Productive computing access for African institutions
Equip your teams with work-capable devices, sourced directly from global brands. No upfront capital. Pay only for what you use. Scale up or down as your needs change. Lifecycle support included.
Join the waitlist →The bottleneck
The infrastructure is live. Broadband reaches 86% of the continent. Subsea cables are operational. Satellite constellations are active. But 40 million SMEs still operate without productive computing — not because they lack connectivity, but because no viable channel exists to put a warranty-backed, work-capable device on the desk.
Data evidence
Less than 7% of African microenterprises use a smartphone or computer for business. These firms are the backbone of the economy. They represent the vast majority of all businesses on the continent and employ over 60% of the working population.
IFC – World Bank Working Paper, April 2023 · 3,325 firms surveyed across 7 countries
86% of African firms have access to a phone or basic internet connection. But having a phone is not having a workstation. Only a fraction use technology intensively for business. The gap between access and productive capability is where Redevice operates.
IFC "Digital Opportunities in African Businesses," May 2024
Fewer than 10% of households in Sub-Saharan Africa own a computer. Entire generations enter the workforce without ever touching the device their economy needs them to operate.
Afrobarometer, 2021–23
African SMEs spend an estimated $42 billion annually on technology. The demand is not missing. What is missing is a supply chain that can serve institutional buyers with affordable, managed, work-capable devices.
IFC, World Bank estimates
The affordability wall
A standard work-capable laptop costs $500 new. In the United States, that is two days of income. Across 26 African countries — home to 908 million people — the same device requires four or more months of national income. The problem is not that people do not want devices. It is that the price makes ownership impossible.
The continental average is 5.3 months. In Burundi, it takes nearly three years. Even in relatively stronger economies like Kenya or Ghana, a laptop still costs months of work. This is not a pricing problem — it is a structural access failure. No amount of connectivity investment changes the equation until the device itself becomes accessible on terms that match local economic reality.
Why nothing else works
Between global device supply and African institutional demand, there is no channel, no credit rail, and no operating layer. Every existing path is broken.
Buy new
A 50-device deployment is a six-figure outlay. No warranty infrastructure. No lifecycle support. When something breaks, you're on your own — and in most markets, it breaks within months.
Buy secondhand
85% of imported electronics are near end-of-life. No warranty, no security updates, no management tools. Devices fail quickly and become e-waste — less than 1% is formally recycled on the continent.
Wait for OEMs
54 regulatory environments. No institutional credit infrastructure. Volatile currencies. Africa is 18% of the world's population and less than 2% of global PC shipments. The channel does not exist.
Rely on aid
Donated devices arrive without management, maintenance, or support. They solve a moment, not a need. Institutions need sustained access to productive computing — not a one-time shipment of aging hardware.
The operating layer
Verified institutional buyers. Structured eligibility review. Documented payment behavior — the foundation that makes recurring device access possible at institutional scale.
Devices arrive configured and ready to work. Maintenance, replacement, and continuity are handled by Redevice. Institutions get capacity, not procurement burden.
Recurring billing matched to institutional cash flow cycles. Transparent reporting that institutions and partners can audit.
The decision
The institutions that win this decade will not be the ones that bought the most hardware. They will be the ones that put their capital to work where it grows the business — and ran on infrastructure built to serve them.
Stop locking six-figure outlays into hardware you must depreciate. Convert capital expenditure to predictable monthly operating expense. Put your money where it grows the business — hiring, inventory, expansion, working capital.
Stop owning a fleet you cannot maintain. Every device comes with security, monitoring, maintenance, and lifecycle coverage from deployment to end-of-life. The service is the device — not a box shipped and forgotten.
Stop forecasting hardware against last year's plan. Add ten devices this quarter and fifty next quarter. Equip a new office. Step down a closing project. Computing capacity should match the work in front of you, not the budget cycle behind you.
Who we serve
Estimates: IFC, World Bank, AfDB, ILO. Variation across sources reflects definitional differences.
SMEs are roughly 90% of African businesses, half the continent's GDP, and most of its employment. They are also the institutions least served by the existing device market — squeezed between hardware they cannot afford to buy, secondhand inventory that fails fast, and an OEM channel built for buyers ten times their size. The majority operate without productive computing — paper records, manual workflows, no digital backbone. Redevice gives them access without the capital burden, so they can equip their teams and grow.
Students learn on shared devices, outdated labs, or nothing at all. Subscription access means every student can have a provisioned, managed device — and the institution does not drain its budget to make it happen.
Clinics and hospitals running patient records on paper or failing hardware. Managed devices with security and compliance built in — because healthcare computing is not optional, and neither is the support behind it.
What we've proven
In 2022, we launched a consumer device rental pilot for college students in Sudan. We owned the inventory. Within months, devices were exchanging hands among students on weekly and daily plans. Demand exceeded the inventory we could supply.
In April 2023, civil war erupted, destroyed our few inventory, desplaced our clients and country itself collapsed.
We lost it all. What survived was the proof that the leasing model works in Africa, and hypothesis that if it works for people, it will work for institutions — they will pay for subscription-based device access instead of costly outright purchase.
Team
Co-founder & CEO
Sudanese-born, refugee-turned entrepreneur. Stumbled onto the internet as a teenager in sanctioned, technologically isolated Sudan and became an early evangelist for digital access , then he co-owned a consumer electronics retailing business importing devices from abroad. Yari has spent more than a decade living and working across Africa, East Asia, and North America. He co-founded TechBank Inc. in Canada in 2022, and led the launch and operating side of the Sudan pilot through 2022–2023 before war destroyed the inventory. Today he leads strategy, partnerships, institutional relationships, and African market operations at Redevice.
Co-founder & CTO
Senior systems engineer with more than a decade of experience across major enterprise technology platforms — Microsoft, TradeStation, Adobe, and the University of Utah. Security-focused, with a track record across infrastructure management, vulnerability mitigation, and mission-critical reliability. Co-founded the Sudan pilot with Yari. Today leads platform development, technical infrastructure, and the digital operating layer at Redevice.
Environmental impact
Africa generates 2.9 million metric tons of e-waste annually. Less than 1% is formally recycled. The current device market isn't just failing people — it's poisoning communities.
Devices maintained and reconditioned, extending usable life by up to 40%.
Certified reconditioning or recycling, not landfill.
Subscription models break the buy-use-discard cycle.
Join the waitlist to be among the first institutions to access managed, subscription-based computing — built for African scale.
Thank you. We'll be in touch.