Finance, investment, innovation and diplomacy take centre stage as prominent African and international decision-makers convene in the French capital. Paris, October 23, 2026 | CEMAC-ECO.FINANCE The fourth edition of Africa Solutions Week (SAS 2026) takes place in Paris on October 23–24, bringing together leading figures from finance, business, diplomacy, technology and international media. Organised by...

From November 5 to 14, 2026, the EICAR Paris campus will host the 8th edition of the international film festival L’Afrique Fait Son Cinéma. By appointing Clémentine Célarié and Lucien Jean-Baptiste as Official Patrons, and international actor Richard Sammel as Jury President, the General Delegation led by Blaise Pascal Tanguy affirms the economic and global...

Global platforms arrived in Nigeria with commissioning budgets, then pulled back. African producers rebuilt on the platform that never left: YouTube. For a few years, streaming money transformed African screen production. Netflix commissioned Nigerian originals, Prime Video followed, and budgets, salaries and ambitions rose. Then the global streaming business turned to profitability. Prime Video stopped...

Cameroon’s English-language film industry grew up in Buea, at the foot of Mount Cameroon. Then the region became a war zone. The films kept coming, from elsewhere. Long before streaming, a generation of Anglophone Cameroonian filmmakers built an industry around Buea, in the South-West region. It borrowed the naming convention of Hollywood and Nollywood and...

One phrase from a Cameroonian saxophonist’s 1972 B-side became one of the most recognisable refrains in pop music. The story of who got paid, and when, is the story of African music’s relationship with the global industry. In 1972, Manu Dibango recorded “Soul Makossa” in Paris. It was the flip side of a record made...

Africa’s best-known e-commerce company has spent a decade proving that selling online on the continent is hard. Its management says profitability is close. It has said that before. Jumia listed in New York in 2019 as “the Amazon of Africa”, a label its founders never chose and its results never justified. Under the current leadership...

Governments across Africa tried to tax digital transfers. Ghana’s levy became so unpopular it was abolished. Cameroon’s is still collected. Which approach raised money, and which drove people back to cash? In 2022, two governments made the same bet within weeks of each other. Ghana introduced an electronic transfer levy on mobile money and other...

Central Africa’s diaspora sends money home every month. No CEMAC state has ever asked it to lend. Nigeria raised $300m from its diaspora in 2017. The idea deserves a serious look, not a slogan. A diaspora bond is a sovereign bond sold to citizens abroad, usually in small denominations, often at a rate below the...

On Sunday 4 October, Emmanuel Macron hosted the business leaders of the Africa-France Impact Coalition at the Élysée Palace, with Benin’s President Romuald Wadagni as guest of honour. Five months after the Nairobi summit, the coalition is becoming a permanent fixture. That leaves three questions about the €23 billion announced in May: what it covers,...

In six days, on 13 October, London once again becomes, for forty-eight hours, the place where part of Africa’s financing gets negotiated. The thirteenth edition of AFSIC – Investing in Africa opens at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge with the fullest programme in its history, just as the money bound for the continent is concentrating...

Gabon is more than 80 per cent forest and absorbs far more carbon than it emits. It has spent years trying to turn that into revenue. Buyers remain sceptical, and the market has turned against them. Gabon’s pitch is simple. Its forests store carbon, the country has kept deforestation low, and the world says it...

Beijing has promised duty-free access to its market for African countries that recognise it. The offer removes the tariff. It does not remove the standards, the logistics or the volumes — which is where Central African exporters usually fail. China announced in 2025 that it would extend zero-tariff treatment to the full range of tariff...

Cement, sugar, fertiliser and now the continent’s biggest refinery. Africa’s wealthiest industrialist has built an empire on import substitution. Central Africa is one of the markets he has not yet conquered. Aliko Dangote’s method has been consistent for three decades: identify a product Africa imports in volume, build capacity at a scale that changes the...

Borrow against tomorrow’s barrels to pay today’s bills. Chad did it, Congo did it, Gabon did it again in April. The mechanism is legal, expensive and almost impossible to see from the outside. An oil-backed loan is simple in principle. A state, or its national oil company, receives cash now from a commodity trader or...

First announced in Cairo in late 2023, relaunched in Algiers, “launched” in Kigali and finally given a manager in July 2026, Afreximbank’s pan-African film fund still carries the same headline figure: one billion dollars. The reality behind it is more fragile. The capital has yet to be raised. The manager has no public track record...

Cameroon has added the largest hydropower plant in its history. Households still count their outages in hours per day. The gap between generation and supply is where the money goes missing. Central Africa’s electricity problem is usually described as a shortage of generation. That description is increasingly wrong, and Cameroon is the clearest case. The...

Six months apart, the same regulator issued two decisions about two Cameroonian microfinance institutions placed under supervision in the same wave. One got a liquidator. The other got its keys back. The variable that separates them is not capital, and it is not credit risk. It is who sits at the head of the boardroom...

Tanzania sent fifteen companies and an ambassador. Zimbabwe’s tourism minister appeared on the speaker list. Past that, the continent’s largest annual pitch to the French travel trade was conducted almost entirely in French, at a show where the Africa Convention has just closed its fourth edition. With AFCON 2027 heading to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda,...