Facebook and a group of its telecommunications partners have announced the expansion of their undersea cable project for Africa to three countries. That brings to 26 the number of countries on or near Africa’s coastline which will be touchpoints for the high-speed internet project.
Last month, Israel announced that it had joined the African Union as an observer state, a position it had held in the previous Organisation of African Unity until 2002 when the body was disbanded and replaced by the AU.
Nearly half of all countries that have restricted social media access since 2015 are African, making the continent the least tolerant of social media globally, a new tracker says.
Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, has already made a name for itself as a regional hub of trade, commerce, innovation, and technology. Now, plans are underway to take the city to the next level—that of becoming a global financial hub.
While Africa’s fintech industry is growing rapidly, with more and more companies being launched, scaling in the ecosystem is rare, a new report says.
Central Africa lags behind other regions in the continent in e-commerce but the region can progress quickly if governments implement policies to hasten the development of digital and e-commerce services, a new report says.
Against the backdrop of a growing startup sector, young entrepreneurs are key to solving South Africa’s job crisis, a new World Bank report says.
Despite being created to manage travel during the Covid-19 pandemic, the African Union’s Covid-19 passport can set in place a mechanism for controlling future pandemics and disease outbreaks in the continent.
Pfizer and BioNTech’s announcement of a partnership with a South African pharmaceutical to handle manufacturing for their Covid-19 vaccine for distribution in Africa marks a notable development in the continent’s quest to develop its vaccine manufacturing ability.
The Covid-19 pandemic presents opportunities for the economic transformation of Africa through innovation, digitalization, and regional collaboration, but countries need policies to enable this, a new think-tank report says.
Five African governments made legal demands to Twitter to produce account information in the second half of last year, up from four in the previous half, a new report by the social networking service shows.
While Africa has a vast e-commerce potential, experts consider this opportunity largely untapped. A report released last year by the International Trade Centre (ITC), a development agency that supports small- and medium-sized enterprises, found that 10 countries were responsible for 94% of all online business in Africa in 2019.
Fintech companies in Africa are flourishing by producing digital systems and infrastructure to make financial services more efficient. And with the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) at the start of this year, the companies are well positioned to replicate this success by providing solutions for what is the largest free trade area globally by the number of countries taking part in it.
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be the region with the lowest adoption of the 5G mobile phone technology over the next five years, a new report says. This is mostly as a result of the high cost of deploying 5G technology and the higher cost of 5G phones.
The topic of inequity in funding local startup founders in Africa is a recurring one in the continent.
When it comes to Africa’s startup scene, fintech is the center of attention.
Increasingly, African fintech startups are moving from focusing on niche areas such as payment, lending insurance, and investment, to offering a wide range of complementary services. This is according to a new report by Disrupt Africa, a website for news on African startups.
The high prices that people in Africa pay for the internet are rarely matched by the connection speeds. This is according to a report by Speedcheck, a website that allows users to test the speed of internet connections, on the relationship between the price of mobile data and the speeds at which carriers deliver the data.
The World Rally Championship (WRC) returned to Kenya last week after a 19-year hiatus from the continent, giving Kenyans a nostalgic experience in the country’s first major international sports competition since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Kenyan taekwondo athlete Faith Ogallo has been training for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo for almost a year-and-a-half now. Despite the uncertainty still surrounding the event, she keeps working hard and continues to dream.
This month has been a significant one for Africa’s animation industry, as major content platforms in the US announced they are picking up four productions by local cartoon creators.
The Covid-19 pandemic made access to mobile phones and mobile internet more important. Yet the gender gap for mobile phone ownership and mobile internet use in sub-Saharan Africa remained largely unchanged in the past year.
The African e-commerce market could benefit by around $14.5 billion if the number of women selling on online platforms achieves parity with men, according to a new report. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), in partnership with the European Commission, says that additional training and financial support for female sellers would hugely expand the overall sector.
The African Development Bank has launched a AUD600 million ($463.9 million) social bond in Australia. Although the bank has issued social bonds in the past, it’s been selling them more frequently, as social bonds emerge as a key way to help cash-strapped countries during the coronavirus pandemic.
