Job Description

Tech Safari is read by 56,000 founders, operators, and investors across Africa. We commission stories about African tech and the businesses underneath it.

We pay $150 for every commissioned piece.

This page explains what we commission, how we sound, and how to pitch us.

Start with one story

The best Tech Safari stories usually have one thing in common: there is one clear story, and there is somebody or something at the centre of it.

We are not looking for sector surveys, trend pieces or stories that try to squeeze five companies into 1,000 words. We want a story with a beginning, a tension and somewhere to land.

And there should be somebody the reader can find afterwards. That might be a company, a founder, a regulator, an investor, or someone else who is actually doing something in the story.

That does not mean we are looking to do PR for companies. We seldom commission pitches that are essentially a company profile, a product announcement, or a chance to tell readers how great a business is. If a company’s communications team could have written the pitch themselves, it is probably not for us.

There are exceptions, particularly when the company is genuinely doing something new or interesting, and the company itself is the story. We are interested in new businesses, unusual products, fresh business models, and companies solving problems in ways we have not seen before. But even then, we want to understand what is interesting about what they are doing, not simply reproduce the company’s talking points.

The company can be the subject. It just cannot be the advertisement.

Think about what the reader does next

The strongest pitches make it easy to imagine what happens after the final sentence.

Maybe the reader looks up a company, or copies a method. Maybe they check a number they had never thought about, or apply for something. Or maybe they understand a market well enough to consider entering it.

You should know what you want that next step to be.

If you cannot tell us what the reader will do, understand, or look at differently after reading the story, the idea probably needs another turn.

What we want more of

1. Original numbers

If you counted it, compiled it, or got someone to put it on the record, lead with that.

Some of our best-read pieces have come from doing our own counting rather than relying on a number that has already appeared in ten other stories.

You do not need a giant dataset. Smaller numbers can be interesting if they reveal something people have not noticed.

2. Better use of existing data

Partech, Briter, TechCabal and others publish reports on African tech every year. Those reports are often quoted once in a news story and then forgotten.

We would rather you went back to one of them and actually sat with the numbers.

Pick one number. Tell us why it moved, what is behind it, and what it means for somebody building or investing in Africa right now.

P.S. Summarising the report is not a pitch. Finding a story inside one number is.

3. Markets beyond the usual three

We cover Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg often, and we have a strong pulse on those markets.

But some of our best numbers in the past two years have come from Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. There is much more to find across North Africa, Central Africa and the francophone markets.

If you know a market that we do not cover enough, tell us something happening there that is worth knowing.

4. Ordinary things with a business underneath

Some of our strongest stories have started with things that do not immediately look like technology stories.

A church. A betting shop. A streaming service. A landlord.

If there is an interesting business, technology, or money story underneath something ordinary, we want to hear about it.

5. Fintech that has an argument

We will read a fintech pitch. But “financial inclusion” and “banking the unbanked” are not angles by themselves anymore. We have published plenty of those stories.

Tell us what the fintech is changing, what it is running up against, or what it reveals about the way people and businesses actually move money.

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What we can’t commission

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Please, no listicles. No Top 10s or “Startups to Watch” (every startup is a startup to watch, thank you very much 🙏🏾 ).

We are also not interested in frameworks that do not have a real company, person, or business inside them. We have published our share of grand theories about African tech, and our readers have generally been much more interested in the people and businesses making those theories real.

So if your pitch is a concept in search of an example, find the example first.

We also do not publish something simply because a company’s communications team would be happy to see it in their inbox. That does not mean we avoid positive stories. It means the story has to contain something worth knowing.

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How we sound

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Tech Safari should be conversational and easy to read, but still serious.

We like short paragraphs. We like openings that get to the stakes instead of spending three paragraphs warming up.

The best pieces feel like somebody who knows the subject is telling you the thing that matters, in plain language, without wasting your time.

The shape is usually simple: stakes, problem, solution.

Your pitch should make that shape clear too.

Most finished drafts will run between 800 and 1,200 words. Leave room for images, and tell us if there is a photograph, document, screenshot, or simple chart that would help carry part of the story.

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If you’ve got time, please read these first

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Here are five pieces that will teach you more about what we like than this page will.

1. Rwanda’s Hidden Engine of Jobs
2. How To (Re)Start A Country
3. Africa’s Megacities Are Too Small
4. To The Man With A (Good) Hammer
5. The $4 Billion Trash Can, from Ag Safari, our agriculture publication. Same voice, different beat.

Here are some other strong researchers whose work we also follow closely and admire:

1. Farai Mudzingwa, who writes Daily Viz
2. Yannick Deza, who writes Data Bites
3. Abraham Augustine, who writes MoneyMyths and Digital Africa
4. Mobolaji Adebayo, who writes The Hook.
5. Jefferson Rumanyika, who writes The Grio

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Where we stand on AI

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We use AI. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we are not asking you to.

But we do have a line: AI can assist with the work, but it can’t replace the work.

Use it to check the structure of an idea, find things you should be reading, or tidy a sentence you have been fighting with for too long. We do some of these things ourselves.

What AI cannot do is write your draft for you.

We commission writers because they have found something worth telling us and because they can tell it in their own voice. A model cannot do either of those things on your behalf.

Anything AI touches also needs to be checked. If it gives you a number, quote, or claim, go back to the source before it reaches us.

None of this changes what we expect from the reporting itself.

Make the calls. Talk to the sources. Go to the warehouse and ask why the machine keeps breaking. Find the person who knows the thing everyone else is guessing about.

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How to pitch

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A pitch is a three-line summary plus a short outline. Together, the pitch should be between 200-300 words.

• Start with the headline, and one line under it that states the argument. “Africa’s AI future has a big data problem” is a subhead. So is “A continent in love with its problems”.
• Then the summary, about three to four lines of summary. What the story is, what the tension is, and where it lands.
• Then the outline. Four to six sections, one line each, carrying the real numbers and names you already have.
• Finally, one line on what you still need to find out. We would rather hear that you have two calls left to make than have you pretend the reporting is already finished.

You can also send links to previous work if you have them. If you have never been published before, send the pitch anyway.

Please submit your pitches here.