Tag: investing in africa

Raisons d investir dans les marchés émergents d Afrique 🌍
Le continent africain devient rapidement l’une des nouvelles destinations les plus prometteuses pour les investisseurs des marchés émergents.

En fait, depuis plus de 20 ans, le Forum économique mondial a identifié que plus de la moitié des économies à la croissance la plus rapide dans le monde se trouvent sur le continent. Avec des ressources naturelles abondantes, une main-d’œuvre jeune et de plus en plus éduquée, une stabilité politique relative et des perspectives indéniables de croissance économique, il n’y a aucun doute sur la vitalité pour les investisseurs.

De bout en bout, l’Afrique fait partie des rares marchés émergents à l’échelle mondiale ; l’expression, inventée par des économistes au début des années 1980, définit l’investissement dans les pays en développement. Comme toute décision d’investissement, il y a des risques inhérents, mais voici cinq raisons pour lesquelles notre direction croit que l’Afrique mérite une chance :
1. Potentiel de croissance 📈
Actuellement, l’Afrique représente environ 17% de la population mondiale, mais seulement 3% du PIB mondial. Ces données attestent non seulement d’un échec historique à exploiter le potentiel de développement du continent, mais mettent également en évidence les formidables opportunités à venir. Si l’Afrique continue de maintenir et d’accélérer ses réformes structurelles, beaucoup croient que le continent peut imiter la montée rapide de la Chine au cours des 50 dernières années.
1. Innovation 💡
Les révolutions industrielles, qu’elles soient entraînées par la vapeur, les chaînes de montage ou les ordinateurs, ont historiquement été lentes à balayer le continent africain. Cependant, l’ère de l’Industrie 4.0, de l’énergie propre, de l’intelligence artificielle et de l’innovation numérique promet d’être différente. Contrairement aux précédentes vagues de changement industriel, avoir une part dans l’ère numérique ne nécessite pas une expertise étendue ou des investissements massifs en capital. Au lieu de cela, les innovateurs et les entrepreneurs des marchés émergents sont en position de puiser dans les flux de talents et de connaissances numériques et de les convertir en biens, services et modèles commerciaux.
1. Valorisations plus basses 📉
Au cours de la dernière décennie, les actions africaines n’ont pas été une success story – du moins pas par rapport à des régions similaires. Les indices MSCI US et MSCI Developed World ont augmenté respectivement de 232% et 159% au cours des dix dernières années, tandis que le MSCI South Africa et le MSCI EFM Africa ex. South Africa n’ont gagné que 33% et 23%. Cela dit, certains se demandent si les actions africaines ont été à la traîne à cause de problèmes sur le continent. La réponse courte : pas vraiment. Cependant, cela présente une opportunité unique pour les investisseurs – une plus grande part de capital dans les entreprises dans lesquelles vous choisissez d’investir.
1. Diversification 📊
La diversification est la pratique qui consiste à répartir les investissements afin de réduire l’exposition aux risques associés à un seul type d’actif. Cette pratique vise à réduire la volatilité de votre portefeuille d’investissement au fil du temps. Si vous attendiez patiemment une opportunité d’investir dans des actions internationales, l’Afrique se présente comme une option digne.
1. Classe moyenne en augmentation 💼
Selon le Forum économique mondial, d’ici 2030, plus de 40% des Africains appartiendront aux classes moyennes ou supérieures ; en conséquence, il y aura une demande accrue de biens et de services. Sans parler du fait que la consommation des ménages devrait atteindre 2,5 billions de dollars (oui, billions), plus du double de celle de 2015 qui était de 1,1 billion de dollars. Une augmentation du capital ne peut signifier que plus d’opportunités de croissance économique et de développement à travers le continent, ce qui amène de plus en plus d’investisseurs à se tourner vers l’Afrique.

C’est là qu’intervient daba. Notre plateforme simplifiée fournit ce que nous appelons des « investisseurs de tous les jours » avec des analyses d’investissement et des ressources pour la création de richesse, afin de rendre leurs décisions d’investissement dans les marchés de capitaux privés et publics africains durables.

Pour en savoir plus sur daba et comment rejoindre notre communauté mondiale croissante d’investisseurs, visitez dabafinance.com ou connectez-vous avec nous sur LinkedIn !
May 22, 2023
Daba Participates in BuuPass’ $1.3m Pre-seed Round

Congratulations to BuuPass – Bus, Train & Flight bookings on their fundraising round and recent successes. We are excited to have enabled institutional and individual investors to invest in the company’s journey.

BuuPass is a B2B2C full-stack marketplace for sales and ticketing management for long-distance transport industry (bus, shuttle, train & flight) in the East African region.

The Problem: Transport services in Africa are highly fragmented and undigitized.

The Solution: A digital fullstack marketplace where transport operators can digitize their operations and increase sales via Buupass marketplace & partners and Travelers can search, compare and book their tickets.

At Daba Finance, we have a strong focus on driving capital into companies that are creating positive change and driving innovation in their respective industries. With a $40B domestic travel and transport market in Africa and $24B spent on bus tickets in Sub Saharan Africa, BuuPass is well-positioned to make a significant impact on the transportation sector.

Here are 5 reasons why investors liked BuuPass, why we listed the company and what made their capital raise a success:

1️⃣ Strong Traction and First Mover Advantage : BuuPass is the first transport marketplace in East Africa with a 73% 5-year CAGR since inception; the company reached break-even in July 2021.

2️⃣ Interoperability: BuuPass’s interoperability across multiple apps is a competitive moat; the integration of the M-PESA super app allows it to access over 500M+ mobile money users (potential customers)

3️⃣ Experienced Team: Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi are amazing. The team has solid experience from World Bank, Airtel, safari com, andela, and SWVL along with a street-smart attitude. The team equally has high quality advisors.

4️⃣ Current Investors: Current investors in this round include Five35 Ventures , Founders Factory Africa, Changecom Capital, Google for Startups Black Founders Fund Program, Maxime Bayen, and Nairobi Business Angel Network. These investors have invested in notable companies such as Zazuu, Zuri Health, Shuttlers, Bitmama, Africa Foresight Group, ImaliPay among others.

5️⃣ Social Impact: BuuPass is addressing a key challenge in the transportation system across East Africa as it is making commuting easier and more convenient for individuals.

We look forward to following the growth and success of BuuPass.

To find more about how Daba powers investing in Africa opportunities for individual and professional investors visit our webpage or connect with our team – https://bit.ly/dabawebsite

Read Techcrunch article here https://tcrn.ch/3XwgcKg

February 19, 2023
An Angel Investor’s Guide to Startup Investing
With startups making the news and causing a ruckus for raising ridiculous amounts of funding and the VCs all swooping in to have a piece these last years, there has been a lot of talk on “startup investing” and how to go about it.

This article is here to help you break it down and thoroughly understand what it is and how to get the maximum benefit from it with daba.

Startup investing like a VC but cheaper

What is a startup?

A “startup” refers to an early-stage company founded and owned by one or more entrepreneurs, often with a new product or service and an untested business model. After finding a product-market fit, the goal is often to grow and expand rapidly, therefore, startups generally start with high costs and limited revenue. To achieve this, they look for capital from a variety of sources such as venture capitalists.

For a long time, investments in private companies like startups were reserved for ONLY accredited investors (people with a high net worth or an investment company e.g., venture capital firms) due to the large amounts required for startup investments and the high risk involved.

But with the advent of crowdfunding and law changes in lots of countries, people 18 and older can now invest in startups and gain high returns.

Why startups?

Startup investing, though risky like every other type of investment, has the potential to produce very high returns on investment if proper research and due diligence are done.

An example is Paystack, the Nigeria-based payments startup that makes it easy for businesses to accept secure payments from multiple local and global payment channels.

In 2020, US payment company Stripe acquired Paystack in a deal worth over $200 million. The angel investors who invested in the seed round of Paystack in 2016 made approximately 1,440% ROI, 14.4x their investment in just five years.

These show that although investing in startups could be risky, it could also be rewarding.

Now imagine if you had invested in 2017…..

How do you value a startup?

Before investing in a startup, it’s important to know the company’s value in actual figures. This provides insight into its ability to use the new capital to grow, and meet customer and investor expectations.

But deducing a startup valuation can be difficult. This is because company valuation is done using historical financial performance. However, most startups don’t generate profits or even revenue for a few years after starting, thus using traditional metrics for early-stage valuations doesn’t apply.

Generally, a startup valuation accounts for factors like your team’s expertise, product, assets, business model, total addressable market, competitor performance, market opportunity, goodwill, and more.

Valuing a startup is both an art and a science and some of the best ways to go about it include the cost to duplicate, market multiples, discounted cash flow, and valuation by stage.

Ways to invest in early-stage startups:
1. Equity investment: investors purchase shares in a startup at a fixed price
2. Investing in convertible securities: the investment amount is eventually converted to equity
3. Use a trusted investment platform like daba, sign up here for African startups
How do I choose startups to invest in?

Before investing in startups, it’s necessary to conduct your due diligence; a series of checks an investor might run on a startup to confirm that the investment is a good strategic fit and to identify potential red flags. Due diligence allows investors to make informed investment decisions and mitigate risk.

How do I get a return on my investment?

Startup investors can get returns when:

i) The company is bought by a bigger organization

ii) The startup goes public

iii) Dividend payments (if the business is successfully trading, and the founders are not looking for an exit via sale or IPO, they may reward investors by paying out regularly or through a one-time special dividend)

iv) Selling your stake in the company

v) Revenue from the day-to-day running of the startup

Startup investing is very risky (90% of startups fail in their first five years) but can be highly rewarding for investors willing to sit tight until the startup matures.

As the saying goes in finance; the riskier the asset, the higher the return. This is evident in the technology sector. An example is Cisco’s $3.7 billion purchase of AppDynamics, app management, and analytics tool in 2017. The latter was launched in 2008 and had been through five funding rounds, suggesting several investors got sweet returns from the deal.

It’s important to note that the return on investment you get as an investor depends on the size of your stake in the startup and the valuation it’s based on.

How to get started?

There is no need to worry about how to source for startups, their valuation, founders, how much to invest, and monitoring your investment, daba can help you get started.

daba has created a simple app to access custom investment strategies and build wealth by investing in Africa’s best private and public market opportunities.

In addition to this, daba offers resources help you sharpen your knowledge and make more informed investment decisions.

Register to get early access to daba here.
September 1, 2022
Social Commerce in Africa: The $28bn Opportunity
Today, a lot of buying and selling is done over social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp.

In emerging markets, this brand of e-commerce (called social commerce) has grown over the years.

Facebook and Instagram are used for online shopping more than e-commerce marketplaces by Africans, per a 2019 GeoPoll survey, and social commerce accounts for the majority of e-commerce activity on the continent, according to GSMA and UNECA. Beyond just shopping on social media, buying decisions are also influenced by online social communities.

An underlying reason for this growth is that these channels don’t require much digital expertise and are easily accessible for less tech-savvy vendors in Africa.

Small-to-medium formal businesses also set up stores on social platforms to promote and sell to all sorts of buyers, where they already spend several hours per day.

Image from Later.com

By the numbers
- 3.6 billion: The number of people that use social networking sites globally
- 34%: The share of Africa’s population using the internet as of 2018.
- 233 million: Total Facebook subscribers in Africa as of December 2020.
- 18%: Average increase in the number of online shoppers in Africa between 2014 to 2018, against 12% globally
- 92%: SMEs in Kenya that used social commerce as of June 2020.
- 87%: E-commerce shoppers that strongly agreed that social media influenced their purchase decisions in a 2018 report.
The opportunity: Social commerce does a great job blending content sharing, messaging, and selling into one, helping businesses shorten the sales cycle. But most of the processes through which transactions happen—from product discovery and selection to order placements and payments—are crude and inefficient. Put simply, social networks aren’t built to support end-to-end online shopping experiences, meaning users need third-party support for the logistics and payments side of things.

6 Startups to watch and why

Image from daba

Many African startups currently offer solutions that help improve social commerce processes for vendors. Below are a few;

Catlog

The Nigeria-based startup offers vendors a simple way to create an online store on its platform, add their products, and create a custom link they can share on social media with deals finalized on WhatsApp.

ANKA

Ivorian SaaS player provides merchants with an omnichannel dashboard through which they can monitor their sales and inventory across all several channels—Afrikrea, social media, and websites—and manages payments and logistics for vendors.

Chooya

Which brands itself as the “TikTok for e-commerce”, digitizes word-of-mouth marketing, allowing consumers to recommend sellers and get rewarded for it.

Tendo

Offers the average individual an opportunity to tap into Africa’s e-commerce boom by selling online with zero upfront inventory. Ghanaian sellers on the platform are able to source products and resell items using social commerce tools such as WhatsApp, arrange delivery, and get paid, all through the app.

Rabawa

Enables Nigerian entrepreneurs to leverage social media for curating, promoting, and selling their products. Its social sharing integrations include WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, allowing vendors to earn from their social networks such as friends and family.

Tushop

Works with “community leaders” to make access to groceries more affordable and more convenient for Kenyans through community group buying. The leaders register with the startup, collate orders from their neighbours and manage door-to-door deliveries all through its platform.

Elloe AI

Is a Kenya-based AI-powered, conversational commerce platform that allows small businesses to manage customer interaction and sell products online across various messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Image from the Wfanet.org

The challenge: Limited access to the internet presents potential challenges to the ability of startups in the social commerce space to scale. In addition, selling products via social media platforms alone has its disadvantages, such as when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced lengthy outages last October.

The future: Social commerce continues to blur the lines between social interaction and online selling while accounting for an increasing share of e-commerce sales. We expect to see more growth in the collective social commerce sub-sector in emerging markets as more people come online. More so, Africans are more likely to patronize people they interact with on social media. As a result, social commerce on the continent has a very promising future.
May 17, 2022
QA Session and Deeper Dive With Daba Co-Founders

About six months ago, daba quietly launched its digital presence on a host of social media platforms in addition to a pre-launch landing page that encouraged signups to its growing waitlist. Via our website and social media accounts, we informed curious community members of what daba’s platform would do while they awaited the launch of our beta app. With a simple mission, to democratize investing in Africa, daba provides a barrier-free way for investors (of every level) to access curated investment strategies and build wealth by investing in the African private and public capital markets.

But there’s much more to the story.

Understanding the who, what, and why behind daba; paints a bigger picture for those who are hesitant to begin their African investment journey. Below, co-founders Boum III Jr and Anthony Miclet answer some of the most frequently asked questions in anticipation for the app’s awaited upcoming beta launch.

Q: SO TELL US WHY, WHAT’S THE REASON FOR daba?

After spending several months researching and having experienced how cumbersome it is to invest in promising African companies; we came to the conclusion that there’s a steep chasm between the capital needs of growing companies and investors looking to invest in promising opportunities in Africa. daba’s platform addresses this gap and provides a platform to safely drive capital in and out of the African capital markets, allowing opportunity and demand for capital to seamlessly intersect.

Simply put, our app makes it easy for African companies to access capital while providing investors an easy and convenient way to access these companies.

Q: WHY IS NOW THE BEST TIME TO INVEST IN AFRICA?

According to the World Economic Forum, more than half of the world’s fastest-growing economies are right on the African continent. Like Anthnoy mentioned, there’s a significant disparity in the status of stock exchanges and investment avenues in Africa. Many of these challenges are a result of poor governance, minimal investor confidence, and narrow pathways providing continuity between each of them. Simply put this presents a massive opportunity in Africa and because there are minimal channels for interested parties to get involved and change the tide… taking advantage now is very promising. I wouldn’t want to miss out!

Q: WAIT… WHAT DOES daba MEAN

daba is an acronym that stands for Democratizing Access to Business in Africa. Not to mention, “daba” is also a tool used for agriculture In Ivory Coast that closely resembles a shovel; daba is the people’s tool for investing in Africa.

Q: WHEN WILL THE BETA APP LAUNCH? IS THERE A COST TO JOIN?

Though our launch is contingent upon securing the necessary licenses, we anticipate releasing our invite only beta in late April / early May. We will slowly allow early members (those who joined the waitlist several months ago) to test out the beta app. From there on, we will collect feedback, iterate and then give access to all registered users by July.

The application is completely free to download and use, however, we offer a premium subscription for investors who are looking to access investment reports as well as our pre-built managed investment portfolios which support their wealth journey by aligning with their investment goals and values.

Q: I’VE SEEN YOUR DAILY INVESTOR UPDATES, WHAT’S THAT ABOUT?

At daba, we’re committed to becoming your preferred tool for investing in Africa and understand that in order to do so with confidence, you’ll need the insights to make informed investment decisions. Daily Investor Updates are a streamlined and digestible way for daba users to stay up-to-date with a high-level summary of the latest tech actions and our analyst’s takeaways on how the news impacts the African capital markets.

Q: IS THERE A SUGGESTED DOLLAR AMOUNT TO GET STARTED WITH INVESTING?

That’s a great question! While this is certainly relative to every financial situation, you can get started with $50 — or even much less! The most important thing (and the way to build larger investment portfolios) is to just get started! Building wealth is a journey, not a race. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see results.

Q: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO DEMOCRATIZE INVESTING IN AFRICA?

We want to make it easy for anyone to invest in African Public and Private markets via one simple, transparent and safe investment platform. We believe that Africa represents a massive opportunity that is underinvested and we want everyone to access it.

Q: WILL daba SERVE COUNTRIES OUTSIDE OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT?

Maybe one day, but it’s just far too early to say. Right now, we are focused on the African continent, which already covers 54 countries. We believe that if we are able to facilitate investments in Africa, we will be able to do so across other emerging markets as well. We are building financial rails that are applicable everywhere. The sky is truly the limit but we take it one step at a time.

Q. WHAT ARE daba’s FOUNDERS MOST EXCITED ABOUT?

Anthony: I’m really looking forward to breaking down both the perceived and actual barriers that exist for investing in Africa. With daba, it’s easy for anyone, regardless of their investment savvy or geographic location, to access the African financial markets. That’s going to help a lot of people continue to build or even kick off their wealth journey, it’s really exciting.

Boum: I’m excited about unlocking the true economic potential Africa represents. Africa is literally the last frontier of investing and 1 out of 4 people on Earth will be from Africa in the next 2 decades, yet the amount of capital being invested in the region is nowhere near what it should or could be. Once investment into the opportunities on the African continent, the world will realize how much potential remains untapped. Building daba ,contributing to ushering the future of investing in Africa and creating a reality where investing in Africa is as easy as it is today in the US and other developed markets, is something I am very excited about and particularly proud of.

To learn more about daba and how to join our growing global community of investors, visit dabafinance.com or connect with us on LinkedIn!

May 10, 2022