Asili Africa

Two Americans were named Kevin Ashley and Jon Wagner. Ashley had spent the previous decade flying United Nations relief missions into the South Sudan civil war. Wagner had been in…

How a single Nairobi diner became Kenya's most recognisable casual-dining chain.

Wandia Gichuru built one of Kenya's most recognisable consumer-fashion brands — bootstrapping a category that barely existed in Nairobi.

This is the story of how one of the most-funded African startups of its generation died — and how its founder is, right now, trying to build the opposite of it.

Five million customers. A factory in Nairobi making seven and a half thousand smartphones a day. The largest connected consumer-financing platform in sub-Saharan Africa. All of it…

In the final week of October 2024, federal prosecutors in lower Manhattan unsealed an indictment against Kenneth Newcombe, the former chief executive of C-Quest Capital, accusing h…

This is the story of Twiga Foods. The would-be Amazon for Africa's kiosk economy. The company that raised one hundred and sixty million dollars to fix African food — and discovered…

Sometime in the second week of April, 2020, the people of Nairobi looked up and saw something they had not seen in years. Kenya was locked down. Public transport had stopped. The…

This is the story of how a kerosene burn in a village became a bond market in Nairobi.

To understand M-Pesa, you have to begin in a place that has almost nothing to do with Kenya. You have to begin in Newbury, England, in the corporate social responsibility departmen…

On the sixth of March, 2007, in a small office in Nairobi, a Kenyan telecoms company launched a product that nobody else in the world thought would work. It was called M-Pesa. It l…

In 1993, a supervisor at the Central Bank of Kenya carried a thin folder into a meeting room in Nairobi. Inside the folder were the books of a small building society in Murang'a. T…