Fatu Ogwuche has spent years bringing African technology stories to people through newsletters and online conversations. Now, she wants to put the people behind those stories in front of a live audience.
The former Meta executive is expanding her media company, Big Tech This Week, with Tech This Week, a weekly live programme that brings together technology news, interviews and conversations with founders and industry leaders.
But the show is not where Ogwuche’s media journey began.
Before the cameras and live interviews, she was writing a weekly technology newsletter on Twitter’s Revue platform, sharing observations about Africa’s growing tech industry. She later built an audience through Twitter Spaces, hosting conversations with founders and industry figures.
Ogwuche told TechCabal that the audio series attracted more than 100,000 cumulative listeners over a year. Among the people she has hosted are Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
Her experience also extends beyond online conversations. In May, she took the format to Stablecon, a stablecoin conference in Amsterdam, where she livestreamed interviews and event-floor conversations. The experiment offered an early glimpse of the live video format she would later develop for a wider audience.
In 2024, Ogwuche made another change to the business. She announced that she was moving away from running Big Tech This Week primarily as a flagship newsletter, while retaining the name for her media company and developing other formats, including This is Big, audio programmes, short videos and live events.
That expansion has not meant abandoning written journalism. Big Tech This Week has continued publishing stories on major developments across African technology, including Moniepoint’s exit from UK remittances, Ripple’s investment in Flutterwave and Lagos Life’s $500,000 funding announcement.
Taking the conversations live
The latest step arrived on October 22, when Tech This Week premiered across X, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Its first episode featured a mix of established and emerging players, including Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Terra Industries co-founder Nathan Nwachuku, Money Africa founder Tosin Olaseinde, Danfo Run founder Opeyemi Adeniran and AltSchool Africa co-founder Akintunde Sultan.
The programme attracted more than 8,000 viewers during its debut, according to reports by Fintech Is Easy and Airtime News. That is a launch-day figure, rather than evidence of its regular audience size.
Ogwuche also brought the format to Moonshot in Lagos on October 29, where Big Tech This Week hosted Good Tech Live, sponsored by Madica. The conversations featured founders and executives including Selar’s Douglas Kendyson, MAX’s Adetayo Bamiduro, Mainstack’s Ayo Oyaleke and YouSend’s Adeoye Ojo.
The ambition is bigger than giving founders another place to announce products or funding rounds. Ogwuche wants audiences to hear directly from the people shaping African businesses, technology and culture, including the decisions, ideas and challenges that rarely make it into company announcements.
She has also spoken about the need to cover both business achievements and regulatory problems, without turning interviews into confrontations for their own sake. The programme is free to watch and has secured sponsorship support for its first year, with advertising and paid segments also part of the proposed business model.
For Ogwuche, the move from a newsletter to live television-style conversations is not a departure from what she has been doing. It is an attempt to give those conversations a bigger audience and African technology a bigger stage.