👨🏿‍🚀 TechCabal Daily - A Chella lot

10 OCTOBER, 2022

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Good morning ☀️

In our latest envy-inducing moment, we wrote about two Unilag students who went from studying in Lagos to earning £80,000 at Goldman Sachs in London.

Ezra* and Temi*—names changed for obvious reasons—are the latest guests of our Digital Nomads flagship, a weekly feature where we examine the lives and earnings of Africans who move across the world to work in Tech.

For Ezra and Temi, they spent their first years out of school interning at Goldman Sachs, and the next earning thousands of pounds as frontend engineers. Here’s their story, and how they survive on ~ £3,300 per month.

P.S If you’re a digital nomad with an exciting story to share, reach out to us by filling out this form.

In today’s edition

Crypto market
Netflix bags tourism deal in Kenya
Coachella sues Afrochella
Google Cloud partners with Syft Analytics
TC Insights: Beyond agency banking
Job opportunities

CRYPTO MARKET


Bitcoin	$19,434	+ 0.39%
Ether	$1,323	+ 0.90%
BNB	$277	+ 0.83%
Solana	$33.04	+ 1.59%
Cardano	$0.42	+ 0.74%
Name of the coin Price of the coin 24-hour percentage change		Source: CoinMarketCap

* Data as of 05:30 AM WAT, October 10, 2022.

NETFLIX BAGS TOURISM DEAL IN KENYA

Last year, Kenya’s tourism sector earned Ksh 146.51 billion ($1.2 billion), and Netflix has just bagged a deal that may see the sector earning more.

What’s up?

Last week, Netflix announced that it had signed a partnership with Kenya’s Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife. The partnership will see Netflix promote Kenya as a destination choice for travellers across the globe.

This is not the first time Kenya will be inking a deal with a foreign media company to promote tourism. In May 2015, the Kenya Tourism Board (KTB) signed a multi-million dollar deal with CNN that saw the creation of on-air and online campaigns.

Side bar: The KTB’s agreement with CNN was briefly suspended in August 2015 after CNN aired a documentary that called Kenya a “hotbed of terror” days before a visit from then-US president Barack Obama. The deal was only reinstated after CNN’s global vice executive and managing director Tony Maddox visited president Uhuru Kenyatta to apologise.

Following the deal, revenue in Kenya’s tourism industry grew from Ksh 85 billion in 2015 to Ksh 164 billion by 2019.

Netflix’s deal

Netflix’s deal—the latest tourism deal for Kenya—comes at a critical time for the sector.

The sector was hit by the pandemic with revenue declining from Ksh 164 billion in 2019, to Ksh 89 billion in 2020. In 2021, the sector recovered after lockdown protocols were lifted with Ksh 146.5 billion earned.

With Kenya’s new deal with Netflix, the sector could earn more by 2023.

This deal will see the creation of digital marketing campaigns where Netflix works with other agencies, including the Kenya Tourism Board (KTB)and Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS).

Netflix’s Director of Public Policy, Shola Sanni says: “Kenya is one of Africa’s most beautiful destinations, with compelling cultures, diverse landscapes and natural beauty to rival any in the world. We’re excited to collaborate with the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife to showcase Kenya to the world as a prime tourism destination.”

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COACHELLA SUES AFROCHELLA

Image source: Hollywood Unlocked

If you read this title and thought both words sound like exotic cheeses, then you have good taste.

Anyway, US-based music and arts festival Coachella is suing Ghana-based music festival Afrochella for copyright infringement.

What’s Afrochella infringing on?

A Chella lot.

The “Chella” name. Coachella says that Afrochella is riding on the coattails of its success. According to its organisers Goldenvoice, Afrochella is “intentionally trading on the goodwill of well-known Coachella and Chella festivals and trademarks by actively promoting music events in the United States and in Ghana using the confusingly similar mark Afrochella.”

Let’s explain. Coachella is one of the biggest music festivals in the world; it draws in about 150,000 people per day for its annual music festival which spans over two weekends. The festival has grossed about $100 million since 2016, and headlines GRAMMY-winning artists like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Arooj Aftab and Burna Boy.

Music lovers know and love Coachella, and the festival believes that Afrochella is riding that wave.

Side bar: If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, walks like a duck, then it must be a duck. This saying isn’t just about hypocrites. You can commit legal offences if you create a business that sounds or looks like an already existing or successful business. Like developing a new soft drink and naming it Bubble Up, or creating a tech publication and giving it a white text on a red-field logo and then calling it “TechCable” or “TechieCabal”. If it’s easy for the everyday man to mistake two similar-sounding businesses, then there’s infringement going on.

For Coachella, Afrochella is not only imitating Coachella by using the “Chella” name, it’s also doing graver acts by applying in Ghana to register “Coachella” as a trademark.

“Despite repeated requests from Plaintiffs, Defendants have refused to adopt their own distinctive event name, and as a result, instances of actual confusion have already appeared on social media,” the suit dated October 5 reads.

The lawsuit “seeks injunctive relief and damages for Defendants willful infringement in the United States and to protect the public here from confusion.

GOOGLE CLOUD PARTNERS WITH SYFT ANALYTICS

Last week, Google Cloud announced a collaboration with Syft Analytics, a South Africa-based financial reporting application to help it scale beyond South Africa.

The Syft Analytics tool processes significant volumes of financial data and provides insightful financial reports to accountants, financial analysts, and businesses. The platform also provides visualisations of financial data through reports that the company claims make information simple, understandable, and comprehensible to organisational staff.

Founded in 2017 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Syft Analytics has grown its customer base to 120,000 businesses in the span of five years, across markets such as South Africa, New Zealand, USA, Australia, and the UK.

Syft Analytics will leverage Google Cloud to run its online platform and application that reviews, analyses, and predicts financial data quickly.

Zoom out: We may see many more African businesses partnering with Google Cloud in the future. Last week, at its Google for Africa hybrid event, the company announced that it would be building its first cloud data centre in South Africa which will see the creation of 40,000 jobs by 2030.

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TC INSIGHTS: BEYOND AGENCY BANKING

As of 2019, the global density of the agent network reached an average of 228 active mobile money agents per 100,000 adults, seven times more than ATMs and 20 times more than bank branches. In Africa, there are about 460 agents per 100,000 people compared to the 6 ATMs and 5 bank branches for every 100,000 adults. The number of agents increased by an average of 7% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) in five years, making digital financial services accessible to millions across the continent.

As a result, more people now use agent networks for deposits than withdrawals. For every $3 cashed in, only $2 is cashed out. This is due to the increase in mobile phone usage on the continent. Most people log in cash via agent networks and then continue transactions via mobile money rails. While agents have doubled down on their primary aim of providing access to financial services to the underbanked, especially in rural areas, they must begin to provide more value for the last-mile users by creating robust customer profiles.

Currently, there are no data pipelines that carry nuanced operations data upstream. Usually, when users perform transactions at agent touchpoints, there is zero data collected on the users. It would be effective to pull these data from the transaction database but a lot of transactions are done by third-party account owners.

In the coming years, agency banking will be led by operators who have access to last-mile data and are able to provide customised financial services with it. Currently, most agents run other businesses on the side while providing last-mile financial services to people in their community. It is possible for them to deliver diverse digital services to the last mile. Non-fintech companies like Copia, Jumia, and IrokoTV use agents for offline distribution. Rwanda’s Irembo uses an agent network to bring government services closer to the people. Bundling these services into a network for last-mile delivery will unlock more value for agent networks.

The future of agent networks goes beyond banking. Operators who are able to pivot while keeping an eye on the initial goal of financial inclusion will win.

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

GAME: GUESS THE WORD

Can you guess today’s word? Here is a clue: “Africa”.

IN OTHER NEWS FROM TECHCABAL

South Africa’s largest venture capital fund has a diversity problem.

How Bitcoin communities in Africa are fostering Bitcoin adoption.

Purple Elephant Ventures raises $1 million in pre-seed round.

BUILD BIG WITH ENDEAVOR

Join Endeavor Nigeria on Thursday, 13 October 2022, as they host the 4th edition of their annual scale-up entrepreneurship summit, Catalysing Conversations. This year’s hybrid event, with TeamApt as the lead sponsor, is tagged “Building Big Bubbles… investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs”.

Register today at www.endeavornigeria.events.

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