Purchase credit financing has always been lacking in big markets like Nigeria, which is why we most likely pay for everything in upfront cash. That could change for auto users in the country with a new partnership between Autochek and AppZone.

For those who are not aware, Autochek has been providing expert-inspected vehicles at fair market prices to interested buyers in the Nigerian space for some time now. AppZone, on the other hand, is the leading fintech organisation in Africa. It, thus, makes sense that Autochek will partner with them to bring much needed credit services into the country.

The partnership will work by starting from the Autochek platform where buyers can choose from a wide array of vehicles listed for sale. These vehicles, as promised by Autochek, are tested and inspected to pass multiple stages of standard checks so that they can ensure buyers are getting a good value for their money.

After picking a car of choice, these prospective buyers submit a credit financing application which is run through BankOne – AppZone’s proprietary app for managing such credit requests. In time, the prospective buyers are connected with different credit offering institutions with diverse rates and plans.

Once the intending buyer picks a bank to partner with, they are good to go.

We believe this will replace car loans and make repayments on vehicles purchased even easier on the buyers. Likewise, it would bring a surge to the auto economy of the country, helping to improve the standard of living of those who need a car but might not be able to get it now due to their current capabilities.

Flutterwave seems to be going from heights to new highs these days, and we love to see it. Their latest moves now see them supporting the Nigerian basketball team as the official payments partner as the team heads to Tokyo to compete in the Olympics games.

It is worthy of note that the Nigerian Team, named D’Tigers, is the only African basketball team that made it to the competition.

The task before them is also a tall one, seeing as they have to compete against basket balling giants like the US, Australia, France, Germany, Italy and Iran, among others. The silver lining there is that we have the services of Coach Mike Brown, the assistant head coach of the Golden State Warriors, to lead the team.

This Flutterwave partnership makes it easier for fans to donate to the players and help them reach their full potential. It is also a move to make sure fans from all over the world can get the merchandise and other products that the official sports body in the country will be selling. The proceeds will also go to the bettering of the sport, so fans are supporting in another way too.

The Nigerian team has already secured a friendly win over the US team on July 10 and if they continue in that way, we have hopes of clinching a worthy medal at the Tokyo games.

Samsung had announced since October of last year that it was getting out of the cloud game. Thus, users of the Samsung Cloud service now had to migrate all of their date to Microsoft OneDrive platform.

The company had also given enough time for this to happen, previously setting the due date for the migration to happen to August, 2021. Now, the South Korean OEM has come out with an extension that allows an extra 30 days so that users can get all of their date to the OneDrive platform by September 2021 instead.

Users who do not migrate their data before the end of the due date will no longer be able to complete that operation from October. However, Samsung maintains that users will still be able to access and download the cloud data in October. From November, though, all of the service and its infrastructure become disabled – so much that users cannot even download the data that they have stored on the cloud.

We recommend that if you’re using the Samsung Cloud, now is a good time as any to make the migration. Even if you would not be migrating, consider downloading your data and storing in a safe place.

WooCommerce is one of the biggest ecommerce service providers in the world. To that extent, even ecommerce retailers in Nigeria and Africa prefer the solutions that the platform brings to offer their goods and services online. However, the problem of payments for African merchants has persisted for a long time now.

That is the issue that startups like Paystack and Flutterwave, among others, have stepped up to solve over the years. As of the time of this writing, the African space has made an even closer leap towards being on par with the rest of the world in terms of seamlessly offering their products and getting paid without hassles.

WooCommerce partners Paystack.

The WooCommerce platform has officially recognised Paystack as its official payment partner for the whole of Africa. This means that the payment service is naturally integrated into the WooCommerce offering now, allowing seamless setup, management, collections and remittances from the vendors who choose to use it.

Given the solid framework that Paystack has built over the years, it is both laudable and logical that they be the ones to secure such a partnership.

Going forward, Paystack will now be listed alongside Stripe (which acquired the former company last year) as an independent payments provider on the WooCommerce service, all dedicated to the African landscape.

Netflix, since breaking into the Nigerian and African market, has been trying to get more people on the platform with great deals.

Just as they do in India, they are bringing one of the cheapest plans to this market since they know that they can make more from the numbers. Likewise, once they have established a hold it would be easier to raise the prices and still trust the loyalty of users.

In a new move, the company is now rolling out its cheapest plans ever to the Nigerian and other sub-Saharan markets. The only catch here is that the plans will be mobile only. Seeing as this is where most users view their content in the country, that makes sense from a lot of standpoints. It also means that the company can focus on mobile quality outputs without putting too much strain on its servers.

Before the rollout of this new plan, the cheapest plan from the giant streaming service costs just NGN2,900 per month. This new plan sees that price drop to NGN1,200 per month.

For those whom price had been a barrier of entry in the past, we believe this is as good as it is going to get.

Every ten years since 1981, Ghana has sought to conduct a nationwide census which estimates the number of people living within the shores of the country at any one time. As of the last census in 2010, this number was pegged at a modest 24.6 million. Even though the next one would have been in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic made that impossible.

Now that the country is ready to start counting again, they have made giant strides to ensure the count goes smoother, faster and better this time around: deploying a digital model of counting.

The government has been working on using satellite imagery and tablets to map the areas as well as inhabitants better. This plan has long been in the works, so much that it has even been tested on select areas to see how efficient and accurate it might be. The results of those tests must have been very impressive for a larger launch like this to have been sanctioned.

Leveraging data capture tech which will allow the improved understanding of the citizen demographics too, more than 67,000 field agents have already been trained and deployed to carry out the census program.

However, this did not come cheap. Estimated to have cost some $84 million, representing a 50% increase over the figures from the last census, Ghana will be looking to recoup the investment over the next couple of years, and in the speed/ accuracy of the current exercise.