Zambian and African technology and artificial intelligence — startups, the digital economy, frontier models, and the policy around them.
15 posts
Anthropic's enterprise business is running past $30 billion a year, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, on the back of Claude Opus 4.7, deals such as KPMG rolling Claude out to 276,000 staff, and a $200 million Gates Foundation partnership. Its new Claude for Small Business pushes the model into tools Zambian firms already use — QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva and Microsoft 365. This analysis weighs what the enterprise-AI surge means for Zambian SMEs, and the connectivity and cost gaps that still stand in the way.
MTN Zambia and SpaceX's Starlink have completed Zambia's first satellite data session and first mobile-money transaction over a satellite link, routed through MTN's MoMo platform to a standard smartphone with no special hardware. MTN Zambia became the first African operator to finish Starlink Direct-to-Cell testing and is targeting commercial service within weeks, pending approval from the Zambia Information and Communications Technology Authority. The technology promises to extend payments and connectivity to rural areas terrestrial networks have never reached.
Banks everywhere are pushing AI into credit decisions, fraud detection and customer service. The technology is real and the efficiency gains are real. But a Daily Maverick reflection makes the sharper point: in an AI age, trust is the scarce asset, and a bank that automates faster than it earns trust is building on sand. For Zambia, where banking confidence is still being built, the sequence matters more than the speed.
The mobile-money agent — the person at the kiosk who turns cash into digital value and back — is the most important node in Zambia's financial system. A new agent training manual from the Payments Association of Zambia marks a shift: the agent network is being treated as a profession with standards, not an informal patchwork. The move matters because agents are where financial inclusion, fraud risk and consumer trust all meet.
Google I/O 2026 opened on 19 May, with the company's developer conference positioned by its own event page as the year's flagship. Gemini and broader AI updates are widely expected to define the agenda.
From GPT-5.5 to robotics livestreams to the AI for Good Global Summit, the May 2026 AI cycle is too big for any single launch story. Here is the month, and what it means for Zambia.
OpenAI introduced GPT-5.5 on 22 April 2026, framing the model as a step toward real work on a computer rather than chatbot back-and-forth. A safety system card shipped alongside.
Ilara Health is the Kenya-based health-tech firm that has spent the past five years equipping small private clinics across East Africa with diagnostic devices, working capital and management software. The play is unflashy and durable. Five thousand clinics later, the company is one of East Africa's most significant primary-care networks. For Zambia, where private clinics carry an outsized share of urban primary care, the model is directly applicable.
Climate modelling is the field Wits University's Professor Laura Pereira and a global team of scientists now want to rewrite. Their argument is that the dominant scenarios used by the IPCC and most climate finance institutions encode Western economic assumptions that miss Africa's polycrisis dynamics. The proposed alternative is Integrated Transformative Scenarios — a research agenda built to give the Global South authorship of its own climate futures.
From 24 June 2026, Zambian commercial banks stop processing cheques. The Bank of Zambia phase-out is final, the rationale is sound — cheques are the slowest, most fraud-prone payment rail in the system — and the practical question for businesses is what to use instead. The answer is a three-rail mix: real-time gross settlement (RTGS) for large payments, the Zambia Electronic Funds Transfer (ZEFT) system for routine batched flows, and mobile money for everything small.
Ethiopia spent two decades as Africa's most state-owned major economy. The government is now unwinding the telecoms monopoly, opening the banking sector to foreign players and standing up a proper capital market for the first time. African Business calls it a 'hidden tech awakening'. For Zambia and the Lusaka Securities Exchange, the lesson is in the sequencing — what Ethiopia is doing now is what Zambian markets pulled off a generation earlier, and the reverse-engineering opportunities are real.
Agentic AI — software that can plan and take multi-step actions on a shopper's behalf — is the next platform shift in retail, according to a new McKinsey and ICSC report carried by African Business. The headline number is $5 trillion in unlocked global retail revenue by 2030. Zambian retailers, mostly mid-sized and offline-dominant, are not the target audience for that scenario. They are the next-door audience: the businesses agentic AI will reach through Africa's mobile-money rails before the average shop owner has read a slide deck.
LUSAKA — The Bank of Zambia is closing the cheque system. Circular 08/2024 sets 24 June 2026 as the last day customers can deposit a cheque at any commercial bank.
RightsCon director Nikki Gladstone says a Zambian official told her diplomats from the People's Republic of China had pressured Lusaka to exclude Taiwanese participants. Analysts say Beijing is more willing to use its leverage in Africa.
Access Now cancelled RightsCon 2026 days before its Zambia opening, saying the government had been pressured by China to exclude Taiwanese activists.
Technology/AI is the digital and artificial-intelligence beat for Kwacha News — Zambian and African startups, mobile money and digital payments, broadband and connectivity, e-government, and the frontier AI story sitting alongside them: the models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the safety and governance debate, and how AI is reaching work, healthcare, cybersecurity and robotics. The section treats both threads as economic stories first — who is getting funded, what is scaling, where the infrastructure gaps are, and how global shifts in technology and AI reach Zambian businesses and consumers.