10/03/2026
Finding our place (as Africa) on the global stage
__A big week of in Spain!
If you are in the mobile industry, there is one must-attend event you cannot miss. It’s called the Mobile World Congress (MWC), and is held in Barcelona every year. Everyone who matters in the industry turns up: senior leadership officials, global mobile industry executives, tech leaders, device manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and of course, hundreds of thousands of interested spectators.
Although there are thousands of exhibits, what has always been disappointing to me is the lack of meaningful representation from Africa, particularly amongst the exhibitors.
It's not that Africa isn't innovative! I guess maybe at first we felt a little intimidated, or just daunted when we saw all the giants who always turn up. MWC is the largest and most important connectivity event of the year!
Over the years, I still always encouraged our people to attend and show our work, however modest in scale.
“We belong here and we must demonstrate that right by showcasing our own innovations!"
While we usually used the occasion of the MWC to announce something interesting each year, we decided Cassava Technologies would go BIG this year by showcasing our work in AI.
Here are two major new products for the telecom industry that we're particularly proud of:
#1. Cassava Autonomous Network ("AI AutoNet"):
Whilst this might sound a bit geeky for some of you, the telecom engineers were really excited to see this. It is a vendor-agnostic GPU-accelerated network intelligence system we developed jointly in collaboration with NVIDIA to help engineers to much more quickly identify faults that cause network failure, using a SuperComputer... our Mufungi.
It is the first major from our AI Factory!
Faults that would normally take hours to identify and rectify will now be identified and addressed in minutes!
As Cassava AI we own the actual “IP” (intellectual property) for the . We sell this solution as a “software” to other mobile operators. We have already received orders from operators across Africa, and even Latin America.
It's very cool but a bit complicated to explain. Here's a link to a technical blog from our AI team for those of you interested in the details: https://www.cassavatechnologies.com/launch-of-cassava-autonomous-network-agentic-ai-for-4g-and-5g-radio-access-networks/
#2: Cassava AI Model Exchange (“CAIMEx”):
Most of you are already able to access AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, XAI, Llama, etc., simply by downloading them on your phone from an App Store.
What most people don't realise is that from a technical perspective, mobile operators are still struggling with new requirements (such as bandwidth, latency, data costs). If you have been to Europe or the US, you will know that these Apps are too slow in Africa, and also costly from a data usage point of view.
CAIMEx is a multimodal LLM platform that allows mobile operators to use our “plug and play” solution for these problems.
Now while I didn't attend MWC this year, I was definitely not surprised when our teams came back buzzing!
“Chairman, we've had enquiries and pre-orders from operators across the world. They could not believe that a company out of Africa is able to develop such highly complex AI solutions!”
These two products, AI AutoNet and CAIMEx, are . We sell them through a B2B business model in which our customers are mobile operators (not their customers).
AI is here guys, and it is through a company of African heritage!
And here's more!
Our company Sasai Fintech, not to be outdone by the AI guys, also announced a Memorandum of Understanding with Western Union. They will now be using our technology to deliver remittances into Africa from South Africa. More on this later. Wow!
Please check out Afterthought 6 for more very important AI-powered from us at MWC as we work together to !
For entrepreneurs, here are my two takeaways:
+ Marketing - Cost = Profit.
Here you see we are developing products based on a deep understanding of an industry we're in, and the needs ("Problems") we've identified that require innovative . Once we have imagined, created, and tested a , we then go to where the customers are and market directly to them.
, vision, and action: Don’t be intimidated, and don’t be a spectator. Find your place on the global stage. At this year's MWC, four African companies (Cassava Technologies, MTN, Axian, and EthioTelecom) took part in an inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony supported by GSMA as they opened the "African Pavilion" for the first time! Our Group President and CEO, Hardy Pemhiwa cut the ribbon for Cassava.
Do you see any more takeaways?
These are exciting times, if you but know what to do with them...
No one can afford to stand still.
If you haven't gotten started learning to use AI tools, you're already late. I say this to you as a caring friend, not to sell you a single thing.
Image caption: Cassava Technologies-led discussion last week on our African Language Models initiative. Stay tuned!
