👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Let’s GitStarted

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* Data as of 06:00 PM WAT, May 15, 2022.

INTO GITSTART’S MODEL

Before software engineer Hamza Zia secured the job that would serve as his ticket out of Pakistan, he had spent 6 years applying to many software engineering jobs and getting rejected. It seemed no company was willing to hire him, until Microsoft did in 2012, and he relocated to Shanghai, China, to work from their office there. 

As Zia advanced in his career and began taking on the responsibility of hiring engineers himself, he came to understand why he had been getting rejected all those years. Now, while time zone differences and language proficiency—Zia’s English wasn’t always great—had been major barriers to his getting a developer job, his biggest obstacle, back then, was that, despite having years of programming experience, he was considered a junior developer by the companies he applied to because he hadn’t yet built any active products—except for the e-commerce platform he had dropped out of secondary school in 2006 to build and run for 2 years before shutting it down due to lack of funding.

So, 7 years after his first international work opportunity, Zia, in 2019, launched a company of his own, GitStart, to address the paradox of businesses bypassing engineers with junior experience without providing them with opportunities to expand their skills. He decided to create a platform where junior software engineers could help top companies build products. 

As a pull-requests-as-a-service (PRAAS) platform, GitStart helps Silicon Valley startups build faster by sharing pieces of their task with a host of developers. This solves 2 problems: it allows startups scale faster, and helps junior engineers build the skills and experience they need to scale. 

Damilare Dosunmu has more in Does GitStart have the best model to accelerate junior engineers’ careers?

GRUPP’S PUSH FOR FINANCIAL INCLUSION IN RURAL AREAS

In many Nigerian cities, commercial and agent banks are ubiquitous and financial service delivery is robust. But when you move away from these urban centres into the rural areas, they begin to thin out or are absent altogether.

Since its Nigerian debut in 2013, agency banking has become an important part of how commercial banks serve retail customers, especially since commercial banks themselves are few and far between in rural communities. And in many rural communities, savings and credit cooperative organisations (SACCOs) and small microfinance banks (MFBs) fill in the financial gaps caused by the absence of commercial banks. However, the manual methods these local institutions employ to deliver financial services—painstakingly recording transactions with ink and paper, poor IT infrastructure—and their inability to expand to effectively serve rural areas limit how well these organisations can serve their communities.

Now Grupp, a grassroots banking-as-a-service startup, wants to help these microfinance banks, credit unions, and cooperatives digitise their processes and provides software that enables MFBs to leverage their intimate knowledge of their communities to own—not just operate—agent banks. Led by Olamide Akinbande, former Head of Growth at Nomba (formerly Kudi), a Lagos-based fintech he had helped set up their agency banking unit, Grupp provides software and white-label hardware that help small microfinance banks in rural and semi-urban communities offer financial services digitally and automate previously manual processes. 

Essentially, Grupp provides end-to-end white-label hardware (POS) and software infrastructure for financial institutions in rural areas. White label means, Grupp simply provides customised and unbranded software and hardware that other businesses rely on to create an agent banking network.

Dig deeper: Grupp offers white label infrastructure for financial inclusion in rural communities.

TC INSIGHTS: TACKLING AFRICA’S HOUSING WOES

There’s a growing concern about a lack of affordable housing in Africa. For instance, Kenya has a housing deficit of approximately 2 million homes, while more than 12 million Egyptians live in informal buildings. The situation is worse in Nigeria with a 16 million housing deficit and more than 69% of the country’s urban population living in slums.

With Africa’s fast-growing population and increasing urbanisation rate, the need for affordable housing for Africans has never been more critical.

Currently, the supply and demand sides of the housing market are mostly at variance. To unlock these vast potentials, proptech companies are leveraging the network effect of technology to solve this problem from both the demand and supply side. On the supply side, tech companies have been able to simplify the process of connecting people to properties. With just a few clicks, vetted tenants can conveniently book and pay for apartments using flexible payment options available to them. 

While tech has taken on the demand side the supply part remains a tough nut to crack. According to Naomi Olaghere, co-founder of Rent Small Small, a Lagos-based proptech company, “It will be almost impossible to bridge the deficit gap and reach the government target using our current method of building. Rapid construction technology, incentivised by the government that can deliver mass housing such as prefabricated construction systems will help achieve quick wins.”

Beyond using rapid construction technology to improve supply, some regulations need to be adopted or tweaked. Such regulations include enforcing monthly rental payments and facilitating a more viable mortgage system that gives people the opportunity of owning a home after years of paying rent.

Although technology is still expanding and is not without its shortcomings, it has been able to address and solve a lot of human errors and inefficiencies in the housing market. It will by no means solve the housing issues in their entirety but it will go a long way in redefining traditional processes from the property, landlord, and tenant management to construction concerns. 

You can download all our reports here and watch videos from our events. Send your custom research requests here.

EVENT: FINTECH WEEK LONDON

The second edition of Fintech Week London is set to take place from July 11–15, 2022. 

Fintech Week London is a week-long series of events that highlights and celebrates London’s innovative fintech scene, bringing together senior decision-makers from leading fintechs, banks, investment firms, regulatory bodies, media companies, and service providers. 

This year’s edition will feature 150 speakers including Ghela Boskovitch, founder of FemTechGlobal; Leda Glyptis, Chief Client Officer at 10x Future Technologies; and Huy Nguyen Trieu, co-founder of the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE).

The panels will also discuss several topics including the development of fintech, open banking, crypto, and digital sovereignty. 

Virtual and in-person ticket options are available from £45 ($58). You can also get a 15% discount using the code TechCabal15.

Register here.

JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Every week, we share job opportunities in the African ecosystem.

• TechCabal – Editor-in-Chief, Journalists – Lagos, Nigeria

• Big Cabal Media – Head of Events, Associate Art Director, Associate Video Editor – Lagos, Nigeria

• Flutterwave – Country Manager, Zambia; Country Manager, Morocco; Country Manager, South Africa; Country Manager, Uganda – Various locations

• Bundle Africa – Product Designer – Lagos, Nigeria

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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