In a statement dated 27 October 2026, GTCO said 2 of its subsidiaries, Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) and the payments firm HabariPay, were live with Google Pay “on the day it launches in Nigeria”. The group said it was present at both ends of the same transaction: the person paying and the business being paid.

What changes for GTBank customers

Customers add an eligible GTBank debit card once, through the Google Wallet app on Android or through their Google Account. At checkout, they choose Google Pay, pick the card and confirm.

Google Pay swaps the card number for a digital token, so the merchant never receives the real card details. GTCO said the card works wherever Google Pay is accepted online, in Nigeria and abroad, including for subscriptions, travel bookings, food delivery and bills.

What changes for Squad merchants

On the merchant side, “Pay with Google Pay” now sits at the top of the Squad checkout, alongside card, bank transfer, USSD, bank payments and buy-now-pay-later options. HabariPay runs Squad and said the option is enabled by default for every business on the gateway. Merchants can turn it off.

Squad merchants set up for international payments can also accept Google Pay from customers worldwide, which GTCO pitched as a route to buyers in the diaspora.

“Most failed online payments are not refused; they are abandoned,” said Segun Agbaje, Group Chief Executive Officer of GTCO. “Somewhere along the way the customer gives up, and the business never learns about the sale it lost.”

Eduofon Japhet, Managing Director of HabariPay, said Squad businesses get Google Pay “inside the checkout they already use”, with “nothing new to integrate”.

Not the first Google Pay option for Nigerian merchants

Google Pay acceptance is not new to Nigerian online checkouts. Interswitch announced support for Google Pay on its payment gateway in September 2023, and Paystack’s help documentation also lists it as a way for merchants to take payments. GTCO is claiming a first-day launch on both the issuing and acquiring sides, rather than being the first gateway to offer it.

The distinction matters for how much changes in practice. Merchants on gateways such as Interswitch or Paystack could already offer the option. The new element for Squad is that its own banking sister company can now issue cards that work with it.

GTCO did not say how many GTBank cards are eligible, which card networks are supported, or how many Squad merchants will see the option. It also did not say whether the Google Pay launch covers other Nigerian banks. GTCO operates in 11 African countries and the United Kingdom, but the announcement concerns Nigeria only.

Payment firms in Nigeria are also working to a central bank requirement to store data at home by 2027, which shapes how any wallet or gateway handles customer data.

The technology group, headquartered in the UK and serving customers in 94 countries, announced the agreement on 27 October 2026. Bedrock is the Amazon Web Services platform through which organisations can access Claude and build it into their own applications and services. Cassava describes Claude as offering advanced reasoning, vision analysis, code generation and multilingual processing.

“What matters to our customers is being able to use AI in their business, and that starts with access to the best models,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, President and Group CEO of Cassava Technologies. He said the company’s goal was “advanced AI within reach of every business, government, researcher, entrepreneur and university across the emerging markets globally.”

What Cassava did not say

The announcement gives no pricing and doesn’t say which Claude models customers can buy, which countries the service will be offered in, or when it will start. It also does not say whether Claude will be available through Cassava’s AI Multi-Model Exchange (CAIMEx), the platform through which the company offers several models behind one API.

Cassava’s AI push

The reseller agreement comes 6 days after Cassava said on 21 October 2026 that it was adding NVIDIA Nemotron models to its AI factory, and follows its work on AI infrastructure in Egypt.

Cassava launched CAIMEx in November 2025, describing it as Africa’s first AI Multi-Model Exchange. Its security arm, Liquid C2, announced a partnership with Google Cloud and Anthropic in March 2024 to bring cloud, cybersecurity and generative AI capabilities to Africa.

The programme, called From Script to Screen with AI, is run in collaboration with Google. The release says Google.org is supporting it with US$1 million in funding, and that Curious Refuge developed its curriculum, which the programme calls its education partner. The programme’s website says there is no application fee and no tuition.

How the programme works

Everyone starts with a foundation course in AI filmmaking, then specialises in one of 5 pathways: fiction, documentary, animation, advertising or screenwriting. The 12-week academy is online, with a few in-person meet-ups. The programme’s website lists it as 25 January to 18 April 2027; the release says February to April.

Graduates are certified and can put forward a one-page idea. The strongest ideas are shortlisted, and each shortlisted idea owner builds a team that spends 4 weeks with mentors before pitching to panels drawn from Akuna, Google and the wider industry.

Akuna funds selected projects, and funded teams make their films between July and October 2027. Creators keep the intellectual property in their work.

“Training on its own does not build an industry,” said Khaled Gad, Chief Executive Officer of The Akuna Group. “Creators need a route from the classroom to the screen, and this programme carries them all the way, from their first application to a finished, funded film.”

Who can apply

• Applicants must live in one of the 5 countries and be 18 or older on the date of application.
• They need a laptop, reliable internet and consistent power, and must be free to take part from 25 January 2027.
• No AI experience is required, but applicants must submit one example of their best work (film can run up to 3 minutes), a personal statement of up to 250 words and a 60 to 90 second introduction video.
• Applicants apply as individuals. Teams form later, around the shortlisted ideas.

Akuna says it will confirm the final cohort on 14 December 2026, and strongly encourages women to apply.

The odds are not stated

The programme’s website says plainly that only “a select few” projects in each intake are funded, and that not every graduate will join a team: “The programme funds teams, not individuals.” Neither the release nor the website says how many places the academy has, how many projects will be funded or how much each will receive.

Google’s Building for Africa summit in July 2026 included a Creative AI education programme with The Akuna Group. Free AI training is also on offer elsewhere: the African Development Bank is offering free AI courses to African civil servants. Akuna says a second intake will follow a year after the first.

The Fibre Pre-Provisioning proof of concept, launched on 23 October 2026, covers the Phase 1A Empangeni mega housing development in uMhlathuze Municipality, where 405 houses are under construction. The partners say it is among the first projects in South Africa to use a “Pipe and Box” method, which puts the infrastructure for future connectivity in place while the homes and other essential infrastructure are built.

The homes will not have fibre services yet. “While this proof of concept does not itself provide fibre services, it establishes the physical infrastructure that will make future connectivity possible,” said Thamsanqa Ntuli, Premier of KwaZulu-Natal.

Who does what

• The provincial government, through the Office of the Premier, provides leadership and strategic oversight.
• The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Human Settlements contributes expertise in settlement planning and development.
• uMhlathuze Local Municipality leads local coordination, including infrastructure requirements and approvals.
• Huawei provides technical advice, programme support and knowledge transfer.
• Openserve contributes telecommunications infrastructure and network deployment expertise, including planning for future connectivity.

The case for making it standard

Huawei used the launch to argue for a national rule. “It is our firm belief that fibre pre-provisioning must become a standard policy at a national level, integrated into municipality building codes and national housing strategy across South Africa,” said Charles Cheng, Deputy CEO of Huawei South Africa.

Li Yanbang, Huawei’s Solution Manager, who presented the pilot, said: “If we do the fibre pre-provisioning during or before the road construction, it saves cost and also avoids the damage to the road.”

Rendani Musetha, Chief Director for Digital Government at the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies, asked: “Why should we build houses today and only think about connectivity tomorrow?”

Pearl Schrimpton, Enterprise and Public Sector Executive at Openserve, said: “Our commitment to this project is simple: we build it properly, we measure it openly, and we will share what we learned with our partners in government, so that the country can decide on facts rather than assumptions.”

What the partners have not said

The release does not state the pre-provisioning costs per home or the expected savings, so the claim that it makes services quicker and cheaper to switch on is not yet backed by figures. It also gives no date for fibre services in the development, does not say which operator will connect the homes, and reports no results from the pilot.

Openserve was one of the 8 most-rated fibre network operators in a July 2026 perception survey by the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA). Huawei has also been working on in-home fibre elsewhere in Africa: in May 2026, Telecom Egypt launched its first Fibre-to-the-Room service (fibre run to individual rooms) with Huawei.

Smart Africa, the alliance of African governments and private-sector partners, announced on 20 October 2026 in Kigali, Rwanda, that the countries had completed phase 1 of the pilot. The test used synthetic data in a controlled environment, not real citizens’ records.

A trust framework and an exchange

The pilot rests on 2 pieces. The Smart Africa Trust Alliance (SATA) provides the framework of trust, governance and cooperation between countries. The Smart Africa Data Exchange (SADX) is the infrastructure that lets their national systems exchange and verify information.

Smart Africa says the approach is federated: each country keeps its own identity database and control over its data, and nothing is centralised. “Interoperability does not require centralisation, and integration does not mean surrendering sovereignty,” said Lacina Koné, Director General and CEO of Smart Africa.

From airport e-gates to diplomas

The first use case is verifying travellers. Smart Africa gives the example of a traveller whose identity is checked against their home country’s official records at an automated airport e-gate.

It says the same system could later let a business prove it is legally registered in another country, a professional have a qualification recognised abroad, or a traveller verify vaccination records. Smart Africa links the work to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and to its goal of a single digital market, and says it feeds into the African Union’s interoperability framework for digital ID.

What comes next

Phase 2 will prepare a controlled operational pilot for cross-border identity verification. Smart Africa said it depends on national approvals, security assessments and operational readiness, and gave no date. Results will go to the signatories of the SATA Declaration, who will be invited to consider joining later phases.

The declaration was signed by 19 countries with more than 335 million people: Benin, the Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, the Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Rwanda, Senegal, South Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The pilot is backed by the countries’ national identification and ICT agencies and by partners including the African Development Bank, the European Union and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). Ascend Digital Solutions, which is delivering the technical foundation for SADX, said it looked forward to “the next phases of functional testing and wider rollout.”

Related coverage includes a partnership on African civil register digitisation and Ethiopia’s entry into the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), another AfCFTA-linked cross-border system.

The ministry said in a statement distributed on 21 October 2026 from Mogadishu, Somalia, that 137 Members of Parliament voted in favour at a plenary session. The ministry, along with other institutions, drafted the bill, and it went through readings, deliberations, and a presentation to the House before the vote.

What the ministry says the bill does

The ministry said the bill seeks to establish a legal framework governing digital transactions so Somalia’s regulation keeps pace with new technology and the growing demand for digital services. It cited electronic payment systems, digital currencies, and financial transactions on digital platforms as the context.

The statement noted that mobile money services are widely used across Somalia, and said a clear legal framework would support economic development and public confidence.

Minister of Communications and Technology Mohamed Adam Moalim, known as Mohamed Soomaali, thanked MPs and the parliamentary committee on communications and technology for reviewing and advancing the bill.

Details still to come

The statement did not set out the bill’s provisions, say when it takes effect, or name the regulator that will enforce it. It also did not say whether the bill needs further approval before becoming law.

Separately, in Somaliland, Wadaag Bank is building a digital Islamic banking service, which we covered in a Q&A in August. Mobile money is also driving product launches elsewhere, such as Safaricom’s Shari’ah money market fund on M-PESA.

Vodacom said on 12 October 2026 that the AI for Africa Hackathon Challenge took place at Vodacom World in Johannesburg, South Africa. Students built AI solutions for problems in education, health, maternal health, community safety, gender-based violence and femicide, youth employment, accessibility, water security and agriculture.

From master’s students to undergraduates

The partnership’s first project focused on master’s students in UJ’s Centre for Applied Data Science. The hackathon extends it to undergraduate and master’s students.

“Building Africa’s AI capabilities requires investment in people as well as technology,” said Charlotte Kepadisa, Managing Executive of Big Data, AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at Vodacom Group.

Research on telecom cyber defence

Vodacom said the wider partnership includes co-designed learning programmes, postgraduate research and industry mentorship, with AWS providing cloud, data and AI resources.

Two research strands are under way. UJ master’s students are working on autonomous AI systems that could detect, analyse and respond to cyber threats across telecoms networks, and on blockchain-based approaches to digital identity management and preventing identity theft.

The partnership aims to supply job-ready AI and data science talent in South Africa. Our earlier piece on how AI could widen African education’s gaps covers the education side of that challenge. Meanwhile, the African Development Bank has offered free AI courses to African civil servants.

The GSMA (GSM Association), the mobile industry body, launched the report, Madagascar Digital Economy, at its Digital Africa Summit in Antananarivo, Madagascar, on 16 October 2026. A second report launched at the same event looks at spectrum policy across Africa.

Coverage has grown, use has not

Madagascar’s mobile connections rose from 12.3 million in 2021 to 22.5 million at the end of 2025, according to the GSMA. Unique mobile internet penetration remained low at 14.3% in 2025. In 2026, 66% of the population lived within mobile broadband coverage but did not use mobile internet.

The report names smartphone affordability and digital literacy as major barriers. About one-third of the rural population lives outside 4G coverage, which the GSMA attributes to difficult terrain, limited electricity, costly backhaul and high operating costs.

4 priorities

The report recommends 4 priorities that support Madagascar’s Digital Strategic Plan 2023–2028:

• Cheaper smartphones. Remove the 6% copyright fee, 20% import duty and 1% regulation levy on qualifying entry-level smartphones, add a targeted VAT exemption and expand device financing.
• Cheaper rural networks. Develop a costed Rural Connectivity Plan, make the funding mechanism transparent and results-based, and coordinate telecoms and electricity investment, including mini-grids anchored by mobile towers.
• Tax reform. Consider removing the 8% sector-specific excise duty, cut the 2% telecoms and ICT regulation tax to 1%, and zero-rate imports of essential broadband network and rural-site energy equipment.
• More useful services. Support voice-based services built on reliable Malagasy speech recognition, to reach people with limited literacy.

“Madagascar’s expanding mobile networks provide a strong foundation for digital transformation,” said Angela Wamola, Head of Africa at the GSMA.

Spectrum costs more in Africa

The second report, Spectrum Policy in Africa, finds that spectrum costs in Africa are on average 24% higher than elsewhere, measured against operator revenues and adjusted for the amount of spectrum assigned. It says pricing and licensing reforms could add more than $120 billion to African GDP between 2026 and 2035.

By 2035, the GSMA estimates the reforms could extend 4G to an additional 50 million people and 5G to an additional 170 million, and lift average download speeds by at least 30%. Its recommendations include prices that reflect spectrum’s forward-looking value, technology-neutral licences, licence terms of at least 20 years and long-term spectrum roadmaps.

The figures are the GSMA’s projections, and the body represents mobile operators that would be affected by the tax and spectrum changes it proposes. Affordability is already a pressure point elsewhere: rising memory prices are pushing Africa’s $30 smartphone out of reach, and spectrum pricing was a live issue when MTN won all the 3 GHz 5G spectrum Ghana offered.

The Pan-African technology group announced on 21 October 2026 that it is expanding its AI Factory with the Nemotron family. The models will run as a locally hosted, managed inference service through the Cassava AI Multi-Model Exchange (CAIMEx), where they are offered to customers as APIs.

One gateway, several models

CAIMEx is Cassava’s exchange for AI models. Its product page describes a single API that lets customers, particularly telcos, use several large language models and switch between them without re-engineering their integrations, running on regional infrastructure for lower latency and in-region data handling where required.

Nemotron adds reasoning and tool-use capabilities, which Cassava says will help customers build AI agents that work through complex tasks and interact with business tools. Because the models’ weights, training data and recipes are open, developers can also fine-tune them for specific applications.

“Expanding our AI Factory across our markets is about creating the capacity and economics needed for businesses to build and deploy AI solutions at scale,” said Ahmed El Beheiry, Group Chief Technology and AI Officer at Cassava Technologies. He said the company was giving enterprises and service providers “more choice in how they access and deliver these capabilities to their customers.”

Security and cost controls for AI agents

Cassava said that as AI agents take on longer-running tasks and gain access to business systems, the infrastructure must include security and guardrails. It is using NVIDIA OpenShell to bring model compute, governed agent execution and independent security enforcement together for customers’ agentic workloads on the AI Factory.

It is also introducing a CAIMEx Token Optimiser that identifies information the system has already processed and, where appropriate, reuses it instead of reprocessing it. Cassava said this reduces computing requirements and helps customers use their AI tokens more efficiently, and that it applies to both Cassava-hosted and third-party models.

Part of a wider NVIDIA push

NVIDIA’s separate announcement on telecom operators building AI infrastructure lists Cassava in Africa among the operators expanding NVIDIA-powered infrastructure, alongside Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Fastweb and Vodafone in Italy.

The move extends the Cassava group’s run of technology partnerships this year. Its security arm, Liquid C2, recently agreed to resell KnowBe4’s security awareness training to African enterprises. Cassava also supplies the AI layer for the AI data centre that Vodafone Business and Elsewedy Electric plan to build in Egypt.

Cassava’s businesses also include Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Africa Data Centres, Distributed Power Africa and the fintech Sasai, and the group says it serves customers in 94 countries.

Cassava did not say in its announcement when customers can access the Nemotron models, what they will cost, or which markets the service will launch in first.

The professional services firm presented the findings of the second edition of VAT in Africa: Digital Services 2026 in a media release on 20 October 2026. The report covers 28 countries in detail, based on information available as of 15 August 2026, and tracks the rules on electronically supplied services, a category that spans streaming, cloud tools, online advertising and marketplaces.

Eleven countries have joined since 2024

Since the first edition, countries that have introduced relevant rules include Algeria, Botswana, Chad, Republic of Congo, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Rwanda, Togo and Zanzibar. Tanzania’s mainland and Zanzibar have separate VAT legislation, so PwC treats them as separate entries.

Not all the new rules are in force yet. Botswana’s non-resident suppliers began registering on 1 June 2026, but they must charge and remit VAT from 1 October 2026. Liberia is moving from a goods and services tax to a VAT, with full implementation expected from January 2027, and Namibia and Mozambique have draft legislation awaiting implementation dates.

Rates and thresholds vary widely

There is no harmonised framework. PwC says the rules differ on which transactions are covered, the revenue level at which a foreign supplier must register, the registration route and the invoicing requirements.

Nigeria’s regime applies to non-resident suppliers of services such as cloud computing, streaming, online advertising and e-learning. They act as VAT agents and must remit the VAT they collect to the Nigeria Revenue Service by the 21st day of the following month.

In Ghana, non-resident suppliers cannot recover input VAT, and the country’s tax authority has begun onboarding them onto its E-VAT system. Egypt has made a mandatory API platform the only way for foreign suppliers to verify an Egyptian business customer’s tax number, which decides whether the customer accounts for VAT under the reverse charge mechanism (where the buyer, not the seller, declares the tax).

Compliance gets harder, not simpler

Job Kabochi, PwC Africa’s Indirect Tax Leader, said: “While African governments are increasingly focused on taxing digital services, there is no single approach across the continent.” PwC says businesses selling into several markets must build compliance processes that adapt as the rules change.

PwC also flags the growing use of technology by tax authorities, including electronic registration, e-invoicing and digital reporting tools. Matthew Besanko, PwC Africa’s Southern Africa Indirect Leader, said: “The landscape is moving beyond VAT on electronic services.” He added that businesses’ priority is managing digital economy tax and compliance requirements as an interconnected whole.

The rules reach markets PwC has singled out for growth. Its Africa media outlook to 2030 forecasts Kenya as the world’s fastest-growing internet advertising market and Nigeria as the fastest in streaming video, and both countries apply VAT to digital services sold from abroad.

For subscription platforms, software vendors and marketplaces, 11 new entrants since 2024 mean more registrations, more local returns and more national systems to integrate.