Africa Tech Summit: What Innovation Looks Like When the Stakes Are Real.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

I have attended a fair few conferences in my time. Most of them blend into each other. Africa Tech Summit London does not.

A couple of years ago I went along and spent most of my time in the investment showcase, listening to founders from across the continent pitch businesses they had built to solve problems that are immediate, material, and in many cases life-changing. Affordable internet for communities that have never had reliable access. Digital healthcare for a country with one pharmacy for every 10,000 people. Solar energy financing for small businesses that cannot afford the grid. Stablecoin infrastructure for people whose national currency has lost the majority of its value.

Every year I leave thinking the same thing: this is what innovation looks like when the stakes are real.

The digital divide looks different from here

There is a tendency in UK technology and finance circles to talk about digital inclusion as a problem of confidence and skills. And it is — but that framing comes from a starting point of near-universal connectivity. Take that away and the conversation changes entirely.

Around 80% of people in sub-Saharan Africa do not use the internet. The barrier is not primarily skills or confidence. It is cost and infrastructure. Mobile data in many parts of Africa remains prohibitively expensive relative to average incomes, and fixed-line broadband is simply not available in most residential areas.

What caught my attention at the investment showcase was poa! internet, a Kenyan company aiming to deliver residential broadband at 95% lower cost than 4G alternatives. The pitch was not about disruption or market share. It was about the reality that internet access changes what is possible for a family, a business, a community. Mobile penetration across the continent has reached 615 million unique subscribers, and is expected to hit 50% penetration by 2030 — but connectivity alone is not inclusion. Price and reliability matter as much as coverage.

Crypto as financial infrastructure, not speculation

The conversation around cryptocurrency in Africa is almost entirely different from the one you hear in European financial services, where it tends to be framed as either speculative investment or regulatory risk.

In sub-Saharan Africa, crypto — and particularly stablecoins — is functioning as practical financial infrastructure for people who have limited alternatives.

Nigeria alone received approximately $59 billion in crypto transaction value between July 2023 and June 2024, making it the second-largest country in the world for crypto adoption behind only India. The scale is striking. And it is driven not by institutional investors or speculative traders, but by ordinary people navigating currency depreciation, limited access to foreign exchange, and the practical need to send and receive money reliably.

Stablecoins now account for 43% of all digital asset transactions in sub-Saharan Africa, with Nigeria dominating — its overall market value hitting $59 billion in one year. The naira lost significant value in 2023 and 2024, which accelerated adoption of dollar-pegged stablecoins as both an inflation hedge and a practical payments tool. By 2025, around 22 million Nigerians held cryptocurrency — a shift from 0.4% of the population a decade earlier to over 10%.

What this means for financial services design is something the industry in the UK and Europe has barely begun to grapple with. The questions of user education, UX simplification, and language accessibility that came up in the showcase are the same questions I work on with clients here — but the context and urgency are completely different. When your currency is losing value and your bank has limited capacity to help, the pressure to design financial tools that actually work is existential, not aspirational.

Healthcare and energy: the same logic, different sectors

Two other businesses from the showcase have stayed with me.

OneHealth Nigeria is building digital solutions for pharmaceutical access in a country with a ratio of one pharmacy for every 10,000 people — ten times below the WHO recommendation. The design challenge is not about making an existing system more efficient. It is about building the infrastructure that makes access possible at all.

Earthbond is doing something similar in the energy sector — providing a one-stop shop for financing and solar installation for SME businesses across Africa, making reliable energy affordable for businesses that currently cannot access it. The problem it is solving is not environmental aspiration but operational survival: without reliable energy, a small business cannot function.

Both of these ventures share a design philosophy that I think is undervalued in the markets I usually operate in: they start from the constraint, not the ideal. They are not asking what the best version of a solution would look like in a well-resourced context. They are asking what works given the actual conditions — the infrastructure gaps, the cost constraints, the trust barriers — that their customers face.

That is a more demanding form of customer-centricity. And watching it in action is genuinely instructive.

The pie-growing point

The closing remarks at the summit made a point that has stuck with me. Entrepreneurs are not looking for a slice of the pie. They are the ones who grow the pie.

It sounds like a conference line. But there is something real in it when you have just spent a morning watching founders pitch businesses that are creating markets, not competing in them. Financial inclusion, healthcare access, reliable energy, affordable connectivity — these are not zero-sum competitions for existing customers. They are expansions of what is possible.

Africa's free trade agreement is projected to generate $292 billion in income gains by 2035, and the fintech and tech infrastructure being built now is part of what will make that possible. The investment showcase at Africa Tech Summit exists because the businesses being built are investable precisely because the problems are real and the markets are large.

I come back to it every year for the same reason: it reminds me that the most important customer experience challenges are not the ones about conversion rates or app ratings. They are the ones about whether people can access the services that shape their lives at all.