Author: Brand Spot

By Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head, Zoho Kenya Africa has always found its own way around barriers. When fixed-line banking proved too slow and too exclusionary, Kenya did not wait for the infrastructure to catch up. It built M-Pesa instead, a mobile payments platform that by 2022 had 50 million customers across seven African countries and processed nearly 20 billion individual transactions annually. That story is now so well-worn that it risks becoming a cliché. But it contains a genuinely instructive logic: constrained circumstances, properly understood, can become a design brief. Today, Africa faces a new set of constraints, around software…

PayAngel, a cross-border payments platform built by migrants and shaped by a lived understanding of the migrant journey, today announced an expanded collaboration with Visa. Leveraging Currencycloud, a Visa Direct solution, PayAngel will strengthen its multicurrency account and international payout capabilities. The collaboration enables PayAngel to support faster, more efficient cross border payouts across multiple currencies and countries, enhancing how individuals and businesses move money internationally. This capability supports everyday use cases that matter to PayAngel’s customers, from contributing to family milestones and fulfilling communal obligations, to supporting businesses that operate across borders. Born out of a desire to challenge the high costs, friction, and…

Afrika Tikkun, a leading South African non-profit organisation dedicated to holistic youth development, has significantly strengthened its strategy execution capability through a tactical partnership with Project Portfolio Office. By implementing PPO, Project Portfolio Office’s centralised, cloud-based project portfolio management (PPM) platform, Afrika Tikkun has enhanced governance, improved accountability and increased its ability to translate strategic intent into measurable, large-scale outcomes. Strengthening execution through integrated portfolio management As Afrika Tikkun’s cradle-to-career model expanded across early childhood development through its Bambanani programme, adolescent support through Ignite, and youth employability through Head Start, the limitations of decentralised project management practices became increasingly apparent. Critical…

The Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, through its Magical Kenya, Origin of Wonder platform, and Google Kenya today announce a strategic AI-driven partnership. The collaboration follows a recommendation from the Kenya Tourism Rebranding and Repositioning Taskforce. It will advance the Ministry’s ambition to establish Kenya as Africa’s foremost AI-first tourism marketing destination. Centred on the Magical Kenya platform, the partnership is designed to connect global travellers directly with Kenya’s distinctive tourism experiences. The aim is to increase visitor numbers, generate new employment and shift destination management from intuition-based policy to a realtime, data driven system that meets the demand for…

Vertiv supported Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a WIOCC Group company, in standardising power and cooling infrastructure at its Parklands data centre in Johannesburg, enabling faster capacity deployment, higher‑density workloads and scalable growth without operational disruption. Originally deployed by Vertiv as a prefabricated, modular, Tier III-compliant data centre for a pan-African telecommunications provider, the Parklands facility was designed to support phased expansion and evolving workload requirements. By standardising on Vertiv infrastructure, OADC can accelerate deployments, support higher‑density customer workloads and expand data centre capacity without major redesign. The facility uses integrated Vertiv™ power protection, thermal management, containment, and energy storage, designed to adapt to changing load profiles, improve energy efficiency,…

The Global Africa Business Initiative (GABI) has shifted its new Digital and Health Action Pathways into a higher gear in order to accelerate the continent’s economic transformation by identifying and driving solutions to problems that slow progress. Convening on the sidelines of the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda on 15 May, the GABI Solutions Lab challenged some of Africa’s top business leaders to develop an ambitious, actionable work plan to overcome the roadblocks holding the continent back. “Africa does not face a shortage of ideas, but a significant gap in execution and the financing required to scale solutions,” said…

A new philanthropic investment vehicle, the Africa Jobs Fund (AJF), has officially launched with an ambitious goal of mobilising $100 million to address one of the continent’s most pressing challenges, the lack of high-quality jobs. The fund will be led by Daniel Yu and housed under Renaissance Philanthropy, aims to back businesses capable of creating high-productivity jobs at scale across Sub-Saharan Africa. Its broader mission is to sustainably raise incomes and improve quality of life for workers across the region. If you have a startup you want featured on TechArena, let us know through this contact form here. AJF will focus on two…

Kaspersky has launched a report on tech-enabled abuse based on its global study, which reveals that 8.5% of respondents had experienced digital stalking, and 5.4% reported being doxxed. The report also includes an analysis of dark web offerings related to stalking services and shares key insights into the evolving landscape of stalkerware. Tech-enabled abuse might refer to any form of abusive behaviour carried out or amplified through digital technologies such as smartphones, social media, or online platforms. It includes a wide spectrum of actions — from online harassment and exclusion to cyberstalking, impersonation, and unauthorised monitoring. Because these behaviours often lack physical…

Vertiv has announced the expansion of its end-to-end thermal chain with the availability of the Vertiv CoolChip CDU 2300 and Vertiv CoolChip Fluid Network Row Manifolds in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). These liquid cooling technologies support the growing demands of AI and high-density, next-generation compute to help customers deploy high-density infrastructure faster and operate more efficiently.  The Vertiv CoolChip family is a core building block of the Vertiv thermal chain, an end-to-end portfolio including direct-to-chip cooling, immersion cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, coolant distribution, heat rejection, intelligent controls, and lifecycle services into a single, cohesive thermal management system. The newly announced solutions will…

Chris Wood, Managing Executive: Product at Absa Business Banking Just a few years ago, most South African businesses largely thought about payments in fairly simple terms: cash or card. That no longer feels true, even for relatively small merchants, many of whom now have to accommodate QR payments, digital wallets, real-time transfers, and a growing range of mobile-first payment options. For consumers, many of these changes appear seamless but behind the scenes, businesses are being forced to rethink how they operate as the payments landscape evolves around them. What is clear is that South Africa is now moving in a…