Author: Mfidie

There have been several changes in the economy and structure of African nations over the last year. Several people were obliged to stay at home due to the epidemic, Covid-19, and go primarily cashless. Africa’s Fintech came to the rescue, providing Africans with cutting-edge technologies to access the best financial services available. Although the previous year had been challenging and put a lot of pressure on these fintech firms, they have remained strong and tenacious in meeting Africa’s needs.

Africa faces several economic challenges in providing financial services to its citizens. In this aspect, the growth of fintech companies across the continent has aided in reaching the continent’s local population, enhancing the quality of financial services they receive. In fact, according to Techpoint Africa, the fintech sector accounted for 54 percent of startup investments in 2019. Fintech exists to fill the gaps that traditional financial services have been unable to bridge. These Fintech firms can reach out to the unbanked and underbanked, bringing financial services to the people.

Fintech companies have emerged as significant actors in Africa’s financial-economic revolution, and many of them are worth keeping an eye on. The following are the top fintech firms working to bridge the financial services gap in Africa’s various demographics.

Flutterwave

Flutterwave was founded in 2016 in Lagos, Nigeria and its current total funding stands at $64.7M. Flutterwave operates an API that allows individuals and firms to process credit cards and alternative payment options available in the African continent. It focuses on connecting local and foreign businesses and service providers to their customers. 

It allows these businesses and service providers to receive payments from their customers efficiently, and it’s currently active in 150 countries. Sellers can receive payments in USD, Naira, Euro, Yuan and GBP. The business headquarters is located in San Francisco, CA. Apart from being a payment getaway, in 2020, Flutterwave rolled out a new feature that allows businesses to set their store directly on the Flutterwave platform. The firm has partnered with notable enterprises such as Visa, Alipay, Worldpay in its quest to provide financial services to Africans.

Opay

Opay was founded in 2018 in Lagos, Nigeria. Its current total funding stands at $170M. Opay provides a payment gateway for sellers and offers loans, remittances, and even ride-hailing services. Opay was founded by Opera Software, one of the leading web browsers and search engines. However, Opay is not registered under Opera but as a separate entity, with Opera owning one-fifth of its shares. 

Opay facilitates an e-wallet that enables mobile top-up, P2P transactions, food &grocery delivery, transportation, loans, logistics, among several others. Opay also rolled out Olla Andriod smartphones in 2020. The firm also rolled out a new feature CreditMe, an overdraft service directed to students and small business owners in their mid-20s and 30s.

Opay has also attained an international money transfer license and recently announced a collaboration with WorldRemit. The collaboration allows persons with an Opay wallet to receive funds from over 50 countries easily. The covid pandemic may have limited some of its services, such as its transportation and logistics, but Opay has focused on its financial services since then. Opay has over 5 million users and, in August 2021, was able to raise $400million in a funding round led by Softbank Vision Fund. The company is currently $2billion.

Yellow Card Financial

Yellow Card was founded in 2016 and has its headquarters in Atlanta, U.S. Yellow Card is a Pan-African crypto exchange currently operational in 13 countries and consistently expanding its reach to other countries. Yellow Card offers diverse crypto products and services. Yellow Card’s mission is financial inclusion, and it is dedicated to making crypto and other financial services easily accessible to Africans. With Yellow Card, Africans can send remittances, make payments, and preserve the value of their assets from the constant depreciation of their currencies in many African countries. This is something that a lot of cryptocurrency sites already do. On the other hand, Yellow Card seeks to set itself apart by developing products that do not require customers to be crypto experts.

In September 2021, Yellow Card announced a $15 million funding raise led by Valar Ventures, Third Prime and Castle Island Ventures. Yellow Card is committed to not only offering excellent crypto services but also to enlightening and educating Africans about cryptocurrency and other financial matters. As a result, Yellow Card Academy was founded to educate Africans in simple, easy-to-understand terms on a variety of crypto and financial topics.

Yoco

Yoco was founded in 2013 in Cape Town, South Africa. Its current funding stands at $23 million. Yoco has helped over 100,000 businesses in South Africa by providing a payment gateway that includes a PoS service. Yoco’s PoS card machine, Yoco Go, is easily connected to mobile phones such that street sellers can perform online transactions. 

Yoco also runs multiple retail stores where business owners can easily sign up and get their hardware. In 2018, Yoco rolled out a new feature that allowed small businesses to access cash advances easily. In just three months of its launch, it had granted 225 advances amounting to $509,000. However, Covid-19 may have forced Yoco to cut its team size because clients sales had decreased by over 90%, but since then, the management has been looking at re-employing team members to continue its services.

Palm Pay

Palm Pay was founded in 2019 in Lagos, Nigeria. Palmpay was founded after a seed round of $40 million was led by Trassion, a Chinese Mobile phone maker. It created a unique partnership with Infinx, Techno and Intel with its app pre-installed on these devices. During its initial launch, it was able to register 100,000 users and processed one million transactions. Palmpay is also operational in Ghana and boasts over 1 million users.

Palmpay has also initiated a strategic partnership with Visa. Its services include Mobile Payments, P2P transactions. Palmpay currently offers users cashback rewards for using its payment platform. Users can also earn PalmPoints from referrals, deposits, and transfers. Currently, Palmpay is working towards onboarding merchants on its platforms so that customers can pay for services via its platform. 

Our phones are something that we use and depend on every day of our lives. Although there have been vast technological advances that make our devices significantly more durable than its past counterparts, there is still the ever-looming possibility of them getting damaged any time.

A lot of different things can happen to your phone, all of which will result in different types of long-term damage if not addressed immediately. If you find yourself in the position where your phone has suffered from any sort of damage, don’t fret and make any hasty decisions. You need not get a total replacement; you can save tons in expenses by getting it repaired instead. 

To give you a better idea of what phone technicians can do for you, here are some of the most common repairs that they can help you with.

Broken Screens

Unfortunately, no matter how careful we may be, the screens of our phone are simply all too fragile and therefore susceptible to scratches and cracks. Although a tiny crack or so might be harmless, you should be careful not to let it get any worse to that point that it renders your screen totally unusable.

In severe cases, a cracked screen might pose a potential danger in which you could accidentally cut yourself on the broken glass. 

Phone screens are usually a simple and standard case for most phone repair technicians. Seasoned experts will be most familiar with the nuances of different phone brands and models, making it much easier for them to determine the impact of the damage and how long the repair process will take. Depending on the extent of the damage, the cost of this type of repair may vary, but rest assured that damaged screens are almost always salvageable.

Damaged charging ports

There’s nothing more frustrating than plugging your phone to charge and then discovering that the port has become damaged, or worse yet, stopped working altogether.

Because this issue is so delicate as it deals with our phones’ power source it can be tempting to just drop your old phone and get out to buy a new one instead. But don’t give up hope just yet – this can be easily fixed when taken to the right repair service center.

Broken charging ports happen for different reasons. Sometimes, it’s due to a manufacturing defect, while other times it may be because of debris that had entered the charging port. In other cases, the use of inferior quality charging cords has caused damage to the inside of the ports.

Whatever the cause may be, in most cases, these will be fast and easy to fix, as it usually involves simply cleaning out the port. Depending on what kind of damage it’s been incurred, the port area may have to be replaced entirely.

Camera issues

For most people nowadays, smartphones also double as a camera. Most modern phones sport both a front-facing and rear camera and either one may experience damage at any time.

It’s actually quite rare for a smartphone’s camera to stop working due to purely technological reasons. Instead, the damage is usually associated with the camera lens, which may have gotten cracks or scratches. This, naturally, greatly impacts the quality of pictures taken with the phone.

The good news is that this type of damage is a super simple repair! In most cases, you’ll only need to have the exterior glass of the camera lens replaced.

Get your phone fixed by a professional

While smartphones are built to be durable, even the most powerful devices can still suffer from any of these damages. But with the right expert professionals like Fone Teknician, none of these problems equate to a death sentence for your phone.

As soon as you experience any sort of issues with your phone, get into contact with a qualified phone repair professional as soon as possible.

Climatarianism. It may sound like a radical movement, but it’s the name given to a diet that is said to drastically reduce your carbon footprint. 

Jennie Macdiarmid, a professor of nutrition at the University of Aberdeen, wrote about a nutritionally balanced diet back in 2012 – a schedule including pasta, wholegrains and even sweets that she said reduces your carbon footprint by 90%.

While this is appealing to those of us wishing to play our part in the climate emergency, is it appealing enough for thousands, or millions, of people to take up?

You don’t have to go vegan

Central to many activists’ eco-friendly lifestyle is a vegan diet: completely avoiding animal products in favor of natural ingredients from plants and herbs. 

While a vegan lifestyle is definitely possible – as proved by the many vegans around the world – climatarianism doesn’t believe it’s essential in the fight to save the planet. Instead, we should look into the processing that goes into the food. 

In her study, Macdiarmid pointed out the ‘halo image’ that plant-based foods have attracted, but, in reality, many of them involve extra processing including the use of palm oil, which is harmful for the environment.

The key is choosing foods that have required as little energy as possible to get onto your plate. Eggs from a local farmer, for example, are better for the environment than a processed vegan ready meal, which brings us on to the next area of the ‘climatarian’ diet. 

Shop local

We all know that ditching driving in place of walking, or just staying in, is better for the climate. We might choose to watch a football game at home instead of drive to the stadium or play on an online casino instead of flying to Las Vegas. Is shopping closer to home worth it, though?

The ‘climatarian’ diet seeks to avoid those long trips to the supermarket, with Macdiarmid singling them out for producing most of the ‘food miles’ when consumers shop. If we can reduce those, then we’ll also help reduce emissions. 

Yet the problem is time. Convenience stores have that name for a reason: they have all the food we need in one place, saving a trip to several shops that might take twice as long. 

Perhaps there’s a compromise. If you’re pushed for time, then look for the supermarket closest to you and walk there with your own shopping trolley. That way, you’ll get exercise as well as reducing your own carbon footprint. 

If that’s not possible, if you live far from shops and convenience stores, then it’s difficult to follow the climatarian recommendations. In which case, growing your own fruit and vegetables to complement your food shopping might be a nice way to learn a thing or two and cut down on emissions in the process. 

Buy seasonal

Macdiarmid’s study recommends eating what is in season as way of reducing the use of artificial light, fertiliser and pesticide that go into growing plants outside their annual window. 

But where does this leave us in winter, especially if you live in Northern Europe? The options are limited to potatoes, pears and apples, maybe a few sprouts. 

This is perhaps the biggest challenge in being a climatarian – the lack of diversity, however there are some creative solutions. Seasonal calendars often conjure up a few surprises that we may not expect – for example, did you know that clementines are in season in November?

There are also a bunch of useful apps that help you make use of what you have in your cupboard, so there’s no excuse not to go seasonal!

Work with supermarkets

Big companies, like wholesale retailers and supermarkets, are often the target of environmentalists, but the truth is we have to work with them.

Their product range might contain thousands of items, but technology can help us locate the most sustainable ones. Giki Badges, for example, lets you scan a product barcode and check whether it qualifies as ‘low carbon footprint’. Another is Evocco, which generates a carbon score of your shopping receipt from a single photo of it – very useful if you want to keep on top of your output.

These are quick, easy solutions that all of us can do when we visit a supermarket, yet it’s up to supermarkets to play their part, too. And there lies the crux of the problem – what we do as individuals counts for very little if big corporations don’t change their methods. 

Still, if you do want to play your part then the climatarian diet is, on the whole, an effective way to play your part. If it could become a way of life for millions of people, then we would be on the way to a cleaner, more sustainable planet.

Thanks to its highly engaged audience, Instagram can be named as the powerhouse for the social marketing of businesses. According to Instagram’s 2019 internal data, 90% of users on this platform follow a business. However, with this level of popularity, the competition to gain engagement on Instagram is also brutal. So, to help you to push through the clutter and outpace your competitors, several sites to buy Instagram followers are present in the market.

Since scheduling your Instagram content is important to maintain your brand at the top, you’ll need a good quality Instagram scheduler. While browsing through the list of such scheduler tools, we came across AiSchedule and Combin. To help you choose between the two, today we’re going to compare Combin with AiSchedul, the professional Instagram manager platform. So, let’s dive in and have a look at the features of both. 

Overview

AiSchedule is a package of Instagram management tools. It enables you to manage multiple IG accounts at the same time and schedule posts and stories. It is also integrated with growth services and DM management tools to help you grow your likes organically from a single dashboard. 

Combin is one of the best sites to buy Instagram followers by helping you manage your account in a better way. It is designed to schedule posts and stories to be updated on some fixed date and time. Combin has a large number of features and is a very user-friendly app to help digital marketers to gain engagement on Instagram. 

Both these tools boast of being the best, but let us compare them to help you opt one out for your needs. 

Configuration 

The setup for AiSchedule is really simple. Visit the AiSchedule Website and on the dashboard, click on the “Get Started” button. Register using necessary data such as your name, your email address, and your password. You’re all set to enjoy its features now. 

After the setup, you can easily log in to your AiSchedule account and add your IG account by clicking on “Add Instagram Account” on the dashboard. Enter your username and password and your IG account can be added successfully. You can add multiple Instagram accounts on AiSchedule.

Registering with Combin is a bit more complex. Visit combin.com and choose Instagram Scheduler. You’ll need to agree with the service policy, before starting the download. Combin must be installed on PC and is available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux versions. Like Aigrow, it is also available in three languages- English, German and Spanish. 

After the desktop app installation, you’ll need to connect your IG account by entering your IG username and password. After login, you can see your posts and followers on the desktop app. 

Topnotch Features

AiSchedule is not just an Instagram scheduler tool. AiSchedule can help you to manage a number of Instagram accounts and edit and schedule posts and stories. It can automatically respond to comments or even tag people and locations. AiSchedule also allows you to repost content on Instagram making it one of the best sites to buy Instagram followers. 

If you wish to become a professional Instagrammer, AiSchedule is just the tool for you. It not only saves time but can also get more attractions. 

Combin is a smart and useful tool that helps you work on a desktop easily, and thus gives a more ordered IG. It has two separate applications to gain engagement on Instagram and to schedule content. The Combin scheduler app can schedule posts and stories as well as define tasks. It also allows you to choose your Instagram grid style. 

But, you cannot set auto-response on Combin for comments or edit your content. Combin enables you to search for posts using a particular hashtag or location. You can also search for any user and select all of their posts to like or comment on. Combin allows users to connect with their target audience through advanced targeting features. 

Support and Maintenance 

Both IG management services provide very reliable customer support and maintenance services. AiSchedule has a FAQ section and if you have any problem getting started with AiSchedule, you may consult it for solutions. You can also look at the guides available on AiSchedule blog which probably answer most of the questions that might arise. There’s also an option of connecting to the help center. 

The help section of Combin is also very structured and detailed, consisting of brief descriptions about different processes. The Guides, FAQs, and How-Tos can easily solve nearly all the queries you might be seeking answers for. Combin also has the online assistant facility to help you clear your doubts.

Pricing and plans 

AiSchedule offers new users a 5-day free trial. It is not at all limited and lets you examine almost all of its features and decide whether you want to use it further or not. It has two different plans for users. One of the two plans is always free but you can only access some features in this version. The other plan gives you complete access to all the features and costs only $9 per month. AiSchedule is highly economical in comparison to other tools.

Combin also provides a free starter package, in which you have limits of 100 post actions and can use only one account. Nonetheless, Combin is more affordable as you need to just pay $10 per month for the personal package without any limitations on post action, but on one account only. The business package is for $30 per month for unlimited features and upto 5 IG accounts. This is really costly when compared to AiSchedule. 

Bottom Line

Combin is a very good Instagram scheduler and is helpful in saving time, but it can only be used on desktop, and not your mobile phone. On the other hand, AiSchedule gives you similar features at a more affordable cost, on any browser. Both of these tools are the best sites to buy Instagram followers, but you have to decide which one meets your needs appropriately to gain engagement on Instagram. 

Just keep in mind the budget you’re working with, the features you need to have to suit your social strategy and at last the number of social accounts you need to connect.

At the start of 2020, the pandemic slowly moved us into an isolated life. That’s when the internet companies and streaming industries boomed to the top. In 2020, streaming platforms got an unbelievable amount of traffic. The situation escalated till 2021, and people got more into the streaming lifestyle.

During this experience, some people started choosing a VPN for streaming Netflix. Suddenly, a new world of endless content unveiled itself to the viewer’s eyes. VPNs gave a new definition to the world of the streaming industry and the VPN industry slowly came neck-to-neck with the streaming industry. The trend is yet to fall and now’s a better time than any to have a VPN in your possession.

Just like a new Android phone comes with default Facebook, future devices will be needing a default VPN. Hyped enough? Here are some reasons why VPNs would be the first choice in 2022 for streaming:

No more geo-restrictions

This is the cherry on top when it comes to the use of VPNs. Since a VPNs job is to hide your online presence through a virtually provided IP address, it opens all gateways to a no-limits world. VPNs can easily give the user a virtual change of location which allows them to avail themselves of all “local features”.

This simply means that a VPN is your pathway to region-restricted services like BBC iPlayer, US Netflix, UK Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu Live, Prime Video, and many more. It still requires you to buy the service but then you get untethered access to the best Hollywood has to offer. 

The best of Live Sports

Who says you can’t stream sports? Not us! Because VPNs allow you to change your address fully, you can access live streaming sites that are open only locally to their regions. Channels like NBC, ESPN+, Hulu Live, Sling TV, etc. are all within your grasp now. 

Each of these services gives you further access to many different channels and a library full of new releases. Some of these channels cover major sporting events like NFL, NBA, UFC, WWE WrestleMania, and many more.

No buffering 

Nobody likes buffering videos during any part of the show, especially a climax moment. What Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do in the case of greater internet usage is that they lower bandwidth to counteract internet congestion. Time for VPN to shine again. 

What a VPN does is an enhanced level of encryption through which a steady bandwidth is maintained. The servers allocate a certain bandwidth to themselves, but it does not lower your streaming experience in any way. This feature even is best during live gaming. 

Public Wi-Fi access with protection

Not many may be aware of this publicly accessible Wi-Fi is both good and bad. You run the risk of having your data exposed on a public router. For all those freelancers who prefer coffee shop ambiance, this could spell trouble for your work. But this is what VPNs were made for in the first place. 

VPNs give you pure control of your data and your user logs are never saved. So pure anonymity is maintained, and you get to avail some great public Wi-Fi. It protects you from any cyberattack lurking in public browsers and whatnot. 

The best releases of Netflix on your watchlist

Many users are happy with the watchlist they have in their area. Some argue about releases not being in their regions. For example, The Office is exclusively available on US Netflix and not for some regions. If you’re a paying customer, you deserve to watch the mockumentary just as much as a USA citizen does. 

VPNs give you the ability to stream the newest releases, the best of different regions, all on your device. Gone are the days, where a new release does not reach your watchlist. You simply must know the region in which the new release happened, use your VPN to change locations to that region, and stream away! 

Multiple device access

It’s not always that you have the usual laptop or phone to stream your favorite content. New devices are rolling in the market like new gaming consoles, Smart TVs, etc. that also stream Netflix. Luckily, VPNs are just an app download away from influencing your watchlist.

The most popular VPN services have rolled out their apps for the Google Play Store and App Store. For a smart TV, it might be difficult to have VPN apps, which is why it can externally be connected to the router. It is a little tricky, but it does the work. Through this, you can get multiple device access to the best content to stream. 

Conclusion

These 6 reasons give you even more ideas to have a VPN subscription for 2022. Not only does it influence your streaming world, but it also slowly making strides in the world of gaming and music.

Be sure to have a premium VPN ready for the new year and do not resort to the free options. So, pick a VPN for yourself, get subscribed, and have a happy streaming experience in 2022.