In many African cities, a broken fridge is rarely thrown away immediately. It may be repaired and resold, dismantled for spare parts or collected for its metal components. Old clothes are often altered or transformed into something new. Leftover crop stalks and leaves are turned into animal feed, compost, cooking fuel or biogas. These activities…
Across sub-Saharan Africa, revenue authorities are increasingly changing how they engage with small businesses. The traditional approach involved audits, penalties and inspections. But more recently many are investing in taxpayer education, “door-to-door” visits, and focusing on ways to make it easier to comply. The logic driving the change is that auditing every small trader is…
Attacks on Chinese workers in Mali are testing Beijing’s reliance on African security forces. Russia’s experience there gives China little reason to take on the fighting itself. On 9 May, fighters from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Sahel, stopped buses and trucks at Zambougou, in the Ségou region of Mali about…
In a RootsToFoods Capital Series interview, Wasim Tahir, Senior Advisor at ODI Global and former director at British International Investment, explains how development finance actually moves private capital into emerging markets, and why the lasting answer lies in deep domestic capital markets and national development banks. Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures, spoke…
Africa’s gaming industry is shifting from a story about how many people play games to one about how much of the industry can be built around those players. The change is being driven by faster market growth, new payment infrastructure, growing game development capacity and an expanding calendar of competitive events across the continent. Data…
Natalie Borcherds, Security Services Manager and Nikishca Moolman, Information Security Consultant at Galix. Cyber security training remains one of the most persistent challenges in corporate South Africa, not because organisations don’t invest in it, but because too many still treat it as a once-off exercise. Ticking a compliance box and moving on. The result? Employees…
In June 2024, a ransomware attack on South Africa’s National Health Laboratory Service rendered patient records inaccessible, disrupted diagnostics and forced hospitals to cancel surgeries. The incident was a stark reminder that when essential services become digital, attacks on their underlying systems can quickly become disruptions to everyday life. It was not simply a cybersecurity…
Africa’s ability to respond to the next epidemic will depend less on how many researchers it trains or scientific papers it publishes and more on whether the continent can detect outbreaks, conduct research and make critical decisions faster when a health emergency strikes. That is the challenge the Ministry of Health has put to researchers…
Dangote Group and Ethiopian Investment Holdings will invest $660 million in a petroleum-products pipeline connecting landlocked Ethiopia with Djibouti’s coast, adding new fuel storage and transport infrastructure to one of East Africa’s main trade corridors. The project was announced by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed alongside Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh and Aliko Dangote. The…
Successful entrepreneurs can build exceptional businesses while continuing to struggle with self-doubt, overthinking and the need to prove themselves. Success is supposed to make us more confident. Yet for many entrepreneurs, the bigger their business becomes, the greater the pressure, uncertainty and expectation, and the more there is to lose. Additionally, business success does not…
