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...

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....

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,...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 10 At end-June 2025, Nedbank carried its 21.2% of Ecobank Transnational at R1.8bn against a market value of R1.9bn. It sold the block four months later for $100m — roughly R1.8bn. The headline that a Cameroonian financier bought for a fifth of what the seller paid is arithmetically true and analytically...

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...