Ascent Capital, a Kenya-based private equity manager has raised more than USD 100 million to its Ascent Rift Valley Fund to invest in small and medium enterprises in East Africa, surpassing the firm’s initial goal of USD 80 million.
ARVF targets small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Eastern Africa, looking to take large minority or majority stakes. The fund will provide funding to scalable SME businesses, helping to drive wider business and industrial development, particularly targeting the financial services, manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade and services, education, healthcare, and agro-processing sectors.
Ascent, which was among several new private equity firms established in the past decade to take advantage of growing popularity of the asset class in the region, had raised USD 80 million in its first round in 2015.
Ascent Capital was founded in 2012 and established its first fund, ARVF I, in 2014. Placements from ARVF I ranged from USD 2 million to USD 15 million, serving companies in Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya. Ascent Capital is targeting a final close of ARVF II in December 2021 with a total volume of USD 120 million. The firm plans to invest from this fund in amounts of USD 4 million to USD 15 million, reaching SMEs in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
Ascent capital caps $100 million in funds
Dashen eases remittance via Silicon Valley partnership
Dashen Bank and Moneta Technologies, Ethiopia’s largest mobile Digital Wallet platform, partnered with the Silicon Valley, San Francisco based technology giant Flutterwave to up lift the traditional and expensive money transfer with modern platform for free of charge.
Africa’s leading payments Technology Company Flutterwave partnership with one of the leading financial firm in Ethiopia has expanded its activity to 34 countries in the continent.
The partnership that was announced on Tuesday May 20 allows facilitation of money transfer into Ethiopia through Amole, to Amole Wallet, bank accounts and cash pickup locations at over 2,500 locations across the country.
Asfaw Alemu, President of Dashen Bank explained that the new partnership with Flutterwave will serve the Ethiopian economy by making diaspora remittances easier for over 8 Million members of the Ethiopian Diaspora that remit over USD 5 billion annually to Ethiopia.
The statement of Dashen Bank said that international money transfer operators (IMTOs) and businesses on Flutterwave as well as Barter by Flutterwave users can send money into Ethiopia via this partnership.
It added that the remittance service in Ethiopia today is seen by users to be expensive, with manual paperwork and delays making it challenging and time consuming for the diaspora community. This partnership solves these problems by providing instant delivery of funds to the receiver at no fee, with more control of where and how to send money, including transparency from a regulatory standpoint.
Asfaw said that the new service has core value for the country’s economy and enables to boost the legal transfer and cut unnecessary costs the receiver or sender spend on the traditional money transfer.
Yemiru Chanyalew, CEO Moneta Technologies, said that the service provided by Flutterwave application through Amole may take very few seconds and the diaspora shall transfer the money for their beloved one from anywhere just by using the apps without visiting parallel banks or money transfer agents.
“The opportunity we have created with Flutterwave is the consumer has 100 percent control,” he says, adding, “we are very excited to work with Flutterwave and leverage our combined technologies to broaden our offering to the Ethiopian Diaspora community, our customers and merchants to enable cross-border remittance and commerce. At Amole, we are increasingly focused on cashless and eCommerce payments. Our combined efforts in enabling seamless and interoperable remittance and eCommerce payments will drive much desired financial inclusion in Ethiopia,” he said.
Asfaw told Capital that the all the deal with Flutterwave before the launch has been scrutinized by National Bank of Ethiopia, which is the financial sector regulatory body. “Flutterwave is a well-known company on the business and so far they have facilitated USD 9 billion. It is also working with 290,000 business community or companies through their platform,” he added.
He said that the new scheme definitely would bring change on the money transfer and the forex generation for the country, “as a bank it saves the financial firm from other investments to compete with others since we avail such technologies that shall access the foreign currency from the source with providing modern technology.”
Flutterwave, which has key advantage on international payment processing in 150 countries and multiple modes including local and international cards, mobile wallets, bank transfer, and Barter by Flutterwave, has processed over 140 million transactions worth over USD 9 billion and it serves companies like Uber, Flywire, Booking.com and other prominent companies.
TOMOCA and SEFA & FAMILY adjoin TOTAL Ethiopia stations
Total Ethiopia launches a new coffee shop and tyre service in its service station in Addis Ababa in the Total Bulgaria station with TOMOCA COFFEE PLC, and SEFA & FAMILY PLC- as its professional tyre service provider.
In addition to the Bulgaria station, quality coffee from TOMOCA and a modernized tyre services by SEFA & FAMILY will be provided at the Meskel Square service stations in Addis Ababa.
“This collaboration with TOMOCA, which is one of the preferred coffee brands for Ethiopians, and SEFA & FAMILY, the modernized tyre service provider, will attract new consumers into TOTAL stations and offer a different experience for people to visit our stations,” said Thibault Lesueur, Managing Director of Total Ethiopia.
Besides providing the best quality of products and services with utmost convenience, TOTAL will use this opportunity to share its safety value and safety culture to partners and customers and implement standardized ways of working in all TOTAL service stations.
Total Ethiopia has already proposed different services in its network stations through diversified activities such as a; Café, Restaurant, Car Wash, Total Quartz Auto Service and Tyre Service, to make TOTAL stations a marketplace for its customers.
TOMOCA COFFEE PLC, a long-established family-owned coffee roasting company with over 60 years of experience and SEFA & FAMILY PLC, professional tyre service provider with more than 12 years of experience are a new addition to strengthen the marketability of TOTAL.
Ethio Telecom launches Tier III Ready Modular Data Center
Ethio Telecom launches Tier III Ready Modular Data Center further strengthening its 127 years of service to Ethiopia.
Dubbed as the biggest Tier III ready modular data center in Ethiopia, the center will facilitate the smooth operation of the recently launched mobile money service, telebirr.
The newly deployed data center is located around Gola Sefer, equipped with 5 POD (Points of Deployment), 16 cabinets per POD, which can support 10 servers per cabinet. The total capacity of this facility can reach 800 servers. According to Ethio Telecom’s plan, the newly built data center will firstly serve existing service provision such as mobile money and business support systems, and the extra capacity could be used for new business such as colocation and cloud service in the future.
Modular data center has become a mainstream form of data center deployment around the world recently, thanks to its short delivery period and high energy saving ratio.
Huawei delivered Ethio Telecom’s data center within 2.5 months, while the traditional way of deployment would take more than 5 months. Meanwhile, modular data center has power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.4, 25% less than traditional data center. After installing Huawei NetEco power monitoring system, it can further reduce 35% of operation and maintenance cost. The routine patrolling and monitoring of the modular facility can be performed by robot.
Mobile financial services have become a significant part of African telecom operators’ businesses after Kenya’s Safaricom pioneered them with M-Pesa in 2007, giving people an alternative to banks.
Ethio telecom plans to recruit 21 million users for the service in the first year of operation, rising to 33 million in five years. The sole telecom provider anticipates that about 40 to 50 percent of Ethiopia’s annual economic output will be transacted on the platform by the end of the five years.
The Ethio telecom Mobile Money platform deployed currently have the capacity of processing up to 100 transactions per second (TPS) and can be easily scaled up to 1000 TPS in the future.
The service is accessible with SMS, USSD and smartphone applications and it can also scale up to more functions in the future.
Ethio Telecom, which had revenue of 25.57 billion birr in the first six months of the current fiscal year, has 52.7 million total subscribers.
