Thursday, November 21African Digital Business Magazine

Nigeria News

Nigeria News

Friday@Noon on Agriculture in Africa – 2018
Agriculture, Angola News, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia News, Ghana News, Kenya News, Mozambique News, Nigeria News, Rwanda News, South Africa News, South Sudan, Tanzania News, Uganda News, Zimbabwe News

Friday@Noon on Agriculture in Africa – 2018

by Johan Burger This paper addresses events and trends in the agriculture sector in Africa for 2018. It is based on the media articles addressed in the Friday@Noon weekly newsletters of the NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies in Singapore. These are by no means meant to constitute an exhaustive list of developments. General Agriculture in Africa has been identified as a sector with the capacity to stimulate economic growth on the continent. What is necessary, is the industrialization of the sector, with a strong focus on improving the inputs, e.g. better quality seeds, fertiliser, irrigation and modern farming techniques. Transforming the sector into a lucrative one, is an important step to convince various stakeholders to see farming as a good business opportunity. The industrialisation of...
Business, Egypt News, Ghana News, Main, Nigeria News, Rwanda News, Tech, Uganda News

Friday@Noon on Financial Services in Africa: 2018

by Johan Burger The NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies publishes a weekly newsletter on issues relevant to Africa. This paper is based on issues addressed in the newsletter. The financial services industry in Africa has seen a lot of development throughout the past few years, as was the case in 2018. Mobile telephony has driven the US$300 million monthly transactions in Africa from 7.2 million new people (up 250% from 2012) using digital financial services and 45,000 new banking agents due to a financial inclusion project. Financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased from 23% in 2011 to 43% in 2017. Mobile money solutions and agent banking now offer affordable, instant, and reliable transactions, savings, credit, and even insurance opportunities in rural villages and urban neigh...
Botswana News, Ethiopia News, Kenya News, Main, Mozambique News, Nigeria News, South Africa News

Friday@Noon on Regional Integration in Africa: 2018

by Johan Burger The NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies publishes a weekly newsletter on issues relevant to Africa. This paper is based on issues addressed in the newsletter. Regional integration has become a high profile intervention and is seen as the route to economic integration and increasing intra-African trade. Some commentators are of the opinion that Africa must secure its own share of global economic growth and sustain the economic growth of Africa itself. The greatest opportunity for doing this, is Africa’s ability to trade and do business with itself. Improvements to fiscal policies, governance and regulatory frameworks, along with a move to diversify economies away from Africa’s traditional commodities-biased economies, present great opportunities to foreign investors. Africa’s...
Friday@Noon on E-commerce in Africa: 2018
Business, Egypt News, Kenya News, Nigeria News, Tech

Friday@Noon on E-commerce in Africa: 2018

by Johan Burger The NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies publishes a weekly newsletter on issues relevant to Africa. This paper is based on issues addressed in the newsletter. The growth and continuation of e-commerce in Africa has received various boosts during 2018. Africa’s leading online shopping platform, Jumia, reported in 2018 it wanted to make Egypt its biggest market on the continent, and it’s turning to Egypt’s vast network of unlicensed vendors for help. Jumia wants a 10-fold growth in revenue from Egypt and a 6-fold growth in the number of products offered on its platform by 2021. To achieve that, Jumia is urging the government to regulate informal retailers by offering them tax incentives and cheap loans that would allow them to market their goods online. The informal economy ac...
Investing in Africa: An Outlook on Nigeria and Ethiopia
African News, Ethiopia News, Main, Nigeria News

Investing in Africa: An Outlook on Nigeria and Ethiopia

Itumeleng Mukhovha, an associate in the Corporate/M&A practice at Baker McKenzie in Johannesburg One can easily assume that international investors are deterred from investing in Africa given the growing need to weather a global financial crisis, which has been distorted by Brexit, rising geopolitical tensions, tightened global liquidity conditions, leveraged loans and sketchy debts that continue to riddle bank systems, idiosyncratic governments and the bond yield curve that is trending toward inversion. However, this is not the case. Conversely, the global financial crisis and the desperate search for growth, yield and solvency has led investors to pay more attention to emerging markets in Africa, and in particular frontier markets with favourable growth paths, moderate debt levels an...
What Angola can learn from Nigeria as it creates remarkable opportunities for marginal oil production
African News, Angola News, Energy, Nigeria News

What Angola can learn from Nigeria as it creates remarkable opportunities for marginal oil production

The Nigerian experience with marginal oil field development had measurable success, with 24 licenses awarded to 31 companies, some as sole operators and others as joint-ventures With production declining and investment scarce, the Angolan leadership has put in place a number of new policies to reboot its oil industry and propel economic development. However, those changes take time and renewed deep-water oil and gas exploration for fresh reserves will take years to yield the desired results and stop the daily production crunch. In the meantime, the government is targeting what it already knows exists, the country’s multiple deposits of what has been dubbed marginal oil fields, which will go on sale this year during the Angolan Marginal Field Bid Round. Marginal fields are defined by ...
Main, Nigeria News, South Africa News

Africa Presents Unique Challenges for Multinational Corporations

Thabo Mpelele, Sales Manager: Southern & Eastern Africa, Orange Business Services Despite being plagued by economic uncertainty and socio-economic issues, Africa remains a promising long-term growth opportunity for business; with multinational corporations (MNCs) the world over continuing to enter into the region. When drawing up development and expansion plans any enterprise is faced with the fact that the African region presents unique challenges for those operating within its borders. Consumer Growth Consumer growth is a global phenomenon, and it most certainly has high importance for MNCs entering and operating in the African region. In two of Africa's fastest-growing markets of South Africa and Nigeria, as well as other markets in Africa,  consumers are looking to acquire advan...
Main, Nigeria News

Nigerian Mining Springs Opportunities for Foreign Investors

Commercial quality mineral resources abound in Nigeria but that’s not the issue here. While it’s true Nigeria has been blessed with grand quantities of gold, diamonds, iron ore, a variety of gemstones and lead, among others, find the technical expertise and financial savvy to take advantage of the resources has long plagued the region. The Federal Gov’t of Nigeria is the custodian of the mineral resources on behalf of the citizenry and they are taking steps to make the resources more lucrative than before but investors have long been weary of sending their money to an area known for its political instability. In decades past, the government granted mineral rights to investors so they could explore, mine and get the minerals to market but the gov't preferred to act as an owner-operator. T...
Chad News, Equatorial Guinea, Main, Nigeria News

Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil and Africa: What to expect

Otavio Veras, Research Associate of the NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies Synopsis In the wake of controversial picks for Trump’s cabinet, the spotlight turns to his appointed choice for Secretary of State, the highest diplomatic rank in the United States government. After a brief interlude with Mitt Romney, which would certainly be a favourite pick among Republicans, Donald Trump showed that he would continue with his anti-establishment agenda and decided instead to recommend Rex Tillerson for the role. Rex Tillerson is an experienced executive of the Oil and Gas industry. Having worked at ExxonMobil for 41 years, Tillerson rose from a production engineer role, when he joined the company in 1975, to vice-president of ExxonMobil by 1999, and finally to chairman and CEO by 2006. Tillers...
Main, Nigeria News

African Challenges to African Development

The parlous story of African economic and social development since independence best expressed in the failure to achieve the autonomous capacity for self-actuated development and in particular to create conditions of national and continental modern mass production and prosperity is well known and need not be repeated. It is enough to re-state that Africa’s development failure was because of the leaderships’ choice to retain, maintain and expand the inherited exocentric colonial system of development incapacitation, primary commodity export, import dependency and poverty generation. The progressive efforts of some African states and leaders to change the system and create self-reliant economies were stymied by the leaderships’ ideological inadequacies and dependency, the balance of paymen...