The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) asked Senegal, Togo and Burkina Faso to initiate infrastructure and legal reforms to fully capture the opportunities presented by e-commerce. In a report published during the regional forum on e-commerce being held on October 9-10, 2018, in Ouagadougou, the UNCTAD in collaboration with ECOWAS estimates that the reforms represent...

Equatorial Guinea is preparing to connect to a new submarine optical cable to increase its data capacity. The company invested in Ultramar GE which will connect the cable directly in Sao Tomé and Principe. Built by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and being deployed in collaboration with the national telecommunication infrastructures management company (GITGE), the 263 km long cable is being...

Finca international in partnership with the USAID’s initiative Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) announced the launch of a platform named Finca Forward. The platform is aimed at facilitating collaboration between African fintech companies launching their activities and microfinance institutions that support people on low-revenues around the world. Finca Forward will allow the...

Hassan Allam, the Egyptian construction company announced in a communiqué published last Monday, that it would list 44.3% of its capital on Cairo and London stock exchanges to fund its development plan. The shares that will be listed are owned by the family of the businessman Hassan Allam who own 86.2 % of the company and the International Finance Corporation (13.8%).   Hassan Allam...

Africa remains WAEMU’s best commercial partner at the end of Q2, 2018, Ecofin Agency learned from official figures. Even though it dropped by 8% on a year-to-year basis, the trade surplus between the union and its main African partners was estimated at CFA365.3 billion. There is namely a positive balance of CFA260.5 billion with South Africa thanks to gold exported by Mali and Burkina Faso....

In a statement published on October 4 in the framework of the world and Arab housing days, Morocco’s ministry of housing and urbanism announced that the country’s housing deficit dropped from 1.2 million units in 2002 to 400,000 units in 2018. This represents a reduction of 800,000 units within 16 years. According to the ministry, this performance is “the evidence of the efforts initiated...

Mauritania’s telecommunications regulatory body (Autorité de Régulation-ARE) has launched a tender procedure to attribute a global license (2G/3G/4G) to a new operator. By opening the national telecommunications market to a new actor, authorities wish to offer consumers an alternative to the poor service attributed to the three operators namely, Mauritel, Mattel and Chinguitel. For a fair...

Ampersand, a startup focused on the East African market and whose main activity consists in assembling electric cars, announced that it has tested four models of electricity powered bikes which are less polluting. The startup spent three years on research to be able to assemble those two-wheel ecological machines. After the experimentation phase, Ampersand is planning to start commercialization...

In Kenya, a new industrial park worth between $110 million and $150 million should be built in the coming years, indiqué Stefano Contardo (photo), Improvon group’s CEO, indicated in an interview granted to CNBC Africa. Named Nairobi Gate, the project plans the construction of plants and warehouses over 42 hectares to provide better locations to rapidly growing Kenyan...

Ethiopia plans to build three new industrial zones during the 2018/2019 fiscal year, Lelise Neme, managing director of Industrial Parks Development Corporation of Ethiopia (IPDC) indicated last week. According to the official’s statement reported by Xinhua, these industrial zones will be built in Aysha, Semera, and Assossa. Added to the four others already launched by the government, these...