TechCabal Daily – Kenya, Zimbabwe simplify investing, for the masses

Breaking it down: This means that anyone from the comfort of their home can now buy and own a piece of Econet Zimbabwe Wireless, for example, if there’s a seller. Econet is currently worth about $12 billion.

This news reminds me of that time Ghanaians were able to buy MTN shares using mobile money.

Big deal? Buying stocks can seem super complicated especially if you use brokers. I bought some shares during my university days through a group of students who were brokers. It’s been more than 9 years and although it wasn’t a lot of money, I am not sure what happened to my shares.

The ZSE platform is expected to make it easy to buy and track your shares similar to many investment & wealth management apps today. In Zimbabwe, ZSE isn’t the first to offer a direct trading solution although one user claims its user interface is better. Also, it gives people an alternative to C-Trade, the only other major option.

According to TechZim, ZSE said it created the platform based on a survey that showed that not many of its residents were buying shares. Survey respondents said the process was too complicated and that they didn’t fully understand why they should buy shares. Only 7,000 out of 14 million Zimbabweans owned shares in 2018.

More importantly; Zimbabwe is experiencing its worst economic crisis in more than a decade. Its annualized inflation is approaching 1000%. Poverty is also rising in the country. Extreme poverty in 2019 is estimated to have doubled its level in 2011.

Investment options such as stocks are one way to make money over a long period of time. But one question might be; how will people get the money to invest? Also, making money from
stocks requires some degree of specialized knowledge.

What’s this? The gist is that they have gotten some money to increase their capacity to serve their clients. Their clients are typically big tech companies or organizations who have a large customer base or data.

They got the money from a $250 million fund, focused on data centres, that was established by Actis and Convergence Partner. Actis previously invested in Rack Centre in March.

So? Well, for one, data centres are where the media (e.g. videos, music) we consume on the internet are stored. As more internet companies like Netflix launch in African markets, using local data centres such as Rack Centre
and MainOne means that your videos could load faster because they are closer to you.

Many big tech companies are already opening data centres in Africa. Amazon Web Services opened its first-ever African data centre last year, likewise Microsoft Azure. Investors such as Actis are anticipating a rise in the demand for data and cloud services in Africa.