[Africa Tech Week] Actualizing Africa's Silicon Valley resolve

With Africa blazing the trail in innovations driven primarily by a new breed of young, intelligent and overly enthusiastic techies, international institutions have been lining up to tap into these innovators with skills and resources further actualizing the dream of transforming most of the continent's technology hubs into Silicon Valleys.  

This week has been no exception. Andela, the company building high-performing engineering teams with Africa's most talented software developers, has launched a pan-African technology hub in its fourth African market: Kigali, Rwanda. Rwanda was picked for being one of Africa's more innovative economies despite its size according to reports. It has traditionally been running innovative hubs to drive digital inclusion.

Still this week, as part of its latest strategy to deepen Africa operations, global money transfer UAE Exchange has been carrying out continental changes. It announced the rebranding of its Uganda operations as “Unimoni”. It has been running a free bank transfer facility targeting Ugandans and other nationalities living in Uganda who wish to do bank remittances.

 In Tanzania, Mastercard has partnered with Selcom to enable local businesses and merchants to accept interoperable digital payments, many for the first time. Consumers are now able to make quick, easy and secure payments with their mobile money wallets or banking apps at Puma Retail Stations across Dar es Salaam. Previous collaboration with Selcom has seen the  global technology leader expand its mobile payments solution in Tanzania. Mastercard has also partnered with other Africa companies to deepen uptake of the Mastercard QR payment solution including Tigo Pesa, Ecobank, UBA, Kopo Kopo and Smart Link

Credit protection company TransUnion and South Africa's first vehicle valuation & verification app FirstCheck have partnered to launch South Africa’s first consumer-focused vehicle checking app.

Africa Data Centres, Part of the Liquid Telecom Group, has named Stephane Duproz as its new Chief Operating Officer (COO), effective immediately. The offshoot was launched in 2018 to address the growing demand for cloud storage and data centre services in Africa. It has already opened offices in Nairobi and Johannesburg.