Today, we are discussing:

• Founders Factory Africa’s partnership with Small Foundation
• CAC put an end to manual submission of post-incorporation submissions

Founders Factory Africa partners Small Foundation

The story: South Africa’s Founders Factory Africa (FFA) has announced its partnership with Small Foundation to select 18 African agritech startups for an acceleration and incubation program.

The partnership with the Johannesburg-based investment company will allow Dublin-based philanthropic organisation, Small Foundation, to invest in FFA towards building and scaling agritech startups in Africa.

It’s good news: African is largely an agrarian society and the agriculture sector is one of the major sources of foreign exchanges for most countries on the continent. Despite this fact, tech startups playing in the space are not getting enough attention from investors. For instance, Millionnaire West African Startups (MWAS) playing in the agricultural sector only raised $4.955 million between 2010 and 2019, accounting for only 0.27% of the amount raised by MWAS within that period.

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More funds for African startups: Evidently, more funds are coming from African-based investors to African startups in 2021. Earlier in the year, Kenya-based Savannah Fund announced raising a $25 million fund for early stage-startups across sub-Saharan Africa. The Savannah Fund news was shortly followed by FirstCheck Africa’s launch as a women-focused angel fund.

Tipping the scales: It’s safe to assume that the share of African investors’ participation in the continent’s startup landscape will witness a significant rise.

CAC put an end to manual submission of post-incorporation submissions

A little background: The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) of Nigeria has been on the digital path since 2015 when it launched an online registration portal to allow people register their business within 24 hours. Four years after the move to go digital with business registration, confidential information of registered companies found their way onto a couple of websites. Some of the information included names of directors and shareholders with their contact details.

In 2018, I questioned the Commission’s move to completely automate business registration. Read the story here.

Still on the digital path: Earlier in the month, the Commision pointed out that it has started working on reducing the registration circle of new companies to just three hours before the end of the year.

Source: Techpoint