Cascador & Sterling launch $200m fund to back startup loans

Cascador, a Nigeria-focused platform for growth-stage founders, and Sterling Bank, a mid-size Nigerian commercial bank, have set up a $200 million fund to help small Nigerian businesses and startups get bank loans by sharing the risk of borrowers defaulting.

The partners say the SME Credit Backstop can back up to $1 billion in loans at a time. Rather than directly lending to the businesses, it will guarantee part of the bank’s potential losses if a borrower defaults, making it easier for lenders to extend credit to companies they might otherwise consider risky.

The fund will consider businesses nominated by venture capital firms and studios that already back them. It will use AI-powered underwriting to check whether the business is ready to take on debt. If it approves the business, the fund agrees to cover part of the bank’s loss if that loan goes bad.

The fund targets a persistent obstacle for most Nigerian startups: access to debt. About one in five Nigerian businesses had a bank loan or line of credit in 2025, compared with 22% across Sub-Saharan Africa and 36% globally, according to World Bank Enterprise Survey data. Banks often consider small businesses and startups as risky and demand collateral that many cannot provide.

“By sharing risk with lenders and translating community trust into a bankable signal to lend, the fund can help more businesses access what they need to scale and create jobs,” said Trish Thomas, Cascador’s CEO, in a statement shared with TechCabal.

Sterling will decide whether to lend after conducting its own checks. The bank will disburse approved loans, collect repayments and pursue borrowers who default. The backstop is intended to reduce the bank’s exposure, not eliminate it.

Obinna Ukachukwu, a group executive at Sterling Bank, said the backstop, combined with borrowers recommended by funds that already know them, gives the bank “greater confidence to provide larger, longer-term loans.”

Borrowers can start with local-currency loans worth up to $250,000, and the fund plans to raise that to $1 million.

The partners expect to raise the backstop capital from philanthropic funders, impact investors and development finance institutions. The $200 million is therefore the fund’s stated size, while the $1 billion figure represents the lending capacity it aims to support.

“The future cannot be sustainably built on one layer of the capital stack,” said Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, founding partner of Future Africa, in the statement. “Equity must work with debt and long-term securities to provide builders with the capital they need to build the future.”

Without access to loans, startups must rely more heavily on equity financing to expand, giving investors ownership stakes in exchange for capital. But venture funding has become harder to secure. Only 190 African startups raised $100,000 or more in the first half of 2026, the lowest number since at least 2021. Companies unable to borrow either give up more ownership and control at the early stage or grow slowly.

Debt has become a larger part of African startup financing, although it remains concentrated among a relatively small group of companies. Startups on the continent borrowed a record $1.64 billion in 2025, and debt made up 41% of all their funding, up from 17% in 2019. TechCabal Insights tracked another $614 million in startup debt in the first half of 2026, about 43% of all funding. Over five years, 169 African startups announced debt deals, against nearly 1,900 that raised equity.

The new fund is designed to widen access by letting lenders share the risk of lending to businesses with revenue and existing investors willing to vouch for them. The move also builds on an earlier partnership between Cascador and Sterling. In 2025, they partnered on a $2 million catalytic fund that gave Cascador alumni debt at interest rates around 20%, with much lower collateral requirements. At its June 2026 Pitch Day, the fund handed out more than $5 million, including a ₦2.5 billion ($1.7 million) debt facility to Agriarche, an agritech startup.

The new fund expands that model beyond Cascador’s alumni. Under the earlier arrangement, Cascador nominated and guaranteed borrowers while Sterling provided the loans. The SME Credit Backstop Fund will also accept nominations from other venture capital firms and startup studios.

The fund will operate through Riverwell Platform Holding Limited, a UK-owned company, and Riverwell Platform Services Nigeria, a Nigerian operating company. The Nigerian company will handle partner coordination, borrower assessment, data collection, and portfolio monitoring. A separate reserve company will hold the backstop capital. Ukachukwu will serve as a director on the Riverwell platform.

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Safaricom dismissed 118 employees for fraud in the year to March, even as fraud incidents fell 82%, pointing to a declining insider threat amid an intensified crackdown at Kenya’s largest telecoms operator.

The figure, disclosed in the company’s 2026 Sust a inable Business Report released on Tuesday at its Nairobi headquarters, is more than four times the 28 dismissals recorded in the year to March 2021. It equates to about 2% of the 5,648 people the report lists as employees.

Earlier disclosures put the tally at 95 in the year to March 2024 and 113 in the yea r to March 2025, so the climb has been steady rather than a one-off spike.

Insider conduct carries unusual weight at Safaricom as staff sit close to customer data, SIM registration and the agent network that moves money across M-PESA, Kenya’s dominant mobile-money platform. The report treats theft, falsifying company records, and unauthorised access to customer call records as gross misconduct that can result in dismissal.

“Our customers entrust us with their personal information, communications and financial transactions and expect our services to be secure, reliable and responsible,” Safaricom said in the report.

The report lists 118 fraud cases investigated and 118 dismissals, along with three disciplinary warnings, up from none the prior year. Referrals to law enforcement doubled from seven to 14. Fraud was the most common concern raised through Safaricom’s anonymous ethics hotline.

The rise comes as the company says its anti-fraud push is working. It cut fraud incidents by 82%, short of a 90% target, and recovered 46% of reported fraud losses. Monitoring and analytics also recovered KES 953 million ($7.4 million) linked to inflated agent commissions.

Safaricom said it moved from an investigation-led model to real-time detection covering internal, distributor and mobile-money fraud. The report does not break down dismissals by role, value internal losses, or say how many cases led to charges.

According to the report, fraud awareness training reached 5,643 people across staff, call centres, M-PESA, distributors and brand ambassadors, and 98% of employees completed the annual ethics programme.

Group Chief Risk Officer Nicholas Mulila said the company is committed to “embedding accountability across our operations.” Safaricom named in-person social engineering as the largest source of customer fraud.

The staff dismissals over fraud mirror what is happening in the banking industry, where sharper detection has also pushed dismissals higher. KCB Group, Kenya’s largest bank by assets, dismissed 60 staff for fraud in 2025, up from 34 in 2024, even as reported fraud incidents fell to 201 from 339, according to its sustainability report. Most of the 50 dismissals were in Kenya.

In May 2025, Equity Group’s chief executive officer, James Mwangi, said the lender had dismissed more than 1,200 employees after an audit of staff transactions, including personal M-PESA activity. Mwangi said the company would make such conduct audits a permanent practice, similar to performance appraisals.

Equity treated receiving money from customers as grounds for dismissal, a conflict-of-interest test wider than outright fraud. Safaricom’s figure covers only cases it investigated as fraud.

Outside finance, Kenya Power dismissed at least 20 employees over irregularities in the year to June 2025, including three who colluded with guards and drivers in a diesel-theft scheme that cost it KES 207.6 million ($1.5 million).

CANAL+ is struggling to turn around MultiChoice South Africa, the country’s biggest pay-TV operator, with revenue falling 3% in the nine months to September as lower subscription income weighed on performance.

The France-based media group is relying on revamped DStv packages and stronger content to reverse the decline. MultiChoice’s revenue fell 3% on a like-for-like basis to September 2026, according to CANAL+’s latest trading update released on Thursday.

The decline reflects underlying performance after adjusting for currency movements and changes in the scope of the business. On a reported basis, MultiChoice revenue rose 0.4% to €1.81 billion ($2.03 billion), benefiting from a material positive currency effect.

CANAL+ said the like-for-like decline was driven by lower subscription revenue in South Africa, partly offset by higher revenue in most other English-speaking African markets.

The decline moderated to 2% in the third quarter, from 3.4% in the first half. CANAL+ attributed part of the improvement to more favourable comparisons with the sporting events line-up in the previous year, rather than solely to the effects of its turnaround strategy.

The figures come as CANAL+ attempts to simplify MultiChoice’s offerings and strengthen the value proposition for subscribers following its acquisition of the South African pay-TV operator.

“We are making good progress with the MultiChoice turnaround plan,” CANAL+ chief executive officer (CEO) Maxime Saada said in the trading update. “In September, a new, simplified value proposition was launched in South Africa, providing subscribers with more content, greater choice, and better value for the same price.”

MultiChoice introduced the new packages on September 7, towards the end of the reporting period, leaving little time for their impact to reflect in the nine-month results. CANAL+ said the rollout would continue across English- and Portuguese-speaking African markets over the coming months.

The strategy comes amid wider changes to MultiChoice’s entertainment business, including the discontinuation of Showmax, MultiChoice’s subscription video streaming service, in April. CANAL+ has treated Showmax as a discontinued operation in its financial reporting.

The group has said it intends to continue investing in premium content, technology and strategic partnerships as it reshapes its entertainment offering. However, the latest trading update does not provide subscriber numbers or average revenue per user. This limits the available evidence on whether the changes are improving customer retention or spending.

At group level, CANAL+ reported revenue of €6.41 billion ($7.2 billion) for the nine months, up 37.5% from the same period last year. The increase primarily reflected the consolidation of MultiChoice following the acquisition, rather than equivalent growth in the underlying business.

On a like-for-like basis, group revenue declined 0.3%. Excluding MultiChoice, revenue increased 0.8% on a like-for-like basis, supported by French-speaking Africa and the group’s content production and distribution operations.

Africa and Asia revenue, including MultiChoice, rose 3.1% on a restated basis. But the figures conceal diverging performances across the continent: CANAL+’s Africa and Asia operations excluding MultiChoice recorded like-for-like revenue growth of 10.2%, while MultiChoice declined.

In French-speaking Africa, the group said subscriber growth was supported by a compelling content line-up and improved distribution efficiency. CANAL+ Telecom Africa, an African telecommunications and fibre broadband operator, also recorded double-digit revenue growth, driven by the expansion of its fibre-to-the-home network and stronger commercial momentum.

“We delivered a solid performance in the first nine months of the year as we continued to execute our strategy. Revenue was in line with our expectations, supported by strong momentum in French-speaking Africa and at STUDIOCANAL,” said Saada.

CANAL+ is also strengthening its sports offering to protect its position in the African entertainment market. The group secured exclusive rights to all UEFA men’s football club competitions across more than 40 countries for 2027 to 2031, alongside rights across Africa for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations and its qualifying campaign.

CANAL+ said it remained on track to deliver its 2026 financial guidance, including €735 million ($825 million) in adjusted earnings before interest and tax and €250 million ($281 million) in targeted synergies measured by adjusted earnings before interest and tax.