This Wednesday and Thursday, October 28 and 29, two of the continent’s economic capitals have the full attention of Africa’s digital ecosystem. Lagos is hosting the fourth edition of Moonshot by TechCabal at the National Theatre, while Johannesburg welcomes the ninth edition of AI Expo Africa at the Sandton Convention Centre. The formats differ, yet the ambition is shared: to show that African tech has moved past the stage of promises.
Launched in 2023 by the media outlet TechCabal, Moonshot has stepped up a level this year by moving into one of the Nigerian megacity’s landmark venues. Its opening day brought together regulation, public policy, artificial intelligence and commerce. Investors had a conference of their own, called FUEL, while young startups pitched their projects in the TC Battlefield competition. Dedicated rooms helped connect founders with funders. Today, the programme turns to big tech companies and the creative economy.
The event has already produced its first notable launch. Grey, a fintech backed by the US accelerator Y Combinator, unveiled Paycheck, a salary account designed for African professionals paid in dollars, pounds or euros. After six years focused on helping people receive money from abroad, the company is now going after the everyday management of that income. On stage, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, co-founder and chief executive of Flutterwave, sat down with a Bloomberg reporter to tackle a question stirring the industry: what happens to a fintech once it starts to look like a bank?
Moonshot reaches well beyond its two official days. The conference anchors a West Africa Tech Week that lists nearly thirty side events across Lagos. It also coincides with the Africa Prosperity Summit run by the Ventures Platform fund, a deliberate scheduling choice meant to give the ecosystem one more reason to converge on the city.
Several thousand kilometres away, Sandton runs at the pace of business. Organised by AI Media, AI Expo Africa bills itself as the continent’s largest trade show for enterprise AI and intelligent automation. More than 3,500 attendees are expected, the vast majority of them decision makers, drawn from some 1,800 companies across more than 45 countries.
The programme is packed. It features 52 talks and panels spread over four tracks, eight workshops accredited by the South African AI Association, closed-door sessions for senior executives and a Women in AI pavilion. South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Mondli Gungubele, is among the speakers, alongside Gebeya founder Amadou Daffe and a representative from NVIDIA.
Part of the show’s significance lies in who attends. South African banks and telecom operators run some of the most advanced AI programmes on the continent, and Sandton is their main commercial meeting of the year. The deals struck there say a great deal about how AI adoption is turning into concrete demand for computing power and data infrastructure.
Taken together, the two events sketch an African tech landscape advancing on two fronts. Lagos embodies the energy of founders and the appetite of investors, Johannesburg the maturity of large companies already putting AI to work at scale. One question remains open, and two days will not settle it: what place will French-speaking Africa manage to claim in the circles where capital and partnerships are decided?
