a time uh these guys who verify you are if you're human, which is very interesting. Cloudflare was down. You saw the repo effect, not even only for Africa, but most of the homin services were down. What does that tell you? It tells you that you cannot afford, and this is like engineering principle to have one source of failure. No, it's like basic engineering 101. You cannot have that by source of failure. Because if someone attacks that, everyone is down, right? Yeah, uh, we have seen actually attack on the airports and the software that runs, you know, shedding and whatever. You have seen delays, not once, like repeating. So cybersecurity is proving that you know it's about time that people started investing outside their comfort zone. It's time governments start taking initiative. And also when you have data, and and this maybe can piggyback to what you used to call open source, open data movement that was really highly discussed. Yeah, it used to be big like 10 years ago. And every African country used to be like we we are open data compliance, which means if you go to a hospital, there is a data you leave there. If you go to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there's data you live there. But if I'm building something around those ministries, I don't have that data. So open data was coming to really regularize that and ensure that it's available, it's safe, and it's regularized so that people can actually innovate around that. But all of a sudden, it started disappearing. Some people would give you like three-year-old data, like you're three-year-old, yeah. Whatever solution you build is like three-year-old. So that means you're missing the better part of like three years. So you can't catch up like that. So even governments, I think there's so much burden that they need to really, you know, ensure that some of these things are done. Because if even if I'm an entrepreneur and I build a cloud platform, man, it's a it's a it's a hard, steep work. And of course, AWS will beat me to it. Google Cloud will be to it. But also, I'm not ruling out that we can collaborate. Because if we're really good, AWS will say, you know what? This guy has figured Southern SADEC market. Why don't we partner with him and he provides our data centers? And that means more money left in the continent. Because every time money leaves the continent, it means less opportunity for our people, less opportunity for the government, less development, and so on and so forth. So there is more for government to gain than even individual entrepreneurs. But that actually is where we are heading. But let me bring the point home. The marketplace in itself is a game changer. Imagine if you have 100 innovators in the house. They can only innovate up to 100. But if you have infinite innovators in the house, then you have infinite innovation. Yeah, I don't rule out someone coming up and providing cloud. And we're happy to support. I don't rule out someone coming out and providing a Ministry of X solution. I don't rule out someone coming and figuring out health systems across Africa. I don't rule out someone coming and figuring out health insurance across Africa. Because remember, those are some of the nuances that you understand when you move to different countries. Imagine if you had one insurance that works in 54 countries, seamlessly. We don't have that, right? But there's someone who will say, you know what, the capability of software engineering today can actually enable that safely and in profitable and so on and so forth. So that actually opens the door of innovation because also we believe, and this is my belief, that innovation is equally distributed. Opportunities are not, platforms are not. So we are starting with platform, which will create opportunities for all devs through community.africastoking.com and marketplace.africastoking.com.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:54

There we go.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:56

Wait.

SPEAKER_09 1:07:58

So are you are you saying the use of tag if it stimulates the economy, it must okay. If let's say it does, right? No, if it is already it does, Uber 100%. So that supersedes the concerns around where the data sits.

SPEAKER_11 1:08:21

Okay, maybe I can say a little bit about that. Yeah, remember uh nobody knew that data was data until somebody said data data, yes, hundred percent. You get what I mean? Like somebody created a narrative that you know, uh to be honest, your data is important.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:35

Yeah, like the guy who discovered that diamond is valuable, yeah.

SPEAKER_11 1:08:38

But otherwise, guys would not be like, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:40

So I mean, sorry, a quick quick point here. So I know I'm trying to understand how you think about data sovereignty because we've we've talked about it a few times in our conversations. Yes, the platform that you're using will always own your data. It's not like it's not like your data because we're in Africa now, some African government or corporation covers my data. If you're using the platform, they own the data. There's no real way. It's not really like it's a data sovereignty issue.

SPEAKER_09 1:09:07

Yeah, true. No, that what I'm asking is not a data sovereignty issue. I'm just trying to see how they it's interesting, it's it's interesting.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:13

Think about and figure it out. But I'm just saying, unless there's gonna be like local companies here that provide the same services as those kind of companies, yeah, the data doesn't sit.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:23

The challenge, yeah. But money challenge. So two years ago or three, 2021, which is now maybe five years, time is running fast, or to 2022, we actually thought about because so when we're running SMS USD, you realize the amount of data that really passes through your platform is enormous. And the key was not like who owns who is sitting in the data. No, in fact, that's not even the problem. The problem was do I benefit when this data is cashed out? Because mostly that's where I think there is disparity. And there's a platform known as Illyrian, yes, Illyrian, okay, which we built, it's it has never shipped like at scale, but Illyrian was supposed to really uh make sure that it doesn't matter where that data is used, okay. When it makes money, it makes it right like next level idea. But I feel like it was ahead of its time because you know, before AI, people are like it's just sign up email, you know, my idea. But you realize that's what people use to sell you a t-shirt, that's what people use to show you an ad in which they're charging, and which these people make money. I think though most of those will come up definitely. They they especially with the AI, definitely, those are some of the solutions that you see start taking up because now if you have less jobs, what does that mean? Now you need to create new jobs, it's not like you cease to exist, but people start being innovative around how do I track my data to an extent that I make everyone makes money out of it. And the more valuable your data is, and and a good example that is really like upper layer or like top layer is influencers. Look at how influencers make money. I have followers, I can put your brand in on in front of two million people. Maybe you can convert like 1% of that. I charge you maybe a thousand dollars. Yeah, and that is a business that has taken up everywhere. Now there is a level of Mr. Beast, there's a level of uh all these other guys. So for for me, it's it's a game changer in in different ways, but definitely that's for sure. And it's good that you are thinking about that and you're thinking about that because one of the key things that is becoming apparent is that we cannot assume that data is nothing, it's that it's it's that's not even acceptable. It's everything, everything. Because if I have your data, bro, the question I ask you is uh different. Yes, the things I could really manipulate you to do different, right? So it's something that we need to uh do it responsibly, but also again make sure that everyone is actually getting credit to them, yeah, including the person, this individual, because that I think the companies really cash out on data, honestly speaking. Companies, even startup, but the individuals who that data is collected from they never get anything.

What To Watch Next And Closing

SPEAKER_09 1:12:12

All right, yeah, in closing, yes. What what should uh what should people be looking out for from Africa stocking?

SPEAKER_11 1:12:22

So this year we want to go deeper. So it's not just enough to be in 23 countries, it's what relationships do we have there. Can we do a hackathon in 23 cities every month and stream it? That's where we want to go. That's what we that's what we are working hard to do. Can we tell the stories of developers in Congo, in South Africa, in Egypt, in Nigeria? And so uh eventually people realize you know what, we we are all we are all in this ecosystem. Some may be behind, they we can pull them, but there's something everyone can learn from everyone. So I think that's just the excitement we want to see. Can we just carry along different language time zones every month to collaboratively build? And then what products can we build internally for them? Because uh also there's that conversation, like you know, voice has brought a renaissance. Our voice API was is 20 is 10 years old from 2014, and ideally, of course, you had telcos say voice is dead, yeah, but then came AI. I can call a business, talk to an AI agent. It you know, and it can execute all my instructions without me waiting for human interaction, but doesn't mean we are eliminating humans, it just means humans are elevating to a more impactful jobs. I don't believe anyone should be. I have a very radical thinking about jobs. I don't think any business that's making money should layer off its people unless they were not doing anything. Okay, but if they are doing something, then you would rather spin off new startups under your brand. Okay, and let these guys run. That's ideal. That's ideal, yes. And if I'm which means we should always try, yes, of course, but it means that if you wake up to that reality, yeah, two months to when you need to execute it, it won't work. We'll need to start building with such a future in mind. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:26

The problem with that is you're still dealing with people and that's also true. People who don't want to do different jobs.

SPEAKER_11 1:14:31

That's also a good point.

SPEAKER_09 1:14:32

That's also a good point, which is why capitalists will say who place didn't get an idea.

SPEAKER_11 1:14:38

Which actually means AI is coming to tell you be more curious and be more daring. Because you might have to take up things that you never really thought you would go that early. Yeah, so maybe that's one lesson.

SPEAKER_09 1:14:52

All right. And if I'm a startup, what support can I look for?

SPEAKER_11 1:14:56

Ah, from Africa Soaking. Yeah. If you're building, we always have the sandbox. Two, we always have uh free resources for you up to two weeks in live environment. So you can get actually uh a channel or you can get a contact, a voice number for up to two weeks, you know, in the live environment. Another thing you can expect from us, especially as we do in the marketplace and the engagements, is access to markets. Okay. Some of the startups today are building incredible things that some of our customers may really need. So we can orchestrate that and see how do we bring people together in a in a collision space where they share maybe more networking. So that's another thing we need to. We were trying it last year, but it didn't work as well. How do we do networking events between our customers and uh ecosystems that we are in? So that as a startup, you have a quick way to acquire new customers.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:53

Nice. Any parting shots?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:55

And if just in addition, if you if you spend a thousand dollars with us, that means you can top up your account with a thousand dollars and you don't have engineering resources in house, you can use our engineers. Okay, that's not for free though, it's just like you have access to these 250 top-level engineers to help you build your solution. We'll we'll project manage it. Yeah, yes.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:16

Okay, yeah, cool, gents. Thank you so much for making the time. Yes, it's been it's been great. We're enjoying that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_12 1:16:24

You think they are going for the comedy nights somewhere? Do you know who the lineup is? I don't know, but comedy is the best way to understand a city.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:32

So you leave that you don't get a problem, and and and and man, shout out to the piano people of course they're doing the most piano is not South Africa. Yeah, it's what piano is not ours, it's no longer it's that's the best part, simple, it's not a different thing and the different flavors when you're working. Like, in fact, maybe I didn't mention this on our community platform. We have a playlist, like 90 percent, yes, Spotify playlist. 90 percent is a piano, yes, 90 percent. Yeah, in every academia, they're like play on my piano, it helps us focus, it's spiritual.

SPEAKER_12 1:17:21

Guys, this is our music color, we have we have a share of dance.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:28

No, and I need to see your dance moves, yeah. Thank you so much. That's been the Hingle podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Do like, subscribe, share more social media platforms. Thank you so much.