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,...

Two Academy Awards, a Tony, four decades on screen. And, running quietly underneath all of it, a fifty-year debt that one man has spent his adult life paying back in instalments. This is the documented record of Denzel Washington’s philanthropy — what it funded, whom it changed, what it cost, and where the legend around...

How Imane Ayissi — dancer, model, self-taught couturier — became the first sub-Saharan African on the calendar of Paris haute couture, and why he is still the only one I. The dance at the end In July 2026, in the gilded salons of the Aéro-Club de France in Paris, a recorded voice asked the guests...

Among the choices that explain the critical success of the French diptych La Bataille de Gaulle — which, with more than 5 million combined admissions, became the surprise box-office triumph of the French summer of 2026 — one stands out as bolder than the rest: building the entire first part, L’Âge de Fer (“The Age...

Angélique Kidjo, from Ouidah to Hollywood Boulevard Los Angeles, August 18, 2026 It took forty-three years to travel from a stage in Cotonou to a stretch of pavement on Hollywood Boulevard. On August 18, 2026, under the palm trees across from the Roosevelt Hotel, at 7011, Angélique Kidjo unveiled the 2,854th star on the Walk...

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...

The money hasn’t left Africa. It has simply become much harder to convince. Institutional investors are no longer asking whether the continent holds promise; they want to know how that promise is being captured, measured and converted into liquidity. Two fund managers — Anza, based in Johannesburg, and Farmties Capital — agreed to describe what...

A payments stack that clears transactions in Lagos will not necessarily clear them in Nairobi. What performs in Accra can stall in Kampala. That fragmentation is the wall most companies hit when they try to scale across the continent — and it is precisely the market Tola Mobile has chosen to occupy. The payments infrastructure...