👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Nigeria to treat electricity as fundamental right

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OmniRetail taps ex-Jumia man Steve Dakayi to lead expansion

B2B e-commerce companies in Africa endure all kinds of business winter; some don’t make it out. But one company is striking new records. 

OmniRetail, a pan-African B2B e-commerce company, is expanding its play into Francophone Africa. Joining that drive is ex-Jumia man, Steve Dakayi, who led commerce and fulfilment at the latter B2C e-commerce company.

Four years after its launch in 2019, OmniRetail became a profitable business in a niche market few others have failed. Today, it makes over $139 million in revenue digitising the FMCG distribution value chain. It also records an impressive 5% in net contribution margins; for every $10 it spends, and makes back $0.5—impressive for a battered B2B e-commerce market.

By maintaining an asset-light model and providing credit to informal retailers, OmniRetail helps these retailers stock products faster.

Lack of access to credit and difficulty getting their stocks on time haunt retail businesses. Through OmniRetail’s products, they get credit access to buy in bulk and get their order delivered in 24 hours.

On the supply side, OmniRetail acts as a central hub for retailers, aggregating their orders. By buying in bulk, OmniRetail secures lower prices from suppliers, which it then shares with the retailers, making the platform more attractive to them.

The company operates in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, and is looking to expand to Francophone Africa, starting from Ivory Coast.

To lead that charge, it has turned to one man with experience leading FMCG chain distribution in this region; Steve Dakayi. Dakayi, who previously founded a similar B2B e-commerce supply-side company, BetaStore, will head OmniRetail’s Ivory Coast business.

Read Moniepoint’s 2024 Informal Economy Report

Did you know that 57.7% of the business owners in Nigeria’s informal economy are under 34 years old? Click here to find out more about the demographics of Nigeria’s informal economy.

Bolt blocks accounts involved in prank orders

When developing applications, product managers usually anticipate potential edge cases that arise from user behaviours or misuse of features. Nothing may have prepared Bolt’s product team for the misuse of its inter-country ride requests feature yesterday.

While the feature allowed for the convenience of helping someone book a ride across international borders, several videos on X (formerly Twitter) showed South African users booking rides from Nigerian drivers without the intention to follow through. 

In retaliation, several Nigerians also began ordering rides from South African drivers and then cancelling those rides leaving the drivers stranded. 

“I drove from Cape Town to Stellenbosch to pick up a customer only to realise it was a fake request,” one Cape Town-based driver told TechCabal. “That’s almost 50km worth of fuel gone because of internet jokes.”

To curb the mess, Bolt put a restriction on the accounts of users perpetuating the act. At this time, the inter-country feature is also turned off for users on Bolt.

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MTN may still be having a word or two with the Osun State government, but the telco company, alongside others operating in Nigeria, will heave a sigh of relief this week. President Bola Tinubu has approved a gazette urging the public to desist from destroying telco infrastructure, such as fibre-optic cables, data centres, and cell towers.

The unreleased gazette lumps up the act as vandalism, an offence punishable by jail term.

Vandalism of public property has become a pandemic in Nigeria. In the last 5 years, the government has lost billions of naira to the destruction of rail, oil, electricity, and telco infrastructure. While it has tried to correct this behaviour by handing jail terms and even mulling over the death penalty punishment in the past, telcos will be happy to see this being strongly enforced to reduce how much they spend on repairs.

In 2023, telcos spent at least $23 million fixing damaged cables.

With Nigeria’s interest preserved in the broadband project, it is working on, it makes sense that the government is intensifying its efforts to protect the 90,000km of fibre optic cables it wants to lay.

In July, the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) said that electricity consumption was not a fundamental right that could be challenged. 

Although access to electricity is not exactly specified as a fundamental human right by the United Nations, it is implied within human rights frameworks in countries like India and China. The right to health, education, and standard of living are all dependent on electricity.

As Nigeria plays catch up with the rest of the world, the country’s Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, announced yesterday that electricity will now be treated as a fundamental human right.

Nigeria has historically struggled with power supply. Most Nigerians receive between 1 and 9 hours of power supply daily. Only 1% of the country’s population receives 24 hours of electricity daily. These figures dwarf the average power supply of countries where electricity is implied as a basic human right.

Making electricity a basic human right means that the country will offer respite to Nigerians who use generators to meet their electricity needs. 40% of Nigerian households spend $14 billion annually to fuel their generators as the country’s grid remains unreliable, according to a Stears report. 

A push to make electricity a fundamental human right will help the government ramp up efforts on fixing its decade-long power distribution problem, making power accessible for all. 

The question the honourable minister is yet to answer though is how. While the minister’s announcement is a positive step, the government has yet to outline a clear plan to address the country’s longstanding power supply challenges and deliver on this ambitious promise.

This week, Ghana and Uganda-focused credit lender Fido raised its Series B. FMO invested $10 million in direct equity (from MASSIF) in FIDO’s Series B capital raise. (August 20)

Here’s the other deal for the week:

• Waza, a Nigerian-based payment and liquidity platform, secured $8 million in equity and debt funding. The funding includes a $3m seed equity round from Y Combinator, Byld Ventures, Norrsken Africa, Heirloom VC, Plug and Play Tech Center, Olive Tree Capital, and others. Additionally, a $5m debt funding was secured from Timon Capital. (August 19)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go, our State of Tech in Africa H1 2024 Report is out. Click this link to download it.