1. Africa’s Pragmatic Consumer: Why Brands Must Rethink How They Win the African Shopper
McKinsey’s new State of Consumer Africa 2026: Meeting the Pragmatic Shopper is particularly valuable for BrandiQ analysis because the research includes 5,013 Nigerian consumers within a 9,036-consumer survey across Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and South Africa. The research finds that African consumers are under significant pressure from inflation, currency movements and cost-of-living pressures, but they are not simply buying the cheapest products. They are making targeted trade-offs, cutting discretionary spending while protecting spending on trusted brands and products that deliver clear value, particularly around health, wellness and convenience.
The most interesting Nigerian finding is the continued dominance of traditional retail. A fresh analysis of the report says 90–95% of Nigeria’s grocery retail remains in traditional trade, giving Nigeria the highest traditional/informal retail share among the five markets studied. That has major implications for brands that have spent years assuming that digital payments, e-commerce and modern retail would rapidly displace neighbourhood commerce.
The BrandiQ angle: this is not another “African consumers are resilient” story. The deeper story is that African consumers are becoming more sophisticated about value. Brands cannot assume that lower price automatically wins. The consumer may trade down in one category while remaining loyal to a trusted brand in another. That makes brand equity economically important precisely when household budgets are tight.
It also challenges the fashionable assumption that digitalisation automatically means digital retail. Nigeria can become increasingly digital in payments, media consumption and communication while remaining profoundly physical at the point of purchase.
BrandiQ Takeaway:
The African consumer is not simply becoming cheaper; the consumer is becoming more selective. Brands that understand the difference between price and value will have the advantage.
2. Canva’s Africa Push: Why Local Support Could Be the Missing Link in Enterprise Digital Adoption
Learning Curve becomes Canva’s first locally based partner in Africa as businesses and universities move from experimenting with digital content tools to managing them at scale.
By Augustine Tom
The technology industry’s expansion into Africa is entering a more mature phase. For years, the central question for businesses was whether they could gain access to the latest global software platforms. Increasingly, however, access is becoming the easy part. The harder question is whether organisations can integrate those platforms into everyday work, equip employees with the necessary skills and establish the governance required to extract lasting value.
Canva’s appointment of Learning Curve as its first locally based Canva Partner in Africa is an example of that shift. The partnership gives organisations across the continent access to Canva’s visual communication platform with local implementation, training and support. Learning Curve, which already works with businesses and educational institutions across Sub-Saharan Africa, will support Canva Business, Canva Enterprise and Canva Campus. The announcement was published on October 5-6, 2026.
At first glance, the appointment could be dismissed as another software distribution agreement. Its significance is broader. Canva is already a global platform with more than 260 million monthly users across 190 countries and more than 100 languages, according to the company. Its African strategy has also been expanding beyond simply making the product available, with Canva highlighting local teams, education partnerships, creator programmes and increasingly localised product experiences across the continent.
The Learning Curve partnership therefore arrives at an interesting point in Canva’s African expansion: the platform has achieved global scale, but the next challenge is organisational adoption.
The Technology Adoption Problem
One of the persistent weaknesses of corporate digital transformation is the assumption that buying technology creates transformation. It does not. A licence is an input; productivity is an outcome.
Businesses frequently acquire sophisticated platforms and then discover that employees continue using familiar tools, departments develop separate workarounds and the organisation never fully adopts the technology for which it has paid. The problem is rarely the absence of functionality. It is often the absence of implementation, training, workflow redesign and management attention.
Learning Curve’s CEO, Glen Lumley, makes essentially this argument in explaining the partnership. Organisations are surrounded by technology choices, he says, but purchasing another platform does not automatically improve productivity. The value comes from selecting the appropriate solution, integrating it into the way people work and giving employees the confidence and skills to use it properly.
That is an important distinction for African businesses, where technology investment can sometimes be framed too narrowly as a procurement decision. The more mature approach treats technology adoption as an organisational change programme.
The Canva partnership is particularly interesting because visual communication is no longer confined to professional designers. Employees in sales, marketing, human resources, corporate affairs, training, administration and management increasingly create presentations, proposals, reports, social-media content, videos and internal communications themselves.
The democratisation of design creates an enormous productivity opportunity. But it also creates a governance problem. When hundreds or thousands of employees can create branded content, who ensures that the brand remains consistent? Who controls approved logos, colours, templates and messaging? Who determines which content can be published externally? Who manages access when employees leave? And who prevents different departments from recreating the same materials independently?
These questions turn what appears to be a design-platform decision into a brand-management and organisational-governance decision.
From Designer’s Tool to Enterprise Infrastructure
Canva’s three-part proposition reflects that evolution. Canva Business is designed around content creation, collaboration and brand management for growing organisations. Canva Enterprise extends the proposition to larger organisations requiring greater administration, security, governance and brand controls. Canva Campus takes the technology into higher education, where it can support teaching, learning, research communication, marketing, student engagement, employability and entrepreneurship.
That progression is significant because it positions Canva less as a graphic-design application and more as an organisational communication platform. Learning Curve’s own enterprise offering emphasises shared brand assets, templates, real-time collaboration, approval workflows, user permissions, security and administration. Its Enterprise proposition also includes AI governance and privacy features.
For brand managers, this is perhaps the most consequential development. The question is no longer whether employees should be allowed to create content. Employees already are. The strategic question is whether organisations can give them the freedom to create while retaining enough central control to protect the brand. That is a fundamentally different model of brand management.
The traditional model put the communications or marketing department at the centre of content production. The emerging model distributes production throughout the organisation while moving the brand function towards governance, enablement and orchestration. The brand team becomes less of a factory and more of an operating system.
AI Makes the Issue More Urgent
The arrival of generative AI makes this transition even more important. AI is reducing the cost and time required to produce text, images, presentations, video and other forms of communication. Canva itself has incorporated AI-enabled creation into its broader product ecosystem, while Learning Curve says the growing adoption of AI-enabled tools is making implementation, training and governance increasingly important. This creates a paradox for organisations.
The easier it becomes to create content, the harder it can become to control content. An employee can now generate a presentation in minutes. A marketing executive can produce dozens of creative variations. A lecturer can create teaching material almost instantly. A sales team can customise proposals at scale.
Productivity Can Rise Sharply.
But without governance, so can inconsistency, duplication, misinformation, copyright risk, inappropriate AI use and brand dilution. The answer is not necessarily to centralise everything again. That would defeat much of the productivity benefit. The better solution is to create systems in which decentralised creation happens within clearly defined boundaries.
That means approved templates, brand kits, permissions, workflows, training, content standards and human accountability. In this respect, Canva’s enterprise proposition is part of a larger movement in business technology: from tools that individuals use to platforms that organisations govern.
Why Local Support Matters
Canva’s decision to work through a locally based partner also highlights an often-overlooked feature of African technology markets: global software does not automatically translate into local adoption. The technology may be global, but implementation is local.
Organisations have different procurement structures, skills gaps, management cultures, training needs and levels of digital maturity. Universities face different challenges from banks. A multinational corporation requires different governance from a growing African business.
Local implementation partners can therefore play a role that goes beyond selling licences. They can become translators between global technology and local organisational realities.
Learning Curve already positions itself as a provider of technology solutions and training across Sub-Saharan Africa, including Adobe and Microsoft solutions, and describes itself as Africa’s only Adobe Platinum Reseller and support provider.
That existing infrastructure gives the Canva appointment a potentially important commercial dimension. Learning Curve is not entering the market simply as a software retailer. Its stated proposition is centred on implementation, training and ongoing support. That is where recurring value may increasingly sit in the enterprise technology market.
Africa’s Bigger Digital Opportunity
There is also a wider lesson for Africa. Canva’s own account of its African expansion points to a growing creative economy involving teachers, young people, small businesses and emerging designers, alongside a push into local languages and education. The company says it is expanding towards nearly 20 African languages and developing locally relevant content, templates and tools.
That suggests the African opportunity for global technology companies is moving beyond simple user acquisition. The next frontier is localisation.
African users need platforms that understand local markets, languages, educational systems, business practices and creative cultures. They also need training and institutional support that can turn individual enthusiasm into organisational capability.
For African companies, meanwhile, the opportunity is to ensure that technology adoption produces more than convenience. The objective should be measurable productivity, better communication, stronger brands and new commercial capabilities.
The Canva-Learning Curve relationship therefore illustrates a broader principle of digital transformation: the value of technology is determined not by how sophisticated the software is, but by how effectively the organisation can absorb it.
The New Role of the Brand Department
Perhaps the most interesting consequence will be felt inside marketing and communications departments. As content creation becomes democratised, the professional communicator’s value proposition will have to evolve.
The marketing department that insists on producing every piece of content itself may eventually become a bottleneck. But a marketing department that simply gives everyone access to Canva or another AI-enabled platform may create chaos.
The strategic middle ground is more powerful: establish the brand architecture, create the systems, train the organisation, manage the standards and let employees create within that framework. That is a very different conception of brand management.
The brand is no longer controlled only through what the marketing department produces. It is increasingly shaped by everything the organisation creates.
BrandiQ Takeaway
The next stage of digital transformation will not be won by organisations that buy the most technology. It will be won by organisations that integrate technology most intelligently into the way people work.
Canva’s appointment of Learning Curve is therefore more than a reseller announcement. It reflects a broader transition in enterprise technology – from access to adoption, from software to capability, and from individual productivity to organisational intelligence.
For African businesses, that distinction matters. The competitive advantage will increasingly belong to companies that can democratise technology without losing control of their brand, data, processes and culture.
3. Aweh Mobile Enters South Africa: Can the Family Become the Next Big Telecom Customer?
The new MVNO is betting that households want more than cheap data – they want control, flexibility and one digital experience for the whole family.
By Martin Ogumah
South Africa’s mobile market has gained another challenger, but Aweh Mobile is entering the increasingly competitive mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) market with a proposition that is less about selling another SIM card and more about changing who the mobile customer is. Officially launched on October 5, Aweh is targeting households with a platform that allows multiple mobile connections to be managed through a single account.
Its proposition is built around a relatively simple consumer problem. A family may have several mobile users, each with a separate number, balance, data requirement and top-up cycle. Instead of treating each SIM as an independent customer relationship, Aweh allows the household to manage multiple SIMs from one dashboard. Customers can share voice, SMS and data between users, monitor consumption, receive balance alerts and automate top-ups. The service also incorporates parental controls, giving parents greater visibility over aspects of their children’s mobile usage.
That may sound like a small change in the way mobile services are packaged, but it represents an important shift in marketing logic. Traditional mobile operators have largely built their propositions around the individual subscriber. Aweh is attempting to make the household the unit of value.
From Selling Connectivity to Managing the Household
The significance of the model becomes clearer when viewed from the perspective of the customer rather than the network. A family does not necessarily think about connectivity as five unrelated SIM cards. It thinks about how much the household spends on communication, who needs more data, who has unused data, which child needs access to a phone, and when another family member is about to run out of airtime.
Aweh’s proposition attempts to solve that administrative problem through one account and one digital interface. Managing the service through an app or website turns mobile connectivity into something closer to a household utility-management platform. The company’s managing director, Nokuthula Mkhwane, says the service was created around the everyday South African family and argues that affordability should not require sacrificing quality, convenience or value.
This is an increasingly important distinction in consumer markets. Price is easy to copy; convenience is harder to copy when it is embedded in the customerexperience. An operator can respond to a competitor’s cheaper data bundle by reducing its own price. It is more difficult to replicate a proposition that changes how the customer manages several mobile services, particularly when that proposition becomes embedded in an app, payment system, usage history and family routines. That gives Aweh an opportunity to compete on experience rather than tariff alone.
The MVNO Advantage
Aweh is entering a market where MVNOs have become an increasingly important mechanism for introducing new propositions without requiring the enormous capital investment associated with building a national mobile network.
An MVNO uses an established operator’s network infrastructure while developing its own customer proposition, brand, pricing and service experience. Current reporting identifies Aweh as operating on Cell C’s network infrastructure. This distinction is strategically important.
Aweh does not need to win a network-infrastructure race against South Africa’s established operators. Its opportunity is to find a customer problem that the large operators have not solved sufficiently well and build a more focused proposition around it.
That is one of the reasons MVNOs can be disruptive. They can attack segments rather than entire markets. The South African MVNO environment already includes offerings associated with major financial institutions and retailers, including FNB, Capitec, Standard Bank, Shoprite and Mr Price, alongside specialist digital operators such as Melon Mobile.
Aweh therefore does not enter an empty market. It enters a market where the basic mobile service has already become commoditised and where differentiation increasingly depends on what companies build around connectivity.
The Real Product May Be Control
A particularly interesting element of Aweh’s proposition is that it packages several features under the idea of control. The account holder can see usage, receive alerts, redistribute shared resources and automate top-ups. Parents can exercise controls over children’s mobile usage. The app provides a single point from which the household can manage its mobile relationship.
That turns a telecommunications service into a small piece of household financial and digital management. The company’s positioning around affordability is therefore worth examining carefully. Aweh is not simply saying that its service costs less. It is suggesting that consumers can obtain more value from the money they already spend by reducing waste and improving visibility. That is a more sophisticated proposition.
For example, unused data sitting on one family member’s account has little value to another family member who has exhausted their allocation. A shared pool potentially reduces that inefficiency. The economic proposition is therefore partly about resource utilisation. In a cost-conscious consumer environment, this can be more compelling than a simple discount.
A Family Proposition in a Smartphone Economy
The family focus also allows Aweh to address a broader cultural shift: mobile phones are increasingly household infrastructure. Parents use them to communicate with children. Children use them for education and entertainment. Families use mobile services for banking, social interaction, work, navigation and access to digital services.
The mobile account is therefore becoming more than a telecommunications contract. It is becoming part of how a household organises its digital life. That creates opportunities for operators that understand the household as a connected ecosystem rather than a collection of subscribers.
Parental controls are particularly interesting in this context because they move the operator into an area traditionally associated with device manufacturers and technology platforms: digital wellbeing and family management.
Whether consumers ultimately regard that as valuable will depend on how intuitive, transparent and useful the controls prove to be. But strategically, it gives Aweh another point of differentiation beyond price.
The Brand Challenge: Differentiation in a Crowded Market
The difficulty is that a good proposition does not automatically produce a successful brand. Aweh enters a market where consumers already recognise major telecommunications brands and where other challengers are also using digital experiences, flexible plans and niche positioning to compete.
Its central challenge will therefore be communicating why the family-management proposition matters sufficiently to justify switching. The answer cannot simply be another collection of promotional offers.
Aweh needs to own a clear consumer territory around family connectivity, control and value. If successful, the brand could become associated with a particular problem it solves: the frustration of managing several mobile services within one household. That is a classic brand-building opportunity.
The strongest brands often succeed not because they have dramatically different products, but because they give consumers a simpler way of understanding the value they provide. For Aweh, the strategic question is whether “one account for the family” can become that organising idea.
What Aweh’s Launch Says About Telecoms
There is a broader lesson in the launch for telecommunications companies across Africa. As connectivity becomes more ubiquitous, the competitive battlefield moves upward. The basic ability to provide calls, messages and data becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate. The next generation of competition will therefore be fought over customer experience, personalisation, digital convenience, ecosystem integration and specialised propositions.
That is already visible in financial services, retail and technology. Telecoms is following the same path. The implications extend beyond South Africa. African markets contain millions of households where mobile connectivity is shared across parents, children and extended family members. A model built around household management could therefore have relevance beyond its initial market if it proves commercially successful.
But scalability will depend on the economics. Aweh has not disclosed specific pricing or, in its initial announcement, the network-host details. Those details will matter because a compelling customer experience ultimately has to be supported by competitive economics and reliable network performance. The company’s ability to retain customers, control acquisition costs and build sufficient scale will determine whether the proposition becomes a meaningful challenger rather than simply another niche MVNO.
The Bigger Brand Lesson
Aweh’s launch illustrates an increasingly important principle in modern marketing: the strongest consumer propositions often begin with an organisational or behavioural problem rather than a product feature.
The product feature is the shared SIM dashboard. The consumer problem is the complexity of managing a family’s mobile life. The product feature is parental control. The consumer problem is helping parents manage children’s digital access. The product feature is automatic top-up. The consumer problem is avoiding the friction and interruption associated with repeatedly managing individual accounts.
That distinction is what gives the proposition strategic potential. Aweh is not simply asking consumers to buy another mobile service. It is asking them to reorganise how they think about mobile connectivity. That is a much bigger marketing challenge—and potentially a much more valuable brand opportunity.
BrandiQ Takeaway
The next battle in telecoms may not be over who offers the cheapest data. It may be over who understands the customer’s life best. Aweh Mobile is betting that the household, rather than the individual subscriber, is the more valuable unit of customer management. If the company can turn that insight into a genuinely simpler and more economical mobile experience, it could demonstrate how an MVNO can compete against larger operators without owning a single mobile tower.
For established telecom brands, the lesson is equally important: when the underlying product becomes a commodity, the customer experience becomes the product.
4. The $30 Trillion AI Bet: Who Will Pay for the Intelligence Economy?
The world’s biggest technology companies are committing extraordinary sums to AI infrastructure. The harder question is whether the economic returns will arrive quickly enough
By Desmond Ekeh
The artificial intelligence boom is beginning to look less like a software revolution and more like an industrial investment cycle. Behind the chatbots, AI assistants and generative applications lies a gigantic infrastructure build-out involving data centres, computing capacity, electricity, chips, cloud infrastructure and long-term technology contracts.
A Reuters analysis published on October 3 captures the scale of the bet. Cumulative global spending on data centres alone could exceed $30 trillion by 2050, according to a PwC projection cited by Reuters. The figure is extraordinary even by the standards of previous technology booms and illustrates how much physical infrastructure the digital intelligence economy may require.
The commitments being made by individual AI companies illustrate the same phenomenon. Reuters reported that Anthropic’s plans involve approximately $518 billion in future spending commitments, according to its IPO prospectus. That figure is not simply a conventional technology company’s capital expenditure budget; it reflects enormous future infrastructure and computing obligations required to support the company’s ambitions.
The central problem is that infrastructure has to be paid for before the economic benefits fully materialise. This is where the AI story becomes an economics story. Investors and technology companies are effectively betting that AI will create entirely new markets, transform existing industries and generate sufficient productivity gains to justify today’s extraordinary infrastructure expenditure.
But economists are increasingly asking how quickly that transformation can happen. Reuters reported that JPMorgan has questioned whether broad productivity gains have yet emerged at the scale required to support the current investment cycle. Bain & Company has argued that productivity improvements in existing markets alone may not be enough to justify the scale of infrastructure investment, meaning entirely new markets and revenue streams may have to emerge. Its analysis suggests that hyperscalers and other participants in the AI ecosystem could need more than $4.2 trillion in additional revenue over five years to support the infrastructure build-out.
AI’s Infrastructure Paradox
There is an important paradox here. The more confident the technology industry becomes about AI’s future, the more infrastructure it must build today. But the more infrastructure it builds, the greater the amount of future revenue required to justify the investment. This is why AI should no longer be understood simply as another software category. It is becoming an infrastructure economy.
Electricity becomes an AI input. Data centres become strategic assets. Fibre networks become economic infrastructure. Semiconductor supply becomes a geopolitical issue. Cloud contracts become long-term corporate commitments. Land, water and energy availability begin to influence technology investment decisions. For Africa, this distinction matters enormously.
Much of the African AI conversation remains focused on applications: AI in banking, agriculture, healthcare, education, marketing and government. Those applications are important, but the infrastructure economics underneath them will determine how much value African economies ultimately capture.
A continent that becomes merely a consumer of AI applications may experience productivity benefits without owning much of the underlying economic infrastructure. A continent that develops data centres, cloud capacity, local datasets, AI talent, energy infrastructure and locally relevant AI applications has a greater opportunity to retain more of the value.
Nigeria therefore needs to think beyond the question of how many businesses are adopting AI. The more strategic question is: what part of the AI value chain will Nigeria own? The next technology race is physical. The irony of artificial intelligence is that the world’s most celebrated digital technology is becoming increasingly dependent on physical infrastructure.
AI models need computing power. Computing power needs data centres. Data centres need electricity. Electricity needs generation and transmission infrastructure. All of it requires capital. That creates opportunities for businesses well beyond the technology sector. Energy companies, property developers, telecom operators, construction companies, financial institutions, insurers and logistics businesses can all become participants in the AI infrastructure economy.
For Nigerian business leaders, this means AI strategy should not stop with buying a subscription to an AI platform. The strategic question is how AI changes the cost structure, infrastructure requirements and competitive position of the enterprise.
BrandiQ Takeaway
The biggest AI opportunity may not be the chatbot. It may be the infrastructure behind the chatbot. The winners of the AI economy will include the companies that build the applications, but also those that provide the power, computing, connectivity, data and capital required to run them.
5. Dentsu 2026 CMO Report: Marketers Want AI to Prove Its Worth
CMOs are increasing marketing budgets – but AI must now prove it can deliver growth
By Augustine Tom
Dentsu Creative’s Making it Real: 2026 CMO Report finds growing budget confidence among Asia-Pacific marketers as they enter 2027, but also dramatically higher expectations of agencies and AI. Twenty-six per cent of APAC CMOs expect marketing budgets to rise by 10–20% over the next year, while 63% expect budgets to increase by at least 5%.
But the more interesting finding is what CMOs now expect from technology. 93% expect agencies to demonstrate that AI improves marketing impact and effectiveness, while 92% want greater transparency about how agencies use AI. At the same time, 90% say AI should empower talent rather than replace it. The research is based on 1,950 senior marketing decision-makers across 14 markets. That represents an important change in the AI conversation.
The first phase was about experimentation: What can AI do? The second phase became efficiency: How much time and money can AI save? The emerging third phase is much tougher:
Can AI actually make the business grow?
Dentsu’s research suggests marketers are increasingly interested in AI applications such as AI influencers, customer-service agents and dynamic creative optimisation. But the agency relationship is changing at the same time. Clients increasingly want agencies to demonstrate measurable value rather than simply present AI capability as another impressive technology.
There is also a fascinating countertrend. As marketing becomes more automated, human creativity and real-world experiences become more valuable. Dentsu reports that 89% of APAC CMOs believe empathetic human truth will become more important in a world of “perfect information”, while 85% plan to increase investment in real-world experiences.
That gives BrandiQ a very strong thesis: AI may automate the middle of marketing, but it could make human judgement at the beginning and human experience at the end even more valuable.
This connects beautifully with the WFA research BrandiQ previously discussed, which found that major brands are rapidly moving AI beyond content production into insights, media, strategy and workflow automation. The WFA study found 96% of major brands surveyed now use generative or agentic AI.
BrandiQ Takeaway:
The AI era will not eliminate marketing talent; it will raise the price of people who know where technology should – and should not – be used.
