Quick Fire with Omolara Dada

Omolara Dada is a senior product marketing manager at Busha, a Nigerian digital asset exchange, where she is building the business-to-business (B2B) marketing function from the ground up. With over six years of experience in African fintech, she previously worked at Anchor, a Y Combinator-backed Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, and Earnipay, an earned wage access (EWA) product, leading go-to-market strategy, product positioning, and growth across B2B and consumer-facing financial products. Her work sits at the intersection of complex financial infrastructure and the human beings who need it explained clearly enough to act on it.

Explain your job to a five-year-old.

"You know when you make something really cool but nobody knows about it? My job is to help people find out about cool things, understand why it's useful, and want to use it. I work for a company that helps businesses move money, and I make sure the right people know we exist and understand how we can help them."

What's the hardest part about working in fintech in Nigeria?

"Trust, and how hard it is to earn, how easy it is to lose. You're often asking businesses to move their money in a new way, through a newer company, in an environment where people have been burned before and where the economy itself is unpredictable. That means the bar for proof is high. It's not enough to be clever or well-designed. You have to be credible, consistent, and genuinely reliable before anyone hands you something as sensitive as their money. This also makes the work meaningful because when a business trusts you, you know you earned it."

What's the first thing you had to figure out with no playbook, building Busha's B2B marketing from scratch?

"Who exactly we were talking to. When you're the first B2B marketing hire, nothing is pre-defined. So the very first thing was getting brutally clear on who the customer actually is, what problem we solve for them that they genuinely care about, and how to say it in a way that resonated with them. Everything else — the content, the channels, the campaigns — comes after getting that clarity. I spent my early weeks asking a lot of questions."

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Visa Appoints Ex-Airtel Money Kenya Chief as East Africa Head

On July 25, Anne Kinuthia-Otieno, former managing director of Airtel Money Kenya, the telecom company's mobile money arm, announced on LinkedIn that she was stepping down from her role. Speculation followed about her next move: banking, telecoms, or fintech.

On Thursday, Visa confirmed that the former mobile money executive was taking over as its East Africa Lead, bringing her experience and years of banking expertise to a different kind of fintech.

Why Visa wanted her: When Kinuthia-Otieno took over Airtel Money Kenya in 2021, Safaricom's M-PESA controlled the market. Airtel Money held just 3.1% of mobile money subscriptions, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya's sector statistics report for Q1 2022–2023. Nearly five years later, that share had climbed to 10.2%, per the CA's Q3 2025–2026 report.

Her new role: As Visa's East Africa head, Kinuthia-Otieno will oversee the company's operations across seven markets, working with clients and partners to expand digital payments, strengthen partnerships, and bring more people into the formal financial system. The appointment is notable because East Africa is one of the world's most mobile-money-dominated payments regions, where card-based payments have historically trailed telecom-led services in volume and everyday usage. Bringing in a leader who grew a challenger mobile money business against M-PESA signals Visa's intent to deepen its relevance in a market where consumers and merchants often default to mobile money over cards.

The timing makes sense: Visa is already midway through its five-year, $1 billion investment commitment in Africa, building infrastructure, experimenting with stablecoin-powered payments, and working to embed itself more deeply into Africa's payments ecosystem. The company also opened its first Africa data centre in Johannesburg in July 2025, reducing transaction latency and signalling a long-term infrastructure bet on the continent.

Hiring someone who understands both banking and mobile money gives Visa an advantage. If she could help expand Airtel Money's footprint in M-PESA's backyard, Visa is betting she can help do the same for digital payments across East Africa.

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Safaricom Invests $11 Million in Ethiopian Operations, Eyes Profitability in 2027

When Safaricom expanded into Ethiopia in 2022, there was uncertainty around whether it could achieve scale. State-owned telecom firm Ethio Telecom controlled an overwhelming share of the market — and still does — helped by the conservative economic model Ethiopia had maintained for years, which tended to favour local incumbents. Safaricom was entering as the country's first private telecom operator, a test case for Ethiopia's incremental opening of one of Africa's largest and most closely held telecom markets.

Yet Safaricom has stuck with its plan. With 14.7 million customers in Ethiopia, Kenya's largest telecom operator now believes it can capture a much larger share of the upside in its neighbouring market. Ethiopia is Africa's second most populous country, with over 120 million people and a historically low financial inclusion rate, which underscores the long-term opportunity for both telecom and mobile money services. Safaricom has just put in more cash to back that belief.

The latest injection: Safaricom has injected another KES 1.4 billion ($11 million) into its Ethiopian subsidiary, taking its total funding contribution to KES 159.6 billion ($1.23 billion) by the end of June 2026.

The profitability race: The business is finally producing numbers that make the spending easier to justify. Active customers rose from 13.6 million in March to 14.7 million in June, adding over 1 million users in a single quarter and growing 46% year-on-year.

Between the lines: Safaricom is now targeting earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) profitability by March 2027. That matters because Ethiopia has already absorbed an $850 million telecom licence fee and an additional $150 million M-PESA licence fee required just to enter the market, plus billions more in network rollout costs. The EBITDA target will be a key metric to watch because it would mark the first credible signal that the unit's revenue can cover its operating costs — a threshold the company and its investors have been waiting on since entry.

Hitting that milestone would be significant not just for the Ethiopian unit but for Safaricom's broader regional expansion story. Investors have long worried that Ethiopia could become a permanently cash-hungry operation; rapid customer growth is the clearest evidence that there may be a path to self-sustaining economics.

Zoom out: Ethio Telecom remains the dominant player, so Safaricom is still very much the challenger. But after years of discussion focused mostly on licence fees and capital injections, the conversation is shifting towards something more important: whether 14.7 million Ethiopian customers can eventually become a profitable telecom and mobile money ecosystem. Ethiopia's ongoing macroeconomic reforms, including currency liberalisation, add a further variable to that trajectory, as exchange-rate shifts directly affect the dollar-denominated costs of network equipment and licence obligations.

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Funding Tracker

Fincart, an Egyptian e-commerce startup, raised $2.8 million in a seed funding round co-led by Launch Africa Ventures and Antler MENAP, with participation from Yango Ventures, Five35 Ventures, Bluestream Capital, Hi2 Global, Kalahari Venture Labs, and others. (Jul 27)

Other deals for the week:

• ORA Technologies, a Moroccan fintech startup, raised $2 million in a Series A funding round from undisclosed investors. (Jul 24)
• Codar, a Nigerian edtech startup, raised $1.5 million in an equity and debt round from undisclosed investors. (Jul 27)

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• After foreigners leave, South Africa's convenience stores face a tech test
• Quidax expands stablecoin corridors as African exchanges seek steadier revenue

Written by Opeyemi Kareem and Zia Yusuf. Edited by Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade.