africe thinks here
On-the-ground business intelligence in East Africa, since October 2019.
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A 310-kilometre river through the Sahara, a Moroccan fintech, the founders of Diwan bookstore and Tunisia's digital start-ups are among the stories now free to watch. CAIRO, 17 October 2026 - Egypt is building a new capital in the desert. The story of the $58 billion...
Mimosa Mine’s collaboration with Rockwell Automation and Mine Elect shows that connected operational technology has turned cybersecurity into a production and resilience issue.
China lists at least ten African uses for its BeiDou satellites, from precision farming to wildlife tracking. What the record does not yet list is the named centres to run them.
At the 2024 Beijing summit China named the digital economy its next African frontier – 20 projects inside a three-year RMB 360 billion (US$50 billion) package. The detail is thinner than the headline.
The headline China-Africa numbers are loans and ports. The quieter figure: 200,000km of optical fibre and broadband for six million households – infrastructure hard to see and hard to remove.
The visible China-Africa media story is towers and dishes. The quieter one is people and programming – journalist exchanges, training cohorts and co-production deals that shape how stories get told.
Continental pledges are hard to test. Uganda’s share of the satellite-TV rollout – 900 villages, 18,000 households – is small enough to count and large enough to judge the wider claim.
A solar-powered dish on a village clinic looks like entertainment. The pitch behind it is something else – basic access to news, weather and public information for places the grid never reached.
A decade after Xi Jinping pledged satellite TV for 10,000 African villages, nearly all are connected. The screens arrived; the harder questions are about who controls what they show.