Glossary
Plain-English definitions for African and Caribbean startup, fintech, and AI terms.
African Continental Free Trade Area — single market across 54 African countries.
AI Optimization — making content citable by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Annual Recurring Revenue — yearly value of subscription contracts.
Bank Verification Number — Nigeria's unique financial identifier for KYC.
Corporate Affairs Commission — Nigeria's business registry.
Customer Acquisition Cost — total spend to acquire one paying customer.
South Africa's Companies and Intellectual Property Commission for business registration.
Economic Community of West African States — 15-country trade bloc.
Server code that runs close to users on a global edge network for low latency.
Pan-African payment platform supporting cards, Mobile Money, and bank transfers across 30+ countries.
Know Your Customer — identity verification required for African financial products.
Large Language Model — AI model trained on vast text to generate human-like responses.
Lifetime Value — total revenue expected from one customer over time.
Kenya's dominant mobile money service operated by Safaricom, with over 50M users.
A mobile-phone-based service for storing and transferring funds, dominant across Africa via M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, and Airtel Money.
Mobile money service operated by MTN across 17 African countries.
Minimum Viable Product — the smallest version of a product that delivers value.
National Identification Number — Nigeria's universal ID required for SIM and banking.
Nigerian payment processor (Stripe-acquired) widely used across West Africa.
Product-Led Growth — using the product itself as the main acquisition channel.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — an LLM pattern that grounds answers in your own data.
Row Level Security — database rule that limits which rows a user can read or write.
Search Engine Optimization — making web pages rank in Google and other search engines.
Small and Medium Enterprise — the backbone of African economies.
An end-to-end platform that handles building, launching, and scaling a startup.
Unstructured Supplementary Service Data — text-based phone menus that work without internet, critical for African users on feature phones.
Describing what you want in plain English and letting AI build the code.
Central African CFA franc — shared currency across 6 Central African countries.
West African CFA franc — shared currency across 8 Francophone countries.
Famous Silicon Valley accelerator that has funded several African startups.