Rwandan president Paul Kagame speaks on the next EU-AU summit, coups in Africa, security concerns in DRC and the thaw with Uganda, Israel in the AU, the presence of the Wagner group in Mali, access to vaccines...
Paul Kagame answered questions by videoconference from Kigali, two weeks before the summit between the European Union and the African Union (17 and 18 February in Brussels), a summit which the Rwandan President has worked to prepare alongside Emmanuel Macron, Macky Sall and Charles Michel.
Kagame been president for nearly twenty-two years. He is the interlocutor of Western governments for whom Rwanda is a pan-African player and a model of economic and social governance – but whose democratic performance is still the subject of strong criticism from NGOs and the media. Aged 64, he is now trying to “crack the armour”: tackle the image of an uncompromising man, devoid of empathy, for whom results count more than the means used to achieve them, statistics more than people.
Paul Kagame does not recognise himself in his detractors’ descriptions. This is what he explains in this interview, alongside broadsides on the major regional and pan-African issues of these first weeks of 2022.
You have actively worked on the preparation of the summit between the African Union and the European Union, scheduled for 17 and 18 February in Brussels. What do you expect from it?
Paul Kagame: Today, there are so many summits that, for some participants, it becomes a form of routine. They come more for the event itself than for the results that may come out of it. This summit gives us the opportunity to be more pragmatic. I am optimistic. The AU has understood, I think, that we have to do things differently. The African Report
One person was killed in a fire that destroyed more than 50 maize mills and 100 houses Friday on the outskirts of the capital, Kampala.
“Police are investigating a fire outbreak that took place today afternoon in Kisenyi. The police directorate of fire prevention and rescue services responded and managed to extinguish the fire,” police spokesperson Luke Owoyesigire said in a statement.
He said Godfrey Mukasa, 50, was found dead during a search of the area.
”It has been established that Mukasa was seated with his friends when the fire started but he was unable to flee because he had disabilities,” he added.
The fire took time for it to be contained because the area is in a congested slum and not easy to reach by firefighters.
More than 1,000 people have lost their livelihood because the area where the fire burned is where they were earning a living. - Godfrey Olukya, Anadolu Agency
· NSSF introduces powerful self-service capabilities with AI-powereddigital customer assistant named ‘Sanyu’, based on Avaya
technology.
· Sanyu reduces contact waiting times by providing easy self-service for routine transactions – while freeing up human agents
so that they can address more complex requests.
Kampala, Uganda – January 27, 2022 – The National Social Security Fund (NSSF) of Uganda has transformed its customer experience with powerful self-service capabilities by introducing an AI-powereddigital customer assistant named ‘Sanyu’ based on Avaya (NYSE: AVYA) technology.
Sanyu, an advanced chatbot that now serves as the NSSF’s front line of customer service, is integrated into the organisation’s Avaya OneCloudTM CCaaS contact centre solution and a range of digital touchpoints. It reduces waiting times for customers who contact the NSSF by providing easy self-service for routine transactions – in the process freeing up human agents so that they can address more complex requests.
NSSF is the national savings scheme mandated by the government of Uganda to provide social security services to all private-sector employees in the country. The organisation sees a very high volume of interactions and transactions and serves customers through multiple channels such as a web portal, app, messaging platforms, call centres, and a physical branch network.
“We estimated that our customer service personnel were spending around three-quarters of their day on easily-answered queries, such as statement requests, registration, and FAQs,” said Richard Byarugaba, Managing Director, NSSF. “By automating most of these interactions, our agents now focus on transactions that require human intervention, typically at the higher-end of the value chain. This transformation paid off during the pandemic, as lockdowns and distancing reduced our customers’ visits to physical branches and increased the demand on our call centres and online platforms.”
The deployment comes as the NSSF’s latest effort to digitise the customer experience. Over the last two years the organisation has moved over 94% of its member transactions and interactions over to digital channels, with only the remaining 6% of customers using walk-in service centres. That digital shift, however, necessitated a transformation in how inbound requests are handled.
“We had been struggling to keep up with the high volume of frequent queries coming in, and we did not have a solution that offered customers the same experience and convenience on our various different digital platforms. We wanted to have unlimited capacity to respond instantly, any time, to customer queries. There was also a need to free up our front-end employees from routine support requests and enable them to focus on more complex tasks,” said Byarugaba.
Sanyu emerged as the solution, integrating into NSSF’s customer-facing interfaces such as a web portal, mobile app, mobile browser, and social messaging clients. The bot interacts with customers through text-based chat and delivers powerful self-service, automating workflows such as Employer Registration, Member Registration, Member Benefit Tracking, Member Provisional Balance, Member Statement and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). And if it cannot serve the customer’s request, Sanyu seamlessly routes the query to the best available agent.
Since October 2020, nearly 164,000 customer transactions and interactions have been registered through Sanyu, and the NSSF is confident the solution will contribute to an improvement in its Net Promoter Score and first contact resolution rates.
Vinod Kumar Puthanpura, Territory Account Manager – West, East & Central Africa, Avaya, said, “With its deployment of Sanyu, NSSF is at the leading edge of infusing AI into the customer experience. With the powerful AI tools available to it through the Avaya OneCloud ecosystem, NSSF has introduced tremendous self-service capabilities that enhance both customer and employee experiences. and set the organisation well on its way to becoming a digital business. We look forward to further supporting the NSSF as it continues this journey.”
About NSSF Uganda
The National Social Security Fund Uganda is a multi-Trillion Fund mandated by Government through the NSSF Act, Cap 222 (Laws of Uganda) to provide social security services to employees in the private sector.
The Fund is a secure, innovative, and dynamic social security provider that guarantees safety, security, and a competitive return on members’ savings of over 2% above the 10-year inflation average.
The Fund manages assets worth over UGX 15.5 trillion at June 30, 2021, invested in Fixed Income, Equities and Real Estate assets within the East Africa region. As the largest Fund in East Africa by value, we have the ambitious goal of growing our Assets Under Management to 20 Trillion by 2025.
Since 2012, the Fund is regulated by the Uganda Retirement Benefits Regulatory Authority while Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development is responsible for policy oversight.
NALA, a Tanzanian cross-border payments company that recently pivoted from local to international money transfers, said Thursday it has raised $10 million in a new fundraising round.
The seed round is coming almost three years after NALA secured a seven-figure pre-seed round led by Accel in 2019. In that time, NALA built a mobile money service in East Africa and scaled it to more than 250,000 users.
But in 2021, NALA started testing international money transfers after some users expressed interest in moving money from the U.K. to East African countries (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), thus ushering the Tanzanian fintech into the remittance business.
The business opportunity for remittance is lucrative despite digital lenders vying for less than 20% of the international money market dominated by traditional offline players.
With Africa being the most expensive region to send money to, with 10.6% in average transaction fees, digital senders like NALA pitch themselves to customers as platforms with the best rates and lowest prices.
Other players in the space facilitating transfer from the U.K. to select African countries include unicorn Chipper Cash, Lemonade Finance, Zazuu and Sendwave. Their collective bet is that their market will grow over time and eat into traditional incumbents’ share. Whether that’ll happen remains to be seen.
That said, NALA has achieved considerable growth since testing out the product last year. The platform allows payments from the U.K. to Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana. And in the past six months, more than 8,000 customers have moved over eight figures in transaction volume to Africa, the company said.
“Our core customer base is the diaspora right now who live in the U.K. This is the customer we’re currently serving today as we speak,” founder and CEO Benjamin Fernandes told TechCrunch in an interview. “We also got our license approvals to go live in the U.S. and the E.U., which will be going live in a month and a half in at least one other E.U. country, probably France.”
The chief executive also said NALA, currently present in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana and South Africa, plans to be live in 12 African countries by the end of the year, including Nigeria.
Remittance is NALA’s low-hanging fruit. According to Fernandes, NALA has more offerings in its pipeline that can be likened to Revolut’s when it first launched in the U.K. The European fintech unicorn, now a financial super app of some sorts, started off providing multi-currency bank accounts, fee-free currency exchange, peer-to-peer payments and a feature for businesses.
Similarly, NALA, in addition to enabling cross-border payments from the U.K. (and the U.S. and the E.U.) to Africa, is privately beta testing multi-currency accounts that will allow the African diaspora to store local African currencies when abroad. It is also currently piloting NALA for Businesses enabling people who run businesses in the diaspora to make payments to Africa.
Away from Revolut’s playbook, Fernandes says the Tanzanian fintech will be building out infrastructure to enable money transfers from Africa to the U.S. and the U.K.
“We’re scaling that up, not just being in Tanzania and Kenya and Uganda as a consumer-facing product. But in the long run, we want to build infrastructure across the continent where we can do outbound from the continent and allow people to send money back. We’ve submitted our remittance license application in Kenya, as well as Uganda, for us to be able to do this the other way around,” said the founder.
The company has hired Subuola Abraham, ex-Citi U.K. MLRO and former group chief compliance officer at pan-African bank Guaranty Trust Bank, to lead its compliance efforts. It also struck a deal with Citi Bank Global to manage their F.X. and fast-track growth across multiple regions, one of the few African tech companies with this deal.
Image Credits: NALA
As part of its user acquisition and retention efforts, NALA will be launching a crowdfunding campaign this year where its first users will get access to own some shares in the company, said Fernandes. It’s a move similar companies facilitating money transfer in Africa, such as Eversend, have made in recent years.
NALA’s executive team includes Nicolas Esteves (CTO) and Nicolai Eddy (COO), who have experience at Monzo, Osper and Morningstar.
This new financing round includes lead investor Amplo, Accel and Bessemer Partners, including local investors like DFS Lab.
NALA also received funds from an impressive group of angel investors — Jonas Templestein, co-founder and CTO of Monzo; Vladimir Tenev, Robinhood co-founder and CEO; Deel founder Alex Bouaziz; Laura Spiekerman, co-founder of Alloy; Peeyush Ranjan, the head of Google Payments and early employees at Revolut and TransferWise.
Sheel Tyle, the founder and general partner at Amplo, will join NALA’s board, the company said in a statement.
The investment will allow NALA to hire more talent and foster growth efforts in the U.K., U.S. and Europe, build payment rails in Africa and expand to new countries.
“We don’t want to be compared to a regular remittance company, and people will do that naturally. But we think remittance is just the starting point for what we’re going to build,” said Fernandes. “My take is that payments across the continent is 1% built, and there’s a lot of infrastructure and software that needs to be built deeply. That’s where we want to sit and this $10 million round is going to do a lot of that.” TechCrunch
Kenya and the United Kingdom (UK) have partnered in the war against cyber-crimes to weed out security threats posed since the inception of digital technology.
State Department for Broadcasting and Telecommunications Principal Secretary (PS) Esther Koimett said that as the country moves to fully embrace the provision of services through a digital platform in all sectors of the economy, there was need to shield the online systems from threats.
She told a workshop for government communicators on cyber security crisis communication held on Tuesday at a Nairobi hotel said that there has been a steady rise in cyber threats across the world and Kenya has been no exception, with websites of various ministries being constantly under cyber-attack.
“This training is therefore important as it will enhance our capacity as government communicators to effectively play our role in informing citizens about how to protect themselves from cyber threats like the ever-emerging scams and fraudulent schemes,” said the PS.
Koimett said that the objective of the training is to strengthen the strategic communications capability of the UK government, its allies and partners to jointly understand and counter cyber threats from hostile state actors given the increasing importance of technology and digitization in the delivery of services in every aspect of human interaction.
“The training project consists of communications planning, delivery and training to support crisis communications and campaigns capability development for partner countries. It also touches on research and insights on critical audience vulnerabilities to underpin joint strategies and campaign development,” she said.
Koimett highlighted that the government of Kenya is cognizant of the importance of Public Communications and they strategically utilise Public Communications to promote government policies, programmes and strategies to cultivate a positive image and build confidence in government.
“I wish to acknowledge the cordial and close working relations between the governments of Kenya and the UK and to thank the UK government for facilitating this training programme that has allowed knowledge-sharing in communications experience and skills,” said Koimett.
British Deputy High Commissioner, Josephine Gauld stated that technology has made lives easier and the UK Government provides most of their services online adding that cyber security threats might lead to a national security crisis if not well handled. By Joseph Ng’ang’a, KNA
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