Howdy.

It’s me again!

News reaching here from East Africa says Kenya’s listed companies are about to start showing their workings. The country’s capital markets regulator wants companies listed on its stock exchange to explain how they’re applying environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles rather than just saying they do. 

What’s more interesting is that bonuses tied to executives’ compensation could soon depend on hitting sustainability targets, if the proposal goes through. If you’re working in one of these companies, your key performance indicator (KPI) is about to include ‘saving the planet,’ so your CEO can earn a bigger pay cheque.

— Yemi

After paying for Netflix, Showmax, Disney+, Prime Video, Spotify, and YouTube Premium, another monthly subscription can start to feel like doing too much. But we’re not sure this streaming brand cares about the choice paralysis it is enabling.

eMedia, the South African broadcaster that operates the streaming platform eVOD, has introduced Openview Stream to the market. 

Too many subscriptions? Ditch them. Openview Stream is free to watch in Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and Mauritius. But the catch is you’ll pay with your attention instead of your wallet, because the platform is funded by advertising. Think of it as one of those… interesting streaming platforms, such as MovieBox (wink wink), that allows you to watch movies for free in exchange for sitting through and clicking on ads. 

Explain like I’m new here: Openview Stream is what’s known as a FAST service—Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV. Netflix, except you don’t pay a subscription fee. Instead, advertisers pick up the bill, and you “pay” by watching commercials between live TV channels and on-demand shows. Right as the detective is about to reveal the killer, don’t be surprised if a shampoo commercial—or an M-PESA advert in Kenya—decides it deserves a few seconds of your attention first. That’s the trade-off, and it’s also the business model. 

It’s a model that’s gaining traction globally as more people grow tired of paying for multiple streaming subscriptions every month.

Curious little thing: South Africa isn’t on the launch list. That’s a bit like KFC opening everywhere except Kentucky. eMedia already operates eVOD in its home market, which crossed 2.2 million subscribers in February and offers more than 9,000 hours of content. Rather than running two similar products side by side, Openview Stream appears to be its vehicle for expanding into the rest of Africa, while eVOD stays focused on South Africa.

Zoom out: In South Africa, pay-TV subscribers are declining, and this is affecting platforms such as MultiChoice’s DStv. eMedia has found relative success by leaning into the free streaming market. eVOD grew its registered user base by 22% year-on-year to more than 2.2 million and increased watch time by 56% in 2025. 

Platforms such as Indian-founded SportyTV are also offering free-to-air football content, which, while still limited compared to DStv’s sports catalogue, was largely exclusive to MultiChoice. Openview Stream takes that playbook beyond South Africa, backing the idea that across much of Africa, watching a few adverts is easier to justify than paying for yet another monthly subscription. 

One more branch-opening for OPPO, the Chinese smartphone company, another big win for the Egyptian government, which has spent years trying to convince global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including car and phone-makers, to build and sell their devices locally.

As an Egyptian using an OPPO smartphone—the data says nearly one in five smartphone users do—you can now walk into a local OPPO store in Benha.

Explain like I’m new here: Egypt has spent the past few years pushing smartphone makers to manufacture locally instead of relying on imports. In 2023, OPPO first opened a factory in 10th of Ramadan City, Cairo, joining companies like Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Nokia, which all assembled smartphones locally at the time, giving Egypt one of Africa’s deepest smartphone manufacturing ecosystems. 

Its new hub in Benha will serve the Egyptian smartphone market, a huge market for OPPO, and export destinations, part of Cairo’s plan to turn the country into a regional electronics manufacturing hub rather than just a consumer market.

Between the lines: Local production helps companies sidestep import bottlenecks, respond faster to demand, and benefit from government incentives created to establish Egypt as a regional electronics manufacturing hub. Egypt produced 10 million smartphones in 2025, up from just 3 million two years earlier, and wants to reach 15 million this year. 

Why OPPO keeps expanding: OPPO is one of Egypt’s biggest smartphone brands, only behind Samsung and Xiaomi as of June 2026. A factory only makes sense if people can buy what it produces, so expanding its retail footprint is the other half of the strategy. 

Zoom out: Egypt wants to become more than a market where smartphone brands sell devices; it wants to become a place where they make them too. OPPO’s new Benha store is the consumer-facing end of that strategy. The phones on its shelves will come from an Egyptian factory, not a shipping container. That’s a model few African countries have managed to build at scale. 

If you’ve ever paid for home Internet in Nairobi, Kenya, then you probably know Zuku, the broadband and pay-TV brand that held over 40% of Kenya’s fixed Internet market in 2016. 

At the peak of Zuku’s fame, it was the brand that wired middle-class Nairobi. But by the time Safaricom, the country’s largest telecom operator, launched home fibre in May 2026, Zuku had begun to lose its grip. And by the time other cheaper competitors strolled into the market, Zuku’s share had already tanked to 12.7% by June 2025. 

Later that year, in November 2025, Yas, the pan-African telecoms arm of Madagascar-based AXIAN Telecom, acquired Wananchi Group, Zuku’s parent company, for $63 million. 

On Monday, Yas, Zuku’s new owner, raised €270 million ($307 million) to reclaim the glory the former market leader lost.

What’s happened: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a development bank that finances private sector projects across emerging markets, has committed €170 million ($193 million) to support Yas’s operations in Kenya and Senegal, with another €100 million ($113 million) available for future acquisitions. In Kenya, the money will modernise the fibre network Yas inherited from Wananchi. In Senegal, it will fund the rollout of 4G, 5G, and fibre infrastructure, according to Yas. 

The EBRD facility includes a local-currency tranche denominated in Kenyan Shillings, making it the first EBRD local-currency financing in sub-Saharan Africa.

Explain like I’m new here: Yas serves 43.8 million subscribers across 11 markets and generated $1.69 billion in revenue in 2025. The Wananchi acquisition gave Yas over one million homes passed with fibre across East Africa, but the infrastructure needs investment to compete. The EBRD loan, which follows a $160 million AfDB facility approved in 2025, gives Yas the capital to do that at a moment when Kenya’s broadband market is more competitive than it has been in a decade.

Zoom out: Safaricom holds 34.3% of Kenya’s fixed broadband market and built it while Zuku declined. A well-capitalised Yas is a different competitor from the one that lost ground for a decade. The question now is whether Yas can deploy €270 million ($307 million) to rebuild the infrastructure fast enough to bring back those customers it lost.

Court dramas may have made you think that rulings are about who wins or loses or who has to pay up. Well, sometimes they become the answer that regulators and judges reach for the next time something similar happens. Kenya has just added another one to that pile.

What happened? Kenya’s High Court has ruled that Diamond Trust Bank (DTB), a mid-tier lender, and Safaricom, the country’s largest telecom, were both responsible after fraudsters stole KES 4.4 million ($34,000) from a customer’s account following a SIM swap attack.

Quick story time: Fraudsters hijacked Mercy Wairimu Kariuki’s phone number through a SIM swap. A SIM swap happens when fraudsters trick or convince a mobile operator to transfer your phone number to a SIM card they control. Once they have your number, they can receive your one-time passwords (OTPs) and access accounts linked to your phone. 

Kariuki reported the suspicious activity to Safaricom almost immediately and even had her line restored, but by the next morning, millions of shillings had disappeared from her DTB account through a series of mobile banking transfers.

The court ruled that Safaricom shouldn’t have allowed the SIM swap to happen after the warning, while DTB should have recognised that the rapid succession of unusual transactions looked nothing like the customer’s normal behaviour. Both companies had independent responsibilities, but dropped the ball.

Explain like I’m new here: It’s great that Kariuki got her money back through the court’s ruling, but this will now become the legal standard that other banks and telecom operators may now be judged by. Courts regularly rely on earlier decisions when deciding new disputes. If a future SIM swap case lands before another Kenyan court, judges can point to this ruling and ask if operators did due diligence.

Why should you care? SIM fraud is one of the most common ways criminals break into bank and mobile money accounts of unsuspecting users. In 2022, Safaricom said that disclosed that SIM-swap fraud cost customers about $4 million. This judgment increases the cost of getting security wrong for operators. Banks could invest more heavily in fraud detection, while telecom operators may tighten SIM replacement procedures. That benefits customers because stronger safeguards and multiple fail-safes keep security intact.