👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Will your inDriver get health insurance?

Happy pre-TGIF. ☀️️

More and more gig workers are getting health insurance as a perk, from Bolt to Chowdeck and now inDrive. As the gig economy expands, will the addition of perks make it more attractive? We’d see.

Canal+, the French media giant that bought MultiChoice, is preparing to list its shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) within the first half of 2026. The company already trades in London, but this second listing will allow South African investors to buy its stock locally.

Why Canal+ is leaning into Africa: After acquiring MultiChoice, the combined group now reaches over 42 million subscribers across more than 70 countries. Canal+ believes that the number could grow dramatically, and Africa is looking like a goldmine. In 2025, the company’s pay-TV operations in French-speaking African markets recorded some of their strongest subscriber growth in more than a decade

The Multichoice problem and the €100 million ($116 million) solution: In 2025, the pay-TV product lost about 500,000 subscribers, while revenue and profits declined. Canal+ has acknowledged this challenge and plans to pump €100 million ($116 million) in fresh capital into the business. The strategy to build the subscriber count back includes combining local productions with global partnerships, cheaper entry packages, and stronger content offerings.

What is Canal+ up to? Between the JSE listing, the capital injection into MultiChoice, and shutting down Showmax, Canal+ is doubling down on Africa and is unafraid to take out experiments that are not delivering. Instead of trying to run everything separately, the media giant appears to be streamlining its operations in the ecosystem.

Kenya’s largest bank by assets, KCB Group, is acquiring a stake in Pesapal, a regional payments company. But the deal isn’t final yet; KCB says it is waiting for regulatory approval before it can complete the acquisition. The value of the stake is yet to be disclosed.

What KCB gains: Pesapal’s payment infrastructure spans Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Zambia, connecting thousands of merchants across sectors. If money is moving through a checkout button or a point-of-sale (POS) terminal in East Africa, companies like Pesapal are often doing the work behind the scenes. Buying into Pesapal gives KCB direct access to merchants served by Pesapal and allows the bank to offer more services to them.

Didn’t KCB just buy another fintech? In January 2026, KCB received approval from the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) to acquire a 75% stake in Riverbank Solutions, a local payments solutions provider.

Why are banks suddenly buying fintechs? A valuable part of financial services is owning the rails where money moves. This is not peculiar to KCB. In 2025, South Africa’s Nedbank acquired fintech, iKhoka. For traditional banks, acquiring fintech infrastructure is faster than building it from scratch, and it allows them to compete directly in the ecosystems those fintechs have already built.

Gig work in Nigeria rarely comes with health insurance, so inDrive is trying to bolt one on. The ride-hailing company has partnered with Nigerian healthtech startup Heala to let its top-tier Platinum drivers buy health plans directly inside the inDrive app, starting from about ₦1,300 ($1) a month.

On paper, it is a tidy fix for a real problem. Drivers are treated as independent contractors, so they spend long hours in traffic with no employer benefits and little time to queue at hospitals, meaning access often gets delayed until things are serious. With this integration, eligible drivers can talk to licenced doctors via chat, voice, or video, get prescriptions, pick up drugs at partner pharmacies, and arrange tests or specialist visits; annual plans come with in-person hospital visits baked in, and dependents can be added so spouses and children are covered too.

The move fits a broader pattern. Bolt has worked with platforms like Flance to get drivers discounted care, and Chowdeck recently rolled out accident insurance for over 20,000 riders through MyCoverGenius. Everyone is converging on the same insight: if your business runs on fleets of informal workers, you cannot ignore their health and income shocks forever. 

The open question is whether a ₦1,300 ($1) entry plan meaningfully shifts outcomes for drivers at scale, or whether this ends up as a niche perk for the most active cohort while the bulk of gig workers remain one medical emergency away from dropping out of the platform entirely.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade