Good morning, people!

Reports out of South Africa say the website of the country’s ruling party, the ANC, was taken down due to unpaid bills. The ANC says it does not owe anyone any money and the website is down because they are “revamping” it but it also turns out the website domain is owned by the same company the ANC denies having anything to do with. Welp.  

How We Made It In Africa did an interview with Katlego Maphai, co-founder and CEO of South Africa-based fintech startup Yoco. The startup recently raised $16 million in a Series B funding round led by VC firm Partech Ventures. 

Multichoice-owned DSTV has announced that it is killing DSTV Mobile, its digital video broadcasting format offering, on October 31, 2018 saying it is no longer feasible. It has already stopped billing customers. 

Changing places: Sylvia Mulinge has rejoined Safaricom as Director of Special Projects starting October 1, 2018. She previously left to head Vodacom Tanzania. 

Zambia-based tech and innovation hub Bongo Hive has announced the nine startups that it selected to join the eighth cohort of its six-month long Launch Accelerator.

Solar financing company, SunFunder, has raised $25 million in funding from Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). The money will go to its Solar Energy Transformation (“SET”) Fund which has a target fund size of $85 million.  

In the coming months, Uber will be making street segment level speeds data free and publicly available per an announcement from the company. The speeds data is aggregated and anonymized from billions of Uber trips across the globe.

Techzim did a report on how much Zimbabwean banks charge for POS transactions. The country is fast becoming cashless with POS transactions being one of the mainstays. According to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, cash was responsible for only 2.05% of all monetary transactions while USD has largely disappeared from the official markets.

Libya Crowdfunder, Libya’s first crowdfunding startup and platform has launched. Disrupt Africa has the gist.

Google celebrated the 20th anniversary of Search across the world on Wednesday, September 26, 2018 and I was at the Lagos celebration. Some fun numbers: 15% of searches every day are new, Google has indexed over 130 trillion web addresses so far, The Knowledge Graph is available in 46 languages and Google’s average query response time is roughly a quarter of a second – the average blink of an eye is a tenth of a second. Check out pictures from the event here.

Data Science Nigeria (DSN) will hold its annual summit and bootcamp on October 10 at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos. The event will be themed “New Algorithms for the Financially Excluded Segment” and people like Adebisi Shonubi, MD/CEO, NIBSS; Dr (Mrs) Yinka David-West, Director, Lagos Business School; Matt Grasser, Director, Inclusive Fintech, Bankable Frontiers Associate, USA; Temitope Akin-Fadeyi and Head Financial Inclusion Secretariat, Central Bank of Nigeria; Ekow Duker will be there. Registration and deets here.

If you’re a Product Designer, UX/UI Designer, Interaction Designer, Graphic Artist, Illustrator in Nigeria, Cokards Creative Agency is organising an event at Workstation on October 13, 2018 by 11AM.  Deets and registration here. 

From TechCabal

+ Logistics Is Hard in Nigeria And Tech-Enabled Interstate Logistics Is Non-Existent

+ HydroPower Dominates Africa’s Renewables But Over 80% Of Its Potential Remains Untapped