On January 11, 2019, Tanzania’s presidency announced that it reached an agreement with Indian telecom group Bharti Airtel for the increase of its share in Airtel Tanzania.   The announcement was made after discussions in Dar es Salaam between president John Magufuli (photo, at the right) and Bharti Airtel’s president Sunil Mittal (photo, at the left), to resolve the dispute that sparked...

The Pan-African capital investment firm AfricInvest has obtained 49.3 million additional shares in the Kenyan insurance firm Britam Holdings for Ksh450 million (about 4.5 million US dollar). This acquisition increases the shares of AfricInvest in Britam’s capital to 16.26%.  By May 2018, AfricInvest had already acquired 360.8 million shares in Britam, representing 14.3% of Britam, for...

Royal Air Maroc submitted a request to the American ministry of transport to request authorization to launch a new line between Casablanca and Boston in June 2019,  Air Journal announced last January 14.   These flights will be made with Boeing 787 Dreamliner in the framework of an open sky agreement signed by Morocco and the USA, the same source revealed. Boston will be the fourth...

Henley & Partners published its 2019 passport index and, once again, the world’s top is dominated by Japan while there is no African country in the world’s top 10. In Africa, the top 5 is dominated by Seychelles (27th  global rank), Mauritius (51st global rank), South Africa (53rd global rank), Botswana (82nd global rank) and Namibia (68th global rank). The bottom 5 is...

Some of Rwanda’s officials have just completed the 4-day training organized by the Chinese e-commerce giant, on the economic issues related to the international e-commerce platform (eWTP) their country has been connected to since October 2018.   During the training, they were also informed of the impact of the digital sector on the economy, finance, logistics and trade notably. It was...

In their recent report on Sub-Sahara Africa, Standard and Poor's (S&P) and Moody's, two rating agencies whose notations are valued by investors, expressed different opinions over the borrower profile of each of the Subsahara African countries. Moody's estimates that the outlooks on the rating of countries it rates are negative due to persisting fiscal and external problems, even though there is...

The supercomputer, for which a €15 million financing agreement was signed in December 2016 in Paris by Senegal’s ministers of economy and higher education and the French public investment bank, will be delivered in some months.   This was announced by Mary Teuw Niane (photo), the minister of higher education, on January 14, 2019, during the signature of a memorandum of...

The European Commission has approved a grant of 5 million euros to the African Legal Support Facility, to finance the Facility’s Medium Term Strategy for the next five years. ALSF, hosted by the African Development Bank, to date has supported African countries to negotiate commercial deals worth more than US$60 billion in potential investments, mainly in the infrastructure and extractive...

Cellcom, operating under Orange after it was acquired in April 2018 by the French telecom giant, was sued by its competitor Lonestar Cell MTN on January 11, 2018. Lonestar Cell MTN, a subsidiary of MTN Group, lodged a complaint against Cellcom, Avishai Marziano (Cellcom’s former CEO), Ran Polani (another Cellcom’s CEO) and Daniel Kaye (a hacker) at the Commercial Court of England & Wales for...

Weeks after the deadline of December 31, 2018, given to Ghanaian commercial banks to increase their social capital, the government has elaborated a special investment vehicle for banks that were unable to comply with the new regulation. "The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, concerned about the difficulties such well-run, solvent Ghanaian-owned banks were likely to face in...