Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded, recently gave an interesting indictment of Silicon Valley explaining the problems with VC culture. One accusation is that venture capitalists rely too heavily on their network of friends, not including enough ‘outsider’ talent. Another is that more money is being invested into venture firms than those same VC firms [...]

Zimbabwe’s economy has all but collapsed, leaving it’s currency worth far less than the paper it’s printed on…
The hyperinflation is now estimated at over a quintillion percent, although no one really knows.
Most Zimbabweans are switching to barter and the Zim dollar is virtually useless. The South African rand and the US dollar are now the [...]

Why on earth is there no solid electronic payment system in Africa? Why are people buying MTN cards and texting the numbers to family members to transfer money? Why? WHY?
On a continent of nearly a billion people why are the financial institutions here in such disarray that they can’t figure out this [...]

There’s a really interesting conversation brewing over at Google’s Africa community that’s all about the state of ecommerce (or lack thereof) in Africa. Here’s a few of the highlights from the thread:
The original poster, Obum, asked:
One main challenge for online business I’ve found in sub-Saharan
Africa, for at least those who have access to the [...]

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In an unfortunate turn of events, one of Kiva’s microfinance loan partners has been reprimanded for taking excessive and fraudulent loans. The group is called Afrique Emergence & Investissements (AE&I) and it appears as though Kiva has been able to act on this quickly enough that there was no further fall [...]