Good news, bad news

Once again, we come bearing news. We have three major headlines for you, and let’s just say – I have news and bad news!

Lets start with the news news

• Ever heard of Jetstream? Well Jetstream is a Ghanian startup founded about four years ago. Founded by Miishe Addy and Solomon Torgbor, Jetstream is described as an e-logistics startup.

For the past four years, they have been dealing in freight forwarding. But now, Jetstream wants more!

Jetstream Africa revealed that they want to be a one-stop-shop that offers export loans to small exporters who receive international orders they cannot finance.

With this, Jetstream hopes to grow quickly and become attractive to investors.

Why the change? Well, they realized they weren’t really helping the people they should be helping. Jetstream was founded to help small exporters and importers in Ghana send cargo abroad. But despite this, it was still too expensive for SMEs to trade internationally as most of them don’t have enough assets to qualify for a loan.

Now to the bad news,

• Alerzo African e-commerce startup, has laid off 100 people. And it’s been barely eight months since they laid off over 400 of their employees. That makes you ask. What exactly is going on with Alerzo?

It’s good for Alerzo, actually.

According to the spokesperson, the reason for the layoffs is simply automation.

Alerzo invested and built an end-to-end warehouse management system that has improved process automation. Yes, this improvement has helped Alerzo with enhanced warehouse performance. But this also means that they have to cutoff on certain warehouse roles, hence the layoffs. There were redundant roles that were not cost-friendly and so, they had to do what they did to maximize their profit.

There’s a severance package for the laid off employees. They will be paid their salary for one month. Also, their HMO packages are available to them till the end of the year.

The second bad news is this! This would hurt our book lovers.

• It’s quite sad but you need to know that Okada Books is shutting down.

Okada Books was launched by a Nigerian writer, Okechukwu Ofili in 2013. Since then, it grew gradually to Nigeria’s pioneer digital publishing and bookselling platform.

Okada Books was launched to make publishing easy and less expensive for writers, as well as connect writers to people who would pay for their work.

It was very cheap also. The average book cost between N250 and N500, depending on the author’s choice. Nevertheless, the app fulfilled its purpose.

Now you’re like, why shut down after 10 years? According to Okechukwu, it’s due to rough macroeconomic conditions. They’ve tried everything to keep the bookshelves alive, but nothing seems to be working.

So, on the 30th of November, 2023, we say goodbye to Okada Books.

There’s no need to be sad for too long! This is Africa. Africa is bursting with innovation.

The shut down would definitely leave a hollow, but in no time, it will be filled.

Reporting Live from AfriRadar