Browsing: Nigeria

With the continent continually racked with hunger and poverty, Africa could turn around its economy by adopting cassava production.…

An IMF projection for this year shows that growth in oil exporters will decline from 1.8 per cent in 2019 to −2.8 per cent.…

Nigeria has a rich venture capital environment and in our new reality, startups will need to adapt to fund themselves. Fabio Scala from FurtherAfrica spoke to Aderonke Alex-Adedipe, a partner of Pavestones Nigeria to understand how the upcoming regulations will impact the market, particularly in regards to crowdfunding platforms and the eligibility and limitations companies may see in effect once the crisis is over.…

At the height of Kenya’s former president Daniel arap Moi’s rule, an idea was conceived that Kenya would stop over-reliance on foreign imports especially motor vehicles and instead develop local capacity to the manufacturing of cars. In the idea, Moi set up Nyayo Motor Corporation, a state-backed entity that was granted the task of developing Kenya’s first made car. As fate would have it, the development of Nyayo Pioneer car flopped and the idea was abandoned.

A state-backed ego and poor planning, disregard of engineering, poor funding and poor workmanship are some of the reasons that are blamed for the collapse of President Moi’s pet project.  What has followed over the decades is a dramatic collapse of almost all industries in the country especially those that had state backing. These included the clothing and apparel industries, food and beverage processing companies, as well as engineering projects and left everything into …

The economic impact of fake and substandard oil on the global economy is valued in the billions of dollars. The business is tempting, it has cheap overhead and high profits and so the black market for fake goods is growing .

The counterfeits black market affects all types of good, from food products to toys, to cosmetics to jet fuels, you name it, it has a counterfeit.

In Kenya, millions of litres of crude oil has been barred from entering the country via an oil tanker on April Fools. News of the cargo ship, No. K07/2020 has just been released to local media saying was the oil tanker, MT Ocean Tiara belongs to a subsidiary company of a Nigerian oil giant and was seized after it berthed at Mombasa port waiting to moor and dump the fuel.

The tanker and its cargo have several discrepancies and the long arm of …

Economists define a recession as a subdued growth that lasts at least six months and goes for another 18 months while depression can last up to a decade. The global economy was already heading to a recession even before the outbreak and spread of COVID-19.

What has followed is global market players and governments pumping millions of dollars to contain the spread of the virus that has Wuhan city and its epicenter. The US and Europe have already announced setting up of special kitty to treat, contain and mitigate the effects of the virus both as a disease as well as the economic heat that comes with the disease.

China, the second-largest economy in the world and Italy- Europe’s third-largest economy and 8th globally- have been severely affected by cities like Rome remaining ghost-towns as economic and commercial activities come to a halt. There is a growing fear that the …

Shelf Life is a revolutionary pharmaceutical inventory management subscription service launched in Abuja in 2017 and has expanded to Kenya. Within that time, through their business model of supplying pharmaceutical products to community-based outlets, it has received widespread acceptance.

The service, provided by social enterprise Field Intelligence, is active in 50 retail locations in Kenya, with over 500 life-saving medicines and essential products being supplied on a pay-as-you-sell basis. In Kenya, there are about 5,840 privately-owned community pharmacies licensed by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board, compared to approximately 4,700 government health facilities.

With the concept gaining popularity, Field Intelligence has been seeking to raise funds to expand to more shops both in Kenya and Nigeria. To this front, the company has announced the successful closing of its Series A funding of US$3.6 million equity.

The US$3.6 million equity raise will fund the scale-up of Shelf Life, the technology-enabled supply chain …

Anastacia Mukami sells fruits and vegetables at the Kiambu town market, a few kilometers north of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Within a month, the price of cloves of garlic has almost doubled, currently selling at 35 shillings up from 15 shillings. This, she says has led to a reduction in the number of cloves she sells in a day as the supply from China becomes more scarce.

Just like the rest of the world, Kenya is reliant on garlic shipped from China, and with the Asian giant facing near lockdown, the supply to traders like Mukami is dwindling and the economic effects of goods from China is starting to be felt across the African continent. The Directorate of Horticulture says that Kenya imports over 50 percent of garlic from China, and some more from Tanzania.

It is not just garlic sellers that are facing a bleak and uncertain future. The eastern …

The Finance Bill, that became law as of February 1, 2020, among other things, increased the Value Added Tax (VAT) rate from 5% to 7.5%. The additional revenue is intended to fund healthcare, education and infrastructure. To mitigate the impact of the VAT rate increase, the Government expanded the list of VAT-exempt items to include staples such as bread,cereals, all kinds of fish, flour and starch meals;fruits, nuts, pulses and vegetables,root vegetables, meat and poultry products,milk,salt and herbs, and natural water and table water.

The Bill is also not intended to be a ‘one-off’ document as the government intends to amend the Finance Act annually along with each appropriation Bill; as a way to ensure that there exists a more integrated fiscal structure in governance, and more efficient planning.

The key changes in the statute lean towards the Federal Government’s stance that the ‘common man’ was considered in the development …

Nigeria has just become the leading nation with the largest economy in Africa, after South Africa recent economic slump, when its economy contracted and sliding into a second recession in two years.

South Africa and Nigeria make up almost half of sub-Saharan Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

While South Africa statistics office highlighted bad news for the nation, suffering from power crisis, Nigeria statistician showed a rather positive performance of the economy, which grew at about 2.55 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2019.

This growth was the highest quarterly performance since the 2016 recession. It is argued that Nigeria’s economic growth was anchored on its oil exports with production levels remaining stable throughout 2019.

The South African economy shrank by 1.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2019, this followed a contraction of 0.8 per cent, which points to the fact that—the second-largest economy in Africa floated …