Africa's Talking is a Nairobi-based API platform founded in 2010 that provides software developers across Africa with programmatic access to telecommunications infrastructure - SMS, voice calls, USSD menus, airtime distribution, and mobile payments. The company occupies a peculiar and essential position in Silicon Savannah: not a consumer-facing startup that the public interacts with, but the invisible infrastructure layer on which hundreds of other African technology companies are built.
The company was co-founded by Samuel Gikandi and Eston Kimani, Kenyan software engineers who recognised that building applications in Africa required telecommunications capabilities that were extraordinarily difficult for individual developers to access. In the United States, a developer who wanted to send SMS messages could integrate Twilio's API in minutes. In Kenya in 2010, the same developer faced weeks of paperwork, contractual negotiations with Safaricom or Airtel, minimum volume commitments, and technical integration challenges that required telco-specific expertise. Africa's Talking abstracted this complexity, providing a simple REST API that developers could integrate in hours.
The platform's initial product was an SMS gateway - allowing developers to send and receive text messages programmatically. This capability was foundational for dozens of Kenyan applications: Eneza Education's mobile learning platform, agricultural information services for farmers, appointment reminders for health clinics, two-factor authentication for fintech apps, and the notification systems that powered logistics companies like Sendy. Every time a Kenyan received an automated text message from a technology company, there was a reasonable chance Africa's Talking was routing it.
The product line expanded to include USSD (the menu-based interface used by M-Pesa and other mobile services), voice calls (enabling interactive voice response systems), airtime distribution (allowing apps to reward users with mobile credit), and mobile payment integration. Each product addressed a specific telecommunications capability that African developers needed but could not easily access directly from telco networks.
Africa's Talking raised funding from investors including Orange Digital Ventures (the venture arm of the French telco) and Social Capital. The company expanded across sub-Saharan Africa, connecting to mobile networks in over 20 countries and serving thousands of developers and businesses. The developer community was central to Africa's Talking's strategy - the company invested heavily in developer relations, hosting hackathons, providing documentation and tutorials, and building a community of African engineers who relied on its platform.
The company's significance extends beyond its commercial operations. By making telecommunications infrastructure accessible to individual developers, Africa's Talking lowered the barrier to entry for African software entrepreneurs. A developer in Nairobi with a laptop, an Africa's Talking account, and a good idea could build and deploy a product that reached millions of mobile phone users - without negotiating contracts with telcos, without significant capital, and without the corporate connections that had historically been required to access network infrastructure.
See Also
- Safaricom
- Silicon Savannah
- Digital Economy Kenya
- iHub Nairobi
- Eneza Education
- Mobile Phone Revolution Kenya
Sources
- Jackson, Tom. "Africa's Talking: The API Platform Powering African Developers." Disrupt Africa, 2018.
- Bright, Jake. "Africa's Talking Raises Funding to Expand API Platform Across the Continent." TechCrunch, 2017.
- Mulupi, Dinfin. "How Africa's Talking Became the Twilio of Africa." How We Made It in Africa, 2019.
- Orange Digital Ventures. "Investing in Africa's Developer Infrastructure: Africa's Talking." Portfolio Case Study, 2018.