Tyme's up for Pick n Pay

The African Development Bank (AfDB), a development finance institution (DFI), has approved a €6.5 million ($7.6 million) investment into Saviu II, a venture capital (VC) fund operated by Saviu Ventures, an early-stage investor backing startups in Francophone West and Central Africa.

In 2025, Saviu stood out as one of the few VC firms that publicly announced exits in two startups, pan-African eyewear startup Lapaire, and Ivorian digital freight operator Kamtar, despite the low liquidity exits on the continent.

What is Saviu’s fund going to achieve? Saviu II will invest between €500,000 ($584,000) and €3 million ($3.5 million) into about 20 startups at the seed stage, with a smaller allocation carved out for pre-seed deals. The fund is directing at least 60% of its capital into countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Mali. 

It will also consider East African startups, but only if they have serious expansion plans into Francophone markets. The first investment vehicle of the fund manager, Saviu I, was launched in 2018 with a capitalisation of €10 million ($11.6 million).

Wait, aren’t DFIs quieter right now? Over the past years, funding from DFIs has slowed down, and Africa’s venture capital fundraising fell from its 2021 peak. The timing of AfDB's funding matters because, although African startups raised more in 2025, the drop in deal count suggests that investors have become more selective.

So, if private capital is concentrating in familiar markets, and global liquidity is tighter, this DFI's entry into seed-stage startups in less familiar markets looks intentional.

What does this mean? Early-stage capital will enable new founders in Francophone West and Central Africa to survive long enough to prove traction, strengthening the region's tech ecosystem and making it harder to ignore. Now, when people talk about tech in Africa, the conversations may not just be concentrated on the Big Four.

TymeBank, the South African digital retail bank that rebranded to GoTyme Bank in February 2026, is packing up its kiosks from Pick n Pay stores by the end of March 2026. Instead, it’s rolling out dedicated customer hubs inside malls.

End of a seven-year relationship: TymeBank’s early story was retail banking without traditional branches. Since 2019, Pick n Pay stores, owned and operated by the South African retail giant, have acted as mini onboarding centres, where customers could open an account while shopping for groceries. 

Shoppers also earned Smart Shopper points for transactions made with a GoTyme Bank card. Now, that chapter is closing.

Why leave the supermarket? TymeBank says times, seasons, and banking behaviour have changed. When Tymebank launched in 2019, physical kiosks inside grocery stores made sense because foot traffic was guaranteed and digital trust was still growing. Seven years later, customers are banking digitally, and people do not want banking customer support on the grocery aisle. Plus, the bank just launched a new digital banking app in February 2026.

Tymebank will now use malls in South Africa as dedicated physical centres to issue debit cards and offer customer support, while enabling users to still access cash deposits and withdrawals at Pick n Pay stores. It's not quite a typical bank branch play, but it signals that Tymebank still recognises the role physical stores play to grow customer trust in an increasingly digital world.

What does this mean? Pick n Pay still hosts nearly 11 financial partners, including Absa, Bidvest, Capitec, Standard Bank and others. But as digital payments grow and onboarding moves online, banks may start rethinking how much physical retail real estate they truly need.

Vodacom's parent company, Vodafone, has signed an agreement with Amazon Leo, Amazon's satellite broadband constellation formerly known as Project Kuiper, to connect remote 4G and 5G base stations across Europe and Africa without laying fibre. The rollout will start in Germany this year and other European countries, then expand across Africa through Vodacom.

The interesting bit is the hedging. In November 2025, Vodacom signed what it called a transformative deal with Starlink for basically the same thing: satellite backhaul to extend rural coverage and enterprise broadband services across Africa. 

Now the parent company has brought Amazon Leo to the table, too. Vodacom, with its vast reach of over 223 million telecom subscribers across eight African markets, will enable both satellite internet companies to achieve scale. 

The timing matters for another reason. Amazon Leo secured a landing permit for Nigeria in January, valid for seven years, and is angling for South Africa next. Meanwhile, Africa's telecom operators are in a quiet arms race over who locks down satellite partnerships first. MTN is testing direct-to-device calls with Lynk Global. Telkom South Africa is shopping for its own LEO partner. 

Operators are now recognising the same thing: laying fibre to every village in Sub-Saharan Africa is not going to happen, and the operator that solves last-mile backhaul cheapest wins the next 100 million subscribers.

MTN Ghana, the subsidiary of the African telecom giant, has reported full-year 2025 results, with profit after tax jumping 55.9% to about GH₵7.8 billion ($727 million) on surging data and mobile money usage, reinforcing West Africa as MTN Group’s growth engine. But the numbers are almost beside the point. The real story is what is happening around MTN in a market it has effectively swallowed whole. 

A major threat: Ghana’s government is so spooked by MTN’s nearly 79% market share that it is merging its two surviving competitors, Telecel Ghana and state-owned AT Ghana, into a single operator backed by roughly $600 million in public funding, just to field a credible challenger. Telecel is throwing in a $70 million network upgrade with Huawei. It is the telecom equivalent of two lightweight boxers standing on each other’s shoulders to fight a heavyweight. 

MTN is not standing still. The parent group has elevated Ghana to “major subsidiary” status alongside Nigeria and South Africa, a label that unlocks a $1.1 billion capital spending plan and turns Accra into a test bed for AI-driven fraud detection in mobile money. The timing is sharp. On February 25, the Ghanaian government said it would auction 5G spectrum through a competitive process, with a target of 70% population coverage by 2027, after ditching an exclusivity deal. MTN wants that spectrum. 

The bigger signal: West African telecom operators are no longer just selling voice and data. With mobile money transactions in Ghana reaching about GH₵3.6 trillion ($335.7 billion) in the first ten months of 2025, they are building financial infrastructure. MTN’s headstart there may be the hardest thing for any merged rival to match.