News
Gates Foundation Provides $15.4 Million to Opportunity International To Help Build Microfinance Banks in Five African Nations 
PR Newswire, February 20, 2007
Opportunity International, one of the world's largest microfinance organizations, today announced it has received a $5.4 million grant and a $10 million loan from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The $15.4 million of capital will fund start-up microfinance banks to serve the poor in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well as expansion of its banking operations in Ghana. Opportunity International operates banks or financial institutions in 28 countries and is the world's largest microfinance bank organization serving the very poor.
>> More Details | created on: 02/23/2007
Reaching out Aureos makes $400m bet on Africa
By Barney Jopson , Financial Times, January 22, 2007
Aureos Capital, one of the most experienced private equity groups in Africa, is aiming to raise $400m for a ground-breaking bet on the potential of smaller companies to build businesses spanning the continent, writes Barney Jopson in London.
The group, domiciled in Mauritius, is among a handful of emerging market specialists active in Africa and already runs three funds, dedicated to east, west and southern Africa, which total $140m.
>> More Details | created on: 02/02/2007
From Matatu to the Masai via mobile
By Paul Mason , BBC News, January 8, 2007
Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason travels through Kenya using a map of the country's mobile phone networks as his guide.
>> More Details | created on: 01/19/2007
Microvending in Kenya
By Kitty Felde, Marketplace - American Public Media, November 21, 2006
Microlending is when small amounts of money are loaned to budding entrepreneurs. MicroVENDING is when small business owners sell tiny amounts of their product. This idea is taking off in the impoverished African nation of Kenya. From the Marketplace Entreprenuership Desk, Kitty Felde reports.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
Chasing the 'base of the pyramid' 
By Marc Gunther, Fortune Magazine, November 15, 2006
Veteran cleaning-product firm SC Johnson seeds startups in the poorest parts of Africa. Socially responsible? Yes, but also good business, reports Fortune's Marc Gunther.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
Kenya's 'Lord of the Ringtones' carves empire in African cell phone
WBCSD, October 22, 2006
In a warehouse on the outskirts of Nairobi, the "Lord of the Ringtones" holds sway over a growing cell phone service empire amid an African explosion in mobile technology. With 14 employees and a clever Middle Earth-inspired slogan, Ken Njoroge's two-year-old Cellulant firm has seized on the phenomenal surge in cell phone use and a ballooning desire for people to customize their handsets with distinctive rings.
"Mobile phones are getting more and more sophisticated," says the 31-year-old "lord," as Cellulant employees in oversized headphones, upship song snippets and ditties to customers for 82 cents (65 euro cents) a ringtone. "We've just found an untapped niche," Njoroge told AFP.
>> More Details | created on: 11/02/2006
African Governments Asked to Plough Back Cell Phone Taxes
By Kimathi Njoka, allAfrica, October 21, 2006
Telecommunications experts say mobile networks have the capacity to provide coverage to 90 per cent of the world's population by 2010.
But this could happen only if governments spend all the tax collections from telecoms industry on improving the mobile infrastructure. Speaking in Cape Town yesterday, experts urged Governments to complement mobile operators towards achieving this goal instead of watering down their efforts through ill-advised policies of subsidising rollouts of fixed-networks.
>> More Details | created on: 10/27/2006
Uganda: MFIs Want Moneylenders Regulated
By Ibrahim Kasita, allAfrica, October 8, 2006
MICRO-Finance Institutions (MFIs) have asked the Government to check the higher interest rates levied by moneylenders who have threatened the industry.
While MFIs' interest rates are between 19%-29%, moneylenders' rates are 30% and above. Money lending is legal, but requires written contracts between the lender and the borrower.
The moneylender is obliged to keep proper records of accounts. Unlike MFIs, moneylenders do not require application, processing, monitoring and insurance fees or compulsory savings, yet MFIs require that.
>> More Details | created on: 10/13/2006
Fertile Ground: Hedge Founds Travel to Africa
By Alistair MacDonald, The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2006
For 20 years, whenever Congolese businessman Kalaa Mpinga wanted to finance projects in sub-Saharan Africa, he would turn to agencies like the World Bank and the European Investment Bank. Now, rather than international development agencies, two hedge funds -- Lansdowne Partners Ltd. and Marshall Wace LLP -- are among his biggest investors. Together, they own more than 12% of the company he heads, Mwana Africa PLC.
"Today, you will get far more results by going to the market and raising your finance that way," says Mr. Mpinga, chief executive of Mwana Africa, a mining company that went public on the London Stock Exchange last year, after obtaining the listing of a rival African miner it acquired.
>> More Details | created on: 10/13/2006
Africa closes tech gap with flashy phones
News.com, September 26, 2006
Rickety minibus taxis weave between corrugated iron shacks, dodging street hawkers and the odd scrawny child with trousers gaping at the knee.
Alexandra is one of South Africa's roughest townships, and yet you can switch on your laptop there, slide in a data card and access your e-mail in seconds using the world's most advanced commercial wireless technology. About a decade after mobile phones started to spread across the poorest continent, trailing Europe by several years, wireless technology in major cities is catching up with that in the West.
>> More Details | created on: 09/29/2006
Botswana: Business Place Gaborone to Boost SMMEs
By Kabo Mokgoabone, allAfrica, September 25, 2006
Lack of management skills by many of Botswana's Small to Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) could be a thing of the past, as the newly established Business Place (Centre) Gaborone will endeavour to address these shortfalls.
The Business Place is the brainchild of Investec Asset Management and a collaboration of other local companies. Investec muted the idea in 2004 in collaboration with Barloworld Botswana, Motor Centre Group, the University of Botswana (UB), the University of Botswana Foundation, Kgalagadi Beverages Trust, Department of Youth and Culture and CEDA. The Managing Director of Investec Asset Management Botswana, Martinus Seboni, explained that while government agencies like CEDA and NDB have sponsored SMME projects, they go out of business within 18 to 36 months of operation.
>> More Details | created on: 09/29/2006
Uganda to Cap Interest Rates Charged By Microfinance Institutions
Microcapital, September 20, 2006
The Ugandan government capped the interest rate that microfinance institutions may charge. According to New Vision Kampala, the new rule sets rates at or below inflation, which stood at 8.1% in 2005. Microfinance institutions in Uganda currently lend at rates of 18 to 100 percent.
Interest rate caps tend to reduce the supply of microcredit, as fewer microfinance institutions enter the industry and existing ones scale back operations, reports Eric Duflos of The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). Uganda’s President, however, stated August 7, 2006 that “the aim of microfinance is to boost the productivity of the rural poor rather than turn a profit”. Consistent with that belief, he recently criticized the “high interest rates” in the country (MicroCapital Blog: August 24, 2006).
>> More Details | created on: 09/22/2006
The flicker of a brighter future
The Economist, September 7, 2006
Once again, Africa is listed as the most difficult place in the world to do business. So why are some businessmen happy to be there?
The prospect of investing in sub-Saharan Africa can cause businessmen to break out in a cold sweat. The region is often seen as a corporate graveyard of small, impossibly difficult markets, where war, famine, AIDS and disaster are always lurking. This week an annual World Bank study once again named Africa as the most difficult region in which to do business. But not everyone sees it like that. Graham Mackay, who runs SABMiller, the world's second-largest brewer, has said that “if there was any more of Africa, we'd be investing in it.”
>> More Details | created on: 09/29/2006
Nigeria: Government, Not Business, Can Deliver Services - Oxfam
allAfrica, September 3, 2006
Only governments can effectively deliver services like health and education to the poorest, development group Oxfam said in a report yesterday critical of groups like the World Bank for hindering poverty programs by pushing private-sector solutions.
The report comes a year after industrial nations pledged to double aid to poor countries by 2010, and donors and development groups look closer at how aid can be made more effective in fighting poverty.
"Only governments can reach the scale necessary to provide universal access to services that are free or heavily subsidized for poor people and geared to the needs of all citizens," Oxfam said in a 124-page report.
Oxfam said its conclusions are based on an essential services index that ranks countries according to child survival rates, schooling, access to safe water, and access to sanitation. It compared their performance with per capital national income.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Let there be light…
WDCSD, August 31, 2006
Africa Investor, 31 August 2006 - Supplying Africa with electricity is a bit like rowing a boat against the tide. You put in a lot of effort, it feels like you’re going somewhere, but when you look up you find the boat has lost ground. Despite some mega-projects on the horizon and billions of dollars expected to be spent on new generating capacity, the absolute number of people without electricity in Africa will continue to rise for at least the next 15 to 20 years. Some time around 2025 new capacity construction will catch up with population growth.
That is the scenario painted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2004 World Energy Outlook, which estimates that more than half a billion people in Africa do not have access to electricity: the only major world region where the number of people without electricity exceeds those who do.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Tanzania: Bank Sets Aside $5 Million to Lend to Informal Sector
allAfrica, August 22, 2006
Standard Chartered Bank Tanzania will set aside $5 million to assist Tanzania's small and medium firms. The chief executive Hemen Shah last week told The EastAfrican that the institution had signed an agreement with PRIDE Tanzania, a small micro-provident fund, to finance the project.
He said the bank's entry into the micro-lending sector signifies its confidence in the development of the sector. "Our lending rates to the micro finance sector are very competitive. We take into consideration a number of factors ranging from the amount borrowed to the credit risk associated with the transaction," he said.
According to Mr Shah, micro finance is a specialised sector that requires special skills in terms of loan administration and follow-up of projects. "The bank has started with PRIDE Tanzania, but we are discussing with other organisations with whom we can co-operate in a similar programme," he said.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Uganda: Micro Finance Institutions Need Help
By Sarah Nakibuuka, allAfrica, August 21, 2006
Government should establish a fully-fledged Credit Reference Bureau to provide accurate information relating to the creditworthness of borrowers. What is happening today with the micro-finance institutions is debt collection through court bailiffs and not credit referencing. Adequate information on credit referencing works to reduce the number and amounts of bad loans underwritten by lenders, thereby reducing the cost of borrowing and increasing the amount of well-underwritten loans. The World Development Report (WDR 2005) shows that information on credit history can reduce the processing time, costs, and default rates by more than 25%.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Entrepreneur has quixotic goal of wiring Rwanda
By Christopher Rhoads, The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2006
MOUNT KARISIMBI, Rwanda -- Greg Wyler, an American tech entrepreneur, dreams of bringing the Internet to this troubled country. There are a few hurdles. One is a battered communications tower atop this 14,787-foot volcanic peak. The air is too thin for helicopters to transport the several tons of equipment needed for repairs. Instead, it has to go by hand.
One recent morning, as mist covered the mountain, a group of 20 Rwandans lugged a 1,300-pound transformer with ropes and pulleys through deep mud. Rains had turned part of the trail into swamp. Mr. Wyler, 36 years old, was checking on their progress. He had recently hired a South African mountain-rescue company to advise on navigating the steeper sections.
"We are pushing the boundaries of technology here," Mr. Wyler said, as the muck oozed up around his knees.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Kenyan bank to use IT to link East Africa
BusinessinAfricaonline, August 11, 2006
Nairobi - Kenyan, Tanzanian and southern Sudanese nationals would shortly begin to bank in any of the three countries when the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) completes the rollout phase of its latest computer technology, a KCB executive has said.
According to Dr Tony Githuku, the bank's technology and operations divisional director, the bank was in the process of acquiring new advanced banking software to link its subsidiaries in the three East Africa countries before the end of the year.
>> More Details | created on: 08/14/2006
Coffee, and Hope, Grow in Rwanda
By Laura Fraser, The New York Times, August 6, 2006
OVER the last dozen years, the view from Gemima Mukashyaka’s small coffee garden in the lush emerald-green hills of southwestern Rwanda has changed. In 1994, after the genocide that killed 800,000 people, it was a site of devastation, chaos and abandonment. Five years ago, when worldwide coffee prices spiraled downward, her neighbors in the densely populated region near Butare were uprooting their coffee trees and planting quick-growing food crops to survive.
But today, there’s a clean coffee processing station nearby, and sprouted around it are two restaurants, a pharmacy, a bank, six hair salons, and just last week, the village’s first Internet cafe.
>> More Details | created on: 08/08/2006
Solar Power Brings Relief to Villagers
WBCSD, August 5, 2006
IPS, 5 August 2006 - Bishop Kodji, a small fishing and canoe carving island in the Atlantic Ocean off Nigeria's sprawling commercial hub of Lagos, has become the first village to be electrified under the Lagos State government's pilot solar energy project.
Before setting up the project, the village, with a population of 5,000, had not known electricity since its existence.
>> More Details | created on: 08/14/2006
Poverty-stricken Rwanda puts its faith and future into the wide wired world
By Xan Rice, The Guardian, August 1, 2006
Office workers talking over Skype. Fibre-optic cable snaking hundreds of miles underground and to the top of a 4,500-metre volcano. Paperless cabinet meetings with every minister using a laptop. This may sound like an advanced western country rather than a tiny, poor African state. Yet this is Rwanda, now in the midst of an extraordinary development plan to leap into the 21st century.
More "mobile in every pocket" than "chicken in every pot", the Vision 2020 project aims to rapidly transform a depressed agricultural economy into one driven by information communications and technology (ICT). If it works, the percentage of Rwanda's workforce involved in farming will drop from 90% to 50% in 15 years. By then the country should be the regional ICT hub - a kind of Singapore of the Great Lakes.
>> More Details | created on: 08/03/2006
Nanotech debate 'must involve poor communities'
By Tawanda Majoni, SciDev.Net, July 24, 2006
[HARARE] Poor communities must be involved in debates about whether nanotechnologies can contribute to social and economic development, said delegates at a series of meetings in Zimbabwe this month.
The last of the three 'nano-dialogues' — attended by Zimbabwean scientists and representatives of local communities — took place on 22 July in Harare.
>> More Details | created on: 07/27/2006
African Farmers try KickStarting Their Farms
npr, July 22, 2006
KickStart is a company hoping to help lift African farmers out of poverty by selling them simple water pumps for their crops. Scott Simon talks with Martin Fisher, co-founder of the non-profit company.
>> More Details | created on: 07/24/2006
South Africa: More Action Needed By Business in South Africa On Poverty
By Futhi Mtoba, July 19, 2006
Futhi Mtoba, Chairman of Deloitte Southern Africa, provides a look at where the corporate responsibility movement stands in South Africa, particularly as it relates to poverty alleviation. According to Mtoba, there is general understanding, and even genuine desire on the part of business to "do something", but for various reasons implementation is lacking. One solution for increasing momentum, says Mtoba, is to develop better methods of measuring the impact on the ground resulting from good business practices and programs. Otherwise, "it remains simply an exercise in throwing money at the problem" without leading to meaningful change in society.
>> More Details | created on: 08/08/2006
Philips keen on SADC region factory
Fin24, July 18, 2006
Johannesburg - Electronics giant Philips said on Tuesday that it hoped to build a compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) assembly factory in the SADC region - the first of its kind in Africa.
"Millions of Southern Africans living in both rural and urban households do not have access to electricity, and those that do often struggle to afford quality lighting. Instead, they rely on hazardous paraffin, kerosene or candles which are not only major pollutants, but also often lead to fires," the statement said.
>> More Details | created on: 07/24/2006
SA can show way in selling to new world
By Steven Burgess, Business Day, July 18, 2006
SIXTY-ONE countries comprising about 40% of humankind are officially classified as low-income countries (LICs) by the World Bank (2005). While many of these countries were ignored as viable destinations for business previously, today the globalisation of markets has focused attention on these “base of the pyramid” countries. Why would anyone be interested in a group of countries in which per capita gross national income is below $800 a year? The answer is growth and market saturation. LICs, and low-income segments in middle-income countries, are large, fast-growing, unsaturated markets that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually
>> More Details | created on: 07/20/2006
Southern Africa: Conference to Explore Affordable Lighting for the SADC
By Thapelo Sakoana, allAfrica, July 18, 2006
In a quest to give access to affordable lighting to millions of households in Southern Africa, an electronics company will host a conference to explore the feasibility of building a factory to manufacture Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) in the region.
This because the majority of citizens in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region do not have access to electricity while those who use it "still struggle to afford quality lighting".
>> More Details | created on: 07/24/2006
Fighting Poverty With $2-a-Day Jobs
By Daniel Gross, The New York Times, July 16, 2006
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ, a veteran of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former consultant to the World Bank, talks enthusiastically about the development of a company in Africa where some 2,000 women earn, on average, $1.80 a day producing antimalarial bed netting. With the assistance of a $350,000 loan from an American investor, the business started making the nets nearly three years ago and is likely to add 1,000 more jobs within the next year.
>> More Details | created on: 07/17/2006
Namibia: Cellphones Can Reverse Poverty
By Prof. Monish Gunawardana, allAfrica, July 14, 2006
Recently, Warren Buffet, the world's second richest businessperson, adding US$31 billion to Bill Gate's Foundation, did not forget to say: "A market system has not worked in terms of poor people." It is true. The third world nations are struggling in a highly volatile global market system that was promoted by the first world. It focuses on profits but not the welfare of the poor. As China and India did it, let us use this system for our benefit. Let us arm our people with the best technological tools to reverse the poverty and retain the global competitiveness. Today, our topic is "cellphone", which is a status symbol for the rich, but an anti-poverty weapon for the poor.
>> More Details | created on: 08/03/2006
UN and Microsoft for small business in Africa
Bloomberg, July 12, 2006
Cape Town and Seattle - Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, and the UN are forming a partnership to supply information technology (IT) and other support to small businesses in Africa.
>> More Details | created on: 07/13/2006
UN Tourism Agency Teams Up With Microsoft to Boost African Tourism
allAfrica.com, July 12, 2006
The United Nations tourism agency has teamed up with Microsoft to use information technology to improve the industry's competitiveness and quality in developing countries, especially in Africa which at present accounts for only 4 per cent of international tourism.
>> More Details | created on: 07/13/2006
Rwanda: Rural Areas to Access Solar Energy
By Grace Mugabe, allAfrica.com, July 10, 2006
The president of Solar Energy Africa, John Ssemanda, has said that the organization has an ambitious project of accessing solar energy to rural areas to boost economic development.
>> More Details | created on: 07/13/2006
In War-Torn Congo, Going Wireless to Reach Home
By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post, July 9, 2006
KINSHASA, Congo -- Until not long ago, if Zadhe Iyombe wanted to talk to his mother, he had to make the eight-day boat trip up the Congo River to the jungle town where he was raised. In a country with almost no roads, mail or telephone system and a grisly guerrilla war raging, making that exhausting and dangerous trip was about the only way he could find out if his 59-year-old mother was still alive.
>> More Details | created on: 07/10/2006
Let business lift Africa out of poverty
By Jon Cronin, BBC News, July 4, 2006
According to Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of Anglo American, poverty in Africa cannot be addressed "simply by aid". "The long term solution has to be to grow business, and I think people are now recognising that," he says.
"We employ very large numbers of people in Africa. We pay those people in total something in the region of $3bn, that's more than we pay our shareholders. Of course, as a business you have to make money. But it doesn't mean there aren't benefits for other people involved, for government, for employees, for suppliers and so on."
>> More Details | created on: 07/31/2006
Nigeria: FG to Build Biogas Plants to Convert Cow Dung to Fertilizer
By Emmanuel Ulayi, allAfrica.com, July 3, 2006
The federal government is to construct two pilot biogas plants for the conversion of abattoir wastes to biogas and organic fertilizer in Oyo and Kano states. The project, which would involve the use of an appropriate technology for treating abattoir waste, will also be implemented through public/ private partnership.
In addition to the production of a cheap source of domestic cooking gas and organic fertilizer, the plant will generate employment opportunities and mitigate the effects of green house gasses.
>> More Details | created on: 07/05/2006
Small generator aims to empower Africans - Foot-powered device test-runs in Rwanda
By Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2006
MUSHERI CENTER, Rwanda -- In this remote village of dirt-floor homes, recharging a cell phone has long meant bicycling 25 miles to the nearest town with power, or 4 miles to the closest charged-up car battery.
So the excitement was palpable when aid workers showed up recently with the first test model of what might prove to be an energy revolution for Africa: the Weza, a foot-pedal power generator.
>> More Details | created on: 07/05/2006
Business Joins African Effort to Cut Malaria
By Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times, June 29, 2006
BELULUANE, Mozambique — With malaria spread across southern Mozambique, executives at the international mining company Billiton expected some workers to call in sick as it began building a massive new aluminum smelter amid the cornfields here.
What they did not expect was that nearly one in three employees would fall ill — 6,600 cases in just two years. And they certainly did not expect 13 deaths, not after the company had built a medical clinic, doused the construction site with pesticides and handed out bed nets to thwart malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
>> More Details | created on: 06/30/2006
Uganda: USAID Pushes for Rural Mobile Banks