About

Hello and welcome to Africa Built

A podcast on the stories and history behind some of Africa's most important mature companies. Brought to you by Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega, writer of the Notadeepdive newsletter, and Nnanna Ijezie, writer of the Fintech is Easy newsletter.

Why does this exist

Every company eventually acquires an official history.

It is told on conference stages, in anniversary posts and investor slides. In the retelling, uncertainty becomes strategy and lucky breaks become foresight.

African business and technology now have enough history to analyse properly. Companies have raised billions, listed on global exchanges, collapsed in public and changed how entire markets work. But the record is scattered across prospectuses, court files, regulatory disclosures, old interviews, news archives, conference panels and the memories of people who were there.

Africa Built brings that record together.

We put the official story beside the documents, the people who lived through it and what happened next.

Over the years, we've collaborated on multiple media projects and reports in various forms, and in the process identified the need to tell larger, more detailed stories of some of Africa's most successful companies. This is our attempt to finally step into the arena and plug a gap we have identified in African corporate storytelling.

By going deep on the companies that built Africa's tech and business landscape, from founding to IPO and beyond, we're telling a researched story of how these companies actually got built: the strategies, pivots, competition, successes, and failures along the way.

Occasionally, we'll have friends, guests, and insiders join us to add more detail to these stories.

African startups of today are standing on the shoulders of giants before them. It's time to tell their story.

We hope you enjoy this.

Cheers,

Muyiwa and Nnanna

Disclaimer, Corrections and disclosures: These stories are built from the best record available, not an omniscient one. If we get a fact wrong, write to us at africabuiltpod@gmail.com. We will correct it publicly in the episode notes and on this site. Africa Built is for information and entertainment, not investment, legal or tax advice. The views are ours and do not represent our employers, sponsors or guests.