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.