Browsing: Health sector in Africa

Africa’s health sector attracts more investments during the pandemic

Health August 20, 2020

My July op-ed focused on the increased M&A activities in Africa under Covid-19. Network International announced the acquisition of Africa’s leading online commerce platform, DPO for $288M on 28^th July 2020, confirming my analysis that we are going to see more M&A activities going forward.”

According to Keet van Zyl, Managing Partner of Knife Capital (which turned ten last week), who managed Mark Shuttleworth’s ‘Here Be Dragons’ Fund – this is likely the largest tech acquisition in Africa since Shuttleworth sold Thawte to Verisign for $575m in 1999″. SoftBank, which had a $16.5B loss in Q1, returned to a $12B net profit in Q2, courtesy of the merger and partial sale of its stake in Sprint to T-Mobile, as well as a recovery in its $100B vision fund portfolio. This means global M&A is also picking steam in the “valley of coronavirus” as Masayoshi Son put it.

Under COVID-19, …

Peace, food security and the pandemic in Africa

Industry and Trade June 2, 2020

The dream of a world without hunger seemed achievable three years ago. However, with increasing challenges such as those recorded recently like the locust invasion and the novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) that is still wrecking lives across the globe, the future looks bleak.

Africa accounts for the highest number of people suffering acute food insecurity due to conflicts and tensions between communities.

According to the 2020 Global Report on Food Crisis (GRFC 2020): “In East Africa, armed conflicts, intercommunal violence and other localized tensions continued to affect peace and security.”

Moreover, “the upheaval that has been set in motion by the COVID-19 pandemic may push even more families and communities into deeper distress, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, added in the Forward of the report.