The money hasn’t left Africa. It has simply become much harder to convince. Institutional investors are no longer asking whether the continent holds promise; they want to know how that promise is being captured, measured and converted into liquidity. Two fund managers — Anza, based in Johannesburg, and Farmties Capital — agreed to describe what...

A payments stack that clears transactions in Lagos will not necessarily clear them in Nairobi. What performs in Accra can stall in Kampala. That fragmentation is the wall most companies hit when they try to scale across the continent — and it is precisely the market Tola Mobile has chosen to occupy. The payments infrastructure...

Ask a hundred founders whether they are investor ready and ninety will show you a deck. Fifteen slides, a chart bending up and to the right, a market size with eleven digits. The document is clean. It proves nothing. A deck describes what a company wants to be. Investor readiness describes what it is —...