TechCabal Daily – The importance of SafeTea 🔐

QUICK FIRE 🔥 WITH MOULAYE TABOURÉ

Moulaye Tabouré is the CEO and Co-founder of Afrikrea, a digital marketplace promoting inclusion and accessibility to African fashion, crafts, arts, and culture. 

Moulaye, explain your job to a six-year-old? 

I help people, especially women that create African culture products, to sell them around the world, saving them time and money. 

What has been the most important business decision of your career? 

My most important business decision was to change our entire business model in the middle of the pandemic. This required us to cut our main revenue source (commissions) in half and bet that our clients needed our services enough to commit to paying monthly! 

Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your 18-year-old self? 

To not waste so much time trying to improve what I wasn’t good at but rather focus on getting even better at what I enjoyed and showed great results at.

What are you currently reading or watching? 

I am currently reading the PayPal story that shows the insides of this incredible odyssey full of amazing personalities. As we are currently fundraising, I am also watching episode after episode of Shark Tank to get in the mood! 

If you did not have to sleep, how would you spend the extra hours? 

Hmmm, great question! I imagine doing more of what I love: talking to our customers (we are lucky they are global, so it is always daytime somewhere) and analysing our numbers to figure out more insights to support our growth.

How has your company adjusted to the pandemic? 

We were lucky that our seller community renewed and reinforced their trust in us after we changed our business model. Our sales grew to more than twice the volume before the pandemic and our revenue grew 5 times as we supported our sellers everywhere – not only on our marketplace. And that is only the beginning! 

THE IMPORTANCE OF SAFETEA

You see, I’ve always thought that the fastest way to get people to learn new things is to write it into a song (🎵 hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium🎵 ) or code it into a game. 

So imagine how excited I was when we found Digital Safe-Tea, a new interactive fiction game geared towards providing African women with tips on digital safety. 

Developed by Paradigm Initiative and Pollicy, Digital SafeTea is a pick-your-adventure game where players experience digital threats like zoom bombing, misrepresentation or revenge porn, and get tips on how best to react to these situations.

What’s the tea on this?

If you frequent Twitter, you may remember a Twitter boycott led by women earlier this year, in April. A similar one was held in 2017 and the reason isn’t far-fetched: women aren’t safe on-site, or online. 

According to Amnesty International, one problematic tweet is sent to women every thirty seconds. This report also espouses that at least 52% of young women and girls have experienced some form of abuse online, and black women are more likely to be targets of these online abuses. 

From doxxing which involves sharing private information of women online, to revenge porn, bullying, and even death threats, there’s a lot of vitriol directed at women online. A study by Pollicy showed that 80% of women secure their online safety by changing passwords only. 

Platforms like Digital SafeTea – a play-on-words on the word “Safety” and “Tea” – help teach African women how to respond to these difficult situations, and what else they can do to ensure online safety. 

How does it work?

First, you pick your character: Goitse, Dami, or Aisha. 

Through the storylines of these characters, players are presented with different threatening scenarios where they are nudged to select the right responses to advance to the next stage.

As players weave through the maze of threats, they are presented with lessons on how to navigate such threats in real life. Players are also directed to sites and toolkits where they can get further learning on their desired topic.

Read more in Koromone’s review of Digital SafeTea

WHAT WILL BE HAPPENING AT THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE?

OPPORTUNITIES

Seedstars is calling for applications from creative minds, democracy experts, programmers, and graphic/web designers for the Digital Democracy Challenge. 

The Challenge is a global hackathon that aims to develop innovative solutions which strengthen and enhance digital democracy for citizens living under strict cyber restrictions and control. The top three solutions will be awarded with $10K USD for first place, $8K USD for second, and $6K USD for third.

Learn more about the challenge here.

HOW ABOKI AFRICA RUNS ITS ONLINE FOREX SERVICE

In 2019, Idorenyin Obong had a problem. 

“I wanted to pay my rent with the money but I had saved up in US dollars,” he says. “I remember spending most of my day trying to convert USD to Naira.” To solve this problem, Idorenyin employed the services of one of the numerous money changers in Lagos. 

Today,it would be hard for Idorenyin to find a money changer due to the ban on sale of foreign currencies to money changers by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)

Idorenyin knows many other Nigerians will face the difficulty of finding reliable money changers. It’s why he partnered with Joseph Aghedo to found Aboki Africa.

Aboki Africa offers digital foreign bank accounts and foreign exchange services to Nigerians via its web-based platform. The platform was launched in 2020 as an online money exchange service. Users can transfer foreign currencies from domiciliary accounts to their Aboki accounts in exchange for naira and vice versa.

What’s catchy about this solution is the price tag? Aboki Africa charges a 1% fee on every transaction with a cap at ₦3,000 (around $6).

Read more in Michael Ajifowoke’s Aboki Africa charges 1% fee on its online forex service

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU

Timi: Personally, I’m not a big risk taker so it would all depend on a lot of things including work culture, growth opportunities, other benefits, & quite importantly, how low is low?👀

Would you do it?

TC INSIGHTS: FUNDING TRACKER

This week, Nigerian fintech OPay raised $400m. It is the single-largest investment round closed by an African-based startup and marks the SoftBank Vision Fund’s first investment in an African startup.

Other participants in the round were Sequoia Capital China, DragonBall Capital, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, and 3W Capital. 

The other deals for the week are:

• Nigerian startup Suplias, raised an undisclosed amount from Atacama Ventures, Soma Capital, and other investors.

• MaxAB, an Egyptian eCommerce platform raised an additional $15m from existing investors bringing its total Series A funding to $55m, the largest ever by an Egyptian startup.

• Egyptian startup Odiggo, a digital marketplace for automotive spare parts, closed a $2.2m funding round from YC, 500 Startups, Plug and Play Ventures, Seedra Ventures, LoftyInc Capital, and Essa Al-Saleh.

• Kenyan retail-tech startup, MarketForce secured $100K from the Harambeans Prosperity Fund, an addition to its $2m pre-Series A round.

• Nigerian fintech startup Awabah raised US$120K after joining the Techstars London accelerator programme.

• South African e-health startup VitruvianMD raised $659k from Singapore-based Verge Healthtech Fund and some angel investors. 

• pawaPay, an African payments company, secured a $9m seed fund. The round was led by MSA and UK-based investment fund 88mph. Vunani Capital, Kepple Ventures, and Zagadat Capital also participated in the round. 

That’s all we’ve got this week! 

Follow TC Insights on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn for more updates on funding deals.

JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Every week, TechCabal shares job opportunities in the African ecosystem.

• Norebase – Head of Product – Africa (Remote)
• TikTok – Head of TikTok Content Operations SSA – Johannesburg, South Africa
• M-KOPA – Recruitment Intern – Kampala, Uganda
• TechSoup – Digital Marketing Coordinator – Nairobi, Kenya – Deadline: September 14
• Capitec Bank – Business Developer – Boksburg, South Africa
• Sabi Writers – Resident Writer, Resident Editor – Lagos, Nigeria – September 30

There are more opportunities here. If you’d like to share a job opening or an opportunity, please fill this form.

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