Trajectories — Portrait No. 11 A founder’s biography is not a legal defence, and a legal file is not a verdict. Mohed Altrad does not know what day he was born; he picked 9 March with his children. From a Bedouin tribe near Raqqa to 65,000 employees in more than fifty countries and a fortune...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 10 At end-June 2025, Nedbank carried its 21.2% of Ecobank Transnational at R1.8bn against a market value of R1.9bn. It sold the block four months later for $100m — roughly R1.8bn. The headline that a Cameroonian financier bought for a fifth of what the seller paid is arithmetically true and analytically...

In seven months, three CEMAC sovereigns raised roughly $2.52 billion on international bond markets at coupons between 8.9% and 9.5%. In the whole of 2025, Central African companies attracted $27 million in venture capital — 0.7% of Africa’s total. That gap, not the absence of capital, is the region’s real financing problem. AFSIC – Investing...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 8 In 2013, Fast Company appended an editor’s note to its profile of Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu. It removed a claim that soleRebels was the world’s only Fair Trade-certified footwear company, and noted the brand was no longer carried by Urban Outfitters. Thirteen years later, the uncorrected version is still the one...