The AfroTech Horizon editorial desk. Bylines are replaced with the reporting journalist once a story is commissioned — this account exists so the site has a working author profile before the newsroom is staffed.
When a regulator forces wallets to talk to each other, the competitive shape of an entire market changes. It is the least discussed and most consequential fintech policy on the continent.
International capacity into Africa has multiplied. Retail prices have not fallen nearly as far, and the reason sits between the landing station and the customer.
Unreliable electricity does not only raise costs. It shapes what applications can be built, and most engineering advice written elsewhere quietly assumes it away.
Local cloud capacity is growing. Whether to use it is a legal question as often as a technical one.
The gap is not linguistic difficulty. It is that the text these systems learn from was scraped from a web that barely contains these languages.
The deployed applications are less exciting and more useful than the ones that get launch coverage: document handling, triage, translation and fraud detection.
Training capacity is concentrated in a handful of countries. What that means for everyone else is a question of strategy, not sentiment.
Foreign employers paying foreign salaries have been transformative for individual engineers and difficult for the companies trying to hire at home.
Meet-ups, user groups and unpaid volunteer organisers have done more for engineering capacity on the continent than most funded programmes.
For engineers without a recognisable employer on their CV, public work is the most reliable way to be judged on what they can actually do.
The comparison flatters nobody and misdescribes what is actually being built. It also imports a set of expectations that do not fit.
Donor-funded pilots are announced constantly and scaled rarely. The incentive structure explains why, and it is not about the technology.