Today's guest is Kiaan Pillay, the Co-founder and CEO of Stitch. My conversation with Kiaan comes on the heels of their recent fundraising announcement, a $25 million Series A extension led by the global fintech fund Ribbit Capital, which brings their total funding raised up over $50 million since the launch of the company in 2019. In this episode, we talk to Kiaan about how they've gotten here, the intangibles of company building, their vision for the next generation of payments, and much...

Today's guest is Olugbenga Agboola, better known as the one and only GB - the Co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave.  It's been a trying last year or so for Flutterwave with issues of fraud, allegations of impropriety inside the company, regulatory hurdles, and the general challenges of scaling a fintech in a tough operating environment. Yet through it all, Flutterwave has "technology reach" in 34 countries, they've continued to ship new products beyond their core payments technology, including...

The future of work in the African context is going to be a lot of different things. It mimics the nature of work itself for many individuals on the continent. They're taking this portfolio approach to work. Even in more "developed markets" we're seeing work become less formal and more flexible, as work becomes unbundled from employment. And this evolution of work itself provides a whole set of new challenges and opportunities.  So this episode is a retrospective on the entire season, in...

There is a perception that there's a tech talent shortage in the African tech ecosystem, and that it's hard to find high-quality local talent. There has been lot of conversation around the impact and role of Big Tech in the equation, which many felt were also culprits in driving up the price of talent in local marketplaces. In an environment of talent scarcity, there's been an upward pressure on salaries for talent of a certain caliber - which Big Tech can more readily afford compared to...

We're dropping one more episode of our new show, crypto@scale, on The Flip's feed today. In this episode, we interview our first guests on what might be Africa's killer crypto app, stablecoins. According to data from Coinmetrics, cumulative Stablecoin volumes are at a $9 trillion annualized run rate, exceeding the volumes of all major card networks, except for Visa. Across the African continent, stablecoins are finding meaningful uptake, particularly in markets with low USD liquidity, or...

We interrupt this season on the future of work to drop a special episode today in The Flip’s feed. Introducing crypto@scale, a new show from The Flip, co-hosted by MFS Africa's Head of Crypto, Gwera Kiwana, and The Flip's Justin Norman. crypto@scale is a pragmatic and hopefully hype-free exploration of the crypto ecosystem across the African continent. If you enjoy this episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app or YouTube by searching for crypto@scale. We'll be...

Where there is fragmentation, informality, and a dearth of infrastructure, there are questions about what the path to formality and standardization will look like. One intriguing answer to that question is conversion franchising, where existing stores are converted into a franchise. In the future of work context, are microenterprises, their owners, and their employees better off as converted franchisees? This episode is a case study, with mPharma's Gregory Rockson. 00:00 - We begin this...

African markets are largely informal. So while our examination of workforce and training programs in the fast few episodes focused on formal and salaried jobs, we know that most Africans aren't going to get these types of jobs. So, our exploration of the future of work needs to span much further than that. Where there are no formal jobs, what does it look like to help stimulate the development of the informal sector and microenterprises? And what role does technology play? In this context,...

Throughout this season, we've heard about this disconnect between supply and demand in the labor marketplace. It's often a skills and training issue.  Even where there are jobs, there's still this disconnect between demand and supply. But what are we training people for when there are few jobs or income-generating opportunities?  In the past few episodes of this season, we've explored the talent networks, the remote work platforms, the workforce enablement programs, and the multi-stakeholder...

How do we tie interventions - whether traditional education or boot camps or training programs - to job outcomes? As we'll explore in this episode, it requires a demand-led approach and starts with employers.  In this episode, we're going to focus on the platforms doing the matching - those that are explicitly working to better connect supply and demand in the job marketplace, to achieve the employment outcomes we wish to see across the continent.  4:03 - We start our exploration on matching...

What's particularly exciting about remote work is that it's not constrained by the demand from the local market. The jobs can come from anywhere in the world. But it leaves us with a big question: why are global employers looking to hire African talent? And how can African markets take advantage of the opportunity and capture more of these jobs for its citizens? This episode is another case study, on what it looks like to develop the global business services industry in a country like South...

We know that local economies are not going to create enough jobs or income-generating opportunities for such a rapidly growing African population. But at the same time, for countries in the global north whose working-age population is shrinking, where's the labor going to come from? The solution to both of these problems might be the same:  remote work.  In this episode, we're going to explore three buckets of remote work: the sexy, high-skilled remote work for product-led technology...

In the first episode of this season, we argued that the future of work is a traditional development playbook. Considering the nature of most African markets today - informal, fragmented, subscale -  and considering the fact that most employment comes from the agriculture sector, the traditional development playbook says that development starts by increasing the productivity of the informal sector and the agriculture sector, in particular. These jobs are local jobs. In the context of Africa's...

How are jobs created? While throughout the season we're going to be looking at that question primarily through a technology and innovation lens, in this episode we're going to start by exploring this jobs question through a more traditional development and economics lens. Because as we'll see, though the future of work might be remote work or the creator economy or any other nascent categories, the future of work in Africa is also a traditional development story. And it starts with...

Introducing The Flip Season Four. African countries will be adding more people to the workforce in the next 10 years than the rest of the world combined. Where are the income-generating opportunities going to come from?  All this season, we're exploring the future of work.  Thanks to MFS Africa for their sponsorship of the entirety of Season 4 of The Flip. Follow The Flip on Twitter @theflipafrica and subscribe to our newsletter The Flip Notes at https://theflip.africa/newsletter.

Read Sabi: Platforming Trade in Africa on The Flip. We’re trying something new - an audio version of this week's partner edition of The Flip Notes, together with Sabi. Along with narration from The Flip's Justin Norman, you can hear Sabi’s co-founders, Anu Adedoyin Adasolum and Ademola Adesina, tell part of the story in their own words. The Flip Notes Partner Editions are our occasional sponsored deep dive of a market or sector or business model, in partnership and behind the scenes with a...