👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – My OneApp, zero access

Safaricom's much-anticipated My OneApp launched this week to conspicuously muted market reception, marking a significant setback for one of Africa's most valuable telecommunications companies. The super app—designed as a unified digital platform combining payments, banking, e-commerce, and lifestyle services—has failed to gain traction among the carrier's 56 million subscribers across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. This underperformance signals deeper structural challenges in how African tech ecosystems are attempting to replicate Asian super app models without addressing fundamental consumer behaviour and infrastructure gaps.

The My OneApp represents Safaricom's aggressive pivot toward ecosystem services, a strategy that has worked brilliantly for WeChat and Alipay in China. Yet the East African market presents vastly different conditions. Consumer awareness campaigns have been modest, onboarding friction remains high, and critically, the app aggregates services that Safaricom customers already access through separate, established platforms. Unlike Asia's super apps, which created entirely new payment and commerce categories, My OneApp arrived into an already-fragmented but functional digital ecosystem where M-Pesa (Safaricom's dominant mobile money service) and established e-commerce players already command user loyalty.

For European investors, this failure carries important implications for the "African tech unicorn" narrative. Safaricom commands approximately 65% of Kenya's mobile market share, operates in multiple East African countries, and has deep infrastructure advantages that most African startups lack. If even Safaricom cannot successfully launch a super app despite these structural advantages, the path to profitability for standalone fintech and commerce platforms becomes even more challenging. The episode demonstrates that market dominance and capital are insufficient—execution, user experience design, and genuine customer value creation remain critical bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, Nigeria is pursuing an alternative strategic path: a shared, government-backed cloud infrastructure initiative. This contrasts sharply with East Africa's privately-driven approach and reflects Nigeria's tech policy shift toward digital sovereignty. Rather than enabling private companies to build isolated ecosystems, Nigerian policymakers are investing in foundational infrastructure that could theoretically benefit all market participants. For investors, this represents a fundamentally different risk profile. Government-backed infrastructure offers long-term stability and potential regulatory moats, but introduces political and bureaucratic risk that private ventures don't face.

The broader context matters: East Africa and West Africa are pursuing divergent technology strategies. East Africa emphasizes private sector innovation and consumer-facing platforms (Safaricom, Equity Bank, Flutterwave), while West Africa increasingly emphasizes state-led digital infrastructure and policy guardrails. Neither approach is inherently superior, but European investors must recalibrate expectations accordingly. The My OneApp failure suggests that the "African tech boom" narrative requires significant qualification—success in one vertical (mobile money) does not automatically translate to success in adjacent categories.

The critical lesson: African digital markets are not monolithic, and importing successful business models from Asia requires far more localization than many founders and investors assume.