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...

The Zimbabwean-born founder of Econet and Cassava Technologies has announced plans to build artificial intelligence computing capacity on African soil. The question is whether the continent can afford to run it. Strive Masiyiwa built a telecoms and fibre group across Africa after a long legal fight to obtain a licence in Zimbabwe. His current vehicle,...

Every Central African family abroad knows a version of the story: money sent for a plot, a house half built, a title that turns out to belong to someone else. Property is the diaspora’s favourite investment and its most litigated one. For most of the diaspora, the first investment at home is land. It is...

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...

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...

She brought the World Trade Organization to Cameroon and left without a declaration. For the woman who runs global trade rules, the Yaoundé conference was both a personal achievement and a demonstration of how little consensus is left. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the WTO’s Director-General in March 2021, the first woman and the first African to...

The largest refinery in Africa sits 600 kilometres from Douala by sea. Central Africa imports nearly all its refined fuel. On paper, the match is obvious. In practice, almost nothing has changed. Since the fire that crippled Cameroon’s SONARA refinery in 2019, the country has imported refined products. Chad refines a modest volume at Djarmaya....

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...

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...