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.
<aside> 💡
</aside>
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.
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.
<aside> 💡
</aside>
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.