TELCOS
Safaricom Ethiopia crosses 15 million subscribers four years in
Safaricom Ethiopia says it now serves 15 million 90-day active subscribers, four years after commercial launch in October 2022 — built on more than 3,500 network sites covering about 60% of the population, all 4G-enabled and 5G-ready. CEO Wim Vanhelleputte calls it "one of the fastest network rollouts by a greenfield telecom operator in Africa". The unit, long the biggest drag on Safaricom group earnings, has also put ETB 684 million into community programmes with its shareholders over the period.
TechArena
FINTECH
Hisa opens US IPOs to Kenyan retail investors
Nairobi investment app Hisa switched on "US IPO Integration", letting eligible users subscribe to selected American listings from inside the app rather than buying after the shares pop on debut. The pitch lands in a hot market: US IPOs had raised roughly $137 billion year-to-date by August, and recent debuts like Circle — priced at $31, opened at $69 — showed how much of the gain first-day buyers miss. Hisa dangles upcoming candidates such as Oura and Anthropic as the kind of deals Kenyan investors could now queue for.
The Kenyan Wall Street
FUNDING
Equity and IFAD launch a $200m climate fund for East African farmers
At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Equity Group and IFAD unveiled ARCAFIM, a $200 million facility — $180 million in lending capital plus $20 million of technical assistance — for climate adaptation loans in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Equity puts $90 million of its own balance sheet in, matching concessional money from the Green Climate Fund and Nordic partners dollar-for-dollar; the 12-year mechanism targets 260,000 smallholder farmers and 500 rural MSMEs, at least half of them women, and is projected to generate $266 million in loans. James Mwangi's framing: farmers don't need rescuing, they need "a financial system built to back them".
Khusoko
FINTECH
Uber quietly switches Visa payments back on in Kenya
Eight months after dropping Visa cards over rising processing costs, Uber restored them for Kenyan riders on 4 September — the option now sits alongside M-PESA, PayPal and Airtel Money, with in-app prompts nudging users to re-add their cards. The about-turn comes in the same week Uber exited Nigeria and Uganda and cut roughly 3,300 corporate jobs globally, while insisting its remaining African markets, Kenya included, are unaffected.
TechCabal
GADGETS
Pixel 11 lands in Nairobi shops from KES 99,999
Days after Google's launch, Nairobi retailers are listing the Pixel 11 series: the base model from KES 99,999 at Avechi (KES 116,500–130,000 elsewhere), the Pixel 11 Pro around KES 168,000 and the Pro XL at KES 170,000. Kenya remains outside Google's official Pixel markets, so every unit is a grey-market import — making the regional variant and the seller's after-sales support part of the purchase decision. Buyers do get the Tensor G6, 12GB of RAM and Google's seven-year update promise.
Tech-ish
