Browsing: Lagos

• The 1,028km highway will connect economic capitals of five West African countries, part of Ecowas economic block.
• Estimates show the project will cost $15.1 billion and is part of the Trans-African Highway Network.
• ECOWAS Heads of State want to speed up the construction of the highway..

The African Development Bank and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Heads of State now want to speed up the construction of the highway between Abidjan and Lagos.

This was realized after the 1st round table of development partners and major regional and international DFIs on the financing of the Construction of the Abidjan–Lagos Corridor Highway, in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

The round table aimed at providing the main regional and international development finance institutions with the latest information on this major regional project.

Abidjan-Lagos road design

The meeting also served as an awareness-raising platform and “soft market test” for the project, …

• German-based biotech company BioNTech is set to acquire InstaDeep, founded by a Tunisian-born and U.K.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, for up to £562 million (US$680 million) in its largest deal yet.
• The Tunis and London-based enterprise AI startup uses advanced machine learning techniques to bring AI to applications within an enterprise environment.
• The startup has offices in Paris, Tunis, Lagos, Dubai and Cape Town.

German pharmaceutical giant BioNTech announced it is acquiring Tunisian artificial intelligence start-up InstaDeep, in what is being hailed as a massive win for Africa’s tech ecosystem. The agreement is reportedly worth an estimated £582 million (US $682 million)

The two companies collaborated in 2020 to rapidly set up an intelligent system to detect Covid-19 variants, and this deal would accelerate BioNTech’s goal of harnessing the power of machine learning to improve the drug discovery process.

This acquisition is as a result of this long-term partnership that …

In Nigeria, where an estimated 38 million people, or 36% of adults, remain financially excluded, the government has set a target of 95% financial inclusion by 2024. 

While this may seem like an ambitious goal, that will require institutions to re-strategize initiatives and policies to accelerate the delivery of financial inclusion services, a lot of tech-backed firms are being developed in the West African country to help achieve this goal. 

Among them is Lagos-based FinTech unicorn Interswitch which seems to have heeded that call, leveraging its position as a market leader in digital payment services to bridge the massive financial inclusion gap and help bring as many people into the financial and economic fold as possible.…

When Nigeria announced its first positive coronavirus infection African countries are now on guard as this has been a wake-up call for nations to strength their surveillance as well as disease containment.

The first case of the coronavirus was confirmed on February 25, via an Italian carrier who works in Nigeria and flew into the nation’s commercial city, Lagos.

According to information from BBC, Nigerian authorities commented that the “patient zero” is who is being treated in a hospital within the city, is stable and with no serious symptoms.

On the larger scale, Egypt and Algeria have also confirmed cases of the virus, while Kenya—whose authorities were debating on flights cancellation to China have given a court order to suspend flights from China, on February 28.

On a global scale, more than 2,800 people have died and more than 83,000 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in more than 50 …