Trajectories — Portrait No. 3 Central African economies pay better for trading than for making. Importing a container requires working capital and a licence; building the factory requires energy, a supply chain, trained labour and capital you cannot get back if you are wrong. Célestin Tawamba trained as a financier, spent a decade pricing exactly...

Trajectories — Portrait No. 2 Ursula Burns took over a company whose product was being erased by the internet, and spent $6.4bn — the largest acquisition in Xerox’s history — buying a different business to become. Six years later the group was split back in two under pressure from an activist holding roughly 15% of...

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...