Africa

1. Why Africa needs ‘big exits’
2. Nigeria’s new commander
3. Bitcoin mining in Ethiopia
4. $600M maternal health fund
5. Investing in nature
6. China’s DR Congo bets

The scholar who challenged Western accounts of Africa.

Africa’s investors need ‘big exits’

Africa’s startup ecosystem needs a surge of “big exits” to help grow the available pool of investors and capital, a top official at the World Bank’s private investment arm told a summit of venture capitalists in Lagos.

Investors realizing returns on their high-profile bets will create the “watershed moments” needed to accelerate the venture capital industry, said Shruti Chandrasekhar, head of the Africa private equity division at the International Finance Corporation. She argued that this process would enable VCs to pump more capital into the ecosystem to make new bets and would boost confidence in the market.

African startups raised $2.2 billion in 2024 across equity, debt, and grants, excluding exits, according to Africa: The Big Deal, a consultancy that tracks fundraising. A total of 188 ventures raised $1 million or more while 22 public exits were recorded. Earlier this month, the CEO of Flutterwave, Africa’s most valuable unicorn which has raised nearly $500 million, said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of selling the fintech company to a larger player.

Nigeria’s new military commander

Nigeria appointed a new military commander in its fight against insurgencies in the country’s northeast amid growing attacks by jihadi groups. A regional governor warned of a major comeback by Boko Haram and its splinter rival, the Islamic State West Africa Province, as they make territorial gains. Major General Abdulsalam Abubakar will be the 15th commander aiming to end a conflict that has raged for as many years. Analysts told Reuters the groups were becoming “bolder” and using increasingly sophisticated technologies including armed drones, suggesting they were receiving more funding from the Islamic State’s central leadership. The spiraling violence has heaped pressure on Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who vowed to solve the country’s security challenges during his 2023 election campaign.

Mining bitcoin in Ethiopia

Abu Dhabi-based crypto company Phoenix Group added 52 megawatts of mining capacity in Ethiopia, months after setting up shop there this year, taking advantage of the country’s openness to providing power for bitcoin mining. The company will draw 90% of the power for its facilities from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, raising Phoenix’s capacity in the country to 132 MW. At the end of last year, about 18% of monthly sales by Ethiopia’s power utility went to bitcoin miners: They “have a lot of money to invest, and we need lots of money to develop our grid, so it’s a win-win,” one executive at the utility recently said. The new injection of power from Ethiopia will raise Phoenix’s global crypto mining capacity to 500 MW, solidifying the group as one of the world’s top bitcoin miners.

$600M fund for maternal health

A $600 million fund was launched to improve maternal and newborn health in Africa. The Beginnings Fund — a joint philanthropic commitment led by the Mohamed Bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity in the UAE — will work in partnership with up to 10 African governments. It aims to prevent over 300,000 deaths and enhance access to care for 34 million mothers and babies by 2030. The funding comes at a time when USAID cuts threaten to derail decades of progress in maternal health on the continent, and are already triggering the loss of health workers, closure of facilities, and disruptions to medicine supply chains. Nearly 70% of the estimated 260,000 global maternal deaths in 2023 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa.

Harnessing nature-based solutions

Investing in nature-based solutions such as mangroves, forests, and grasslands would help Africa become more resilient to the changing climate, a report by the World Resources Institute said. The number of projects aiming to ramp up nature-based solutions in Africa — for example creating floodplains and wetlands in Senegal, and removing invasive species in South Africa — rose by an average of 15% annually between 2012 and 2021. However, the sector faces challenges surrounding insufficient national policies and funding. Long-term sustainability in this area requires a diversity of funding sources beyond grants from multilateral development banks and donors (which currently account for the majority of financing) to include green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, carbon credits, and taxes, the report said.

China’s big DR Congo bets

The value of 19 loan commitments Chinese state-owned creditors approved for cobalt-copper mines in DR Congo between 2000 and 2021. That was a finding in a recent report about Beijing’s bid to secure minerals overseas for the transition to cleaner energy. The study tracks China’s financial commitments for extracting and processing metals including copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium across 165 low- and middle-income countries over a 22-year period.

Copper emerges as a key priority, with 83% of Beijing’s official commitments involving the metal. Some of the world’s largest cobalt and copper mines — including the Tenke Fungurume mine and the Sicomines mine — are located in DR Congo, operated by joint ventures between Chinese and Congolese state-owned enterprises. Last week Chinese electric-vehicle battery materials maker Tengyuan Cobalt said it plans to invest $134 million to build a new mineral processing plant in DR Congo to produce refined copper and cobalt.

Business & Macro

🇳🇬 Telecom company MTN Nigeria’s revenue in the first quarter rose by 40.5% year-on-year, leading to $83 million in profit after tax.

🇺🇬 Uganda raised its budget estimate for the 2025/26 fiscal year by 25% to $19.6 billion, though it remains lower than the budget of the current year that is set to run out in June.

Climate & Energy

🇿🇦 Cape Town deployed helicopters to fight wildfires that started on Friday and have burned more than 7,000 acres of vegetation.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇲🇱 Mali’s junta leader Assimi Goita is set to be handed a five-year term as president, on the recommendation of a national conference held this week that also asked for all political parties to be dissolved.

🌍 African diplomats including from Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia signed a letter to support a UK parliament bill that aims to speed up debt restructurings for developing countries.

Tech & Deals

🇬🇭 Kofa, a Ghana-based battery provider for electric vehicles, raised $8 million from E3 Capital, Injaro Investment Advisors, and Shell Foundation.

🌍 The African Development Bank Group signed a $3.2 billion exposure exchange agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank.

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, a pioneering Congolese-American philosopher, died last week aged 83. He “was among the earliest and most profound challengers of representations of Africa in global thought,” wrote Duke University, where Mudimbe was an emeritus professor of literature. Mudimbe deconstructed what he called “the colonial library” — the accounts of Africa by Europeans who, he said, sought to further colonialism. Born in Likasi, a city in the southeast of modern-day DR Congo, he went on to study and hold teaching positions in Europe and the United States, mentoring generations of scholars. “When we define ourselves, thanks to the expectation we believe that others are having of us, we are limiting, we are simplifying, the complexity of who we are,” he said in an interview in 1991. Mudimbe’s landmark books include The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa.

Some of the biggest US power companies are at odds with senior Trump administration officials on how to fill the country’s looming electricity deficit and beat China at the AI race, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell reports.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Semafor’s World Economy Summit last week that the continued use of federal tax credits to replace fossil fuels in the electric grid with renewables “would be catastrophic for our country.”

But executives of companies actually managing the delivery of power to new data centers have a more nuanced view: Even as rising trade barriers with China make some technologies more expensive, renewables plus batteries are still the cheapest and fastest way to put new electrons on the grid.

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— Alexis Akwagyiram, Preeti Jha, Alexander Onukwue, and Yinka Adegoke.