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,...

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...