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,...

Cameroon hosted the World Trade Organization’s ministerial conference in March, only the second held on African soil. Ministers left without a declaration. The question now is what the host gained. For four days, from 26 to 30 March 2026, Yaoundé hosted nearly 2,000 trade officials and more than 90 ministers for the WTO’s 14th Ministerial...

Washington’s flagship trade preference programme was rescued in February and expires again on 31 December. For most of Central Africa, the deadline is academic: the region was already locked out. On 3 February 2026, President Trump signed legislation reauthorising the African Growth and Opportunity Act through 31 December 2026, retroactive to 30 September 2025, when...

A scored ranking of ten Central African banks on SME and young-entrepreneur finance — and an account of what the score cannot see No bank in Central Africa publishes the five figures that would settle the question: approval rate, median ticket size, share of the loan book held by firms under three years old, share...

Why Central Africa’s banks do not finance Central Africa — and what architecture could make them I. Anatomy of a rational bank — II. Bankability is not a quality of the project; it is infrastructure — III. Who actually finances young entrepreneurs? — IV. Why the region does not take off: four explanations, three of...

BRICS’s New Delhi summit showed a group big enough to rival the West economically — and divided enough to avoid saying so out loud NEW DELHI — For two days in the Indian capital, the leaders of eleven nations that together generate 41 percent of the world’s economic output at purchasing-power parity and are home...

Trajectoire — Portrait No. 14 The last great live-music fortune built without owning the masters On Saturday 12 September, a 58-year-old woman who lived with the symptoms of an incurable neurological disease for seventeen years before being diagnosed will walk onto the stage of Europe’s largest indoor arena, in front of 30,000 people. Behind the...

Commercial Bank Cameroun spent seven years under provisional administration. NFC Bank spent twelve. IDEV never came out at all. On 11 September 2026, NOFIA S.A. walked out after twelve months. The interesting question is not whether that is impressive. It is why it worked — and whether it holds. At a glance InstitutionNouvelle Financière Africaine...

Investigation. The thirteenth edition of AFSIC – Investing in Africa takes place on 13 and 14 October 2026 at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge in London. Billed as the largest annual African investment gathering held outside the continent, the conference is targeting 1,500 delegates, 350 investors and 350 profiled projects seeking more than US$10 billion....

How the heir to Black independent cinema’s founding revolution turned an act of cultural insurgency into a durable business model — and why Paris is about to crown him Some names are worn like a crown. Others like an anvil. Mario Van Peebles inherited both. He is the son of the most ungovernable filmmaker America...

United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc has announced the appointment of Mr. Emmanuel N. Nnorom as Group Chairman, ushering in a new chapter of strategic leadership for one of Africa’s leading financial institutions. The appointment brings to the helm a highly accomplished corporate leader whose distinguished career spans more than four decades across banking, finance,...