July 2018 - African Financial & Economic Data

27 Jul

MallforAfrica and DHL launch MarketPlaceAfrica.com, a global e-commerce site

MallforAfrica and DHL are giving African merchants a global stage. This week the online retailer and delivery giant launch MarketPlaceAfrica.com: an e-commerce site for select African artisans to sell wares to buyers in any of DHL’s 220 delivery countries. The site will prioritize fashion items — clothing, bags, jewelry, footwear and personal care — and crafts, such as pictures and carvings.

MallforAfrica is vetting sellers for MarketPlace Africa online and through the Africa Made Product Standards association (AMPS), to verify made-in-Africa status and merchandise quality.

“We’re starting off in Nigeria and then we’ll open in Kenya, Rwanda and the rest of Africa, utilizing DHL’s massive network,” MallforAfrica CEO Chris Folayan told TechCrunch about where the goods will be sourced. “People all around the world can buy from African artisans online, that’s the goal,” said Folayan.

Current listed designer products include handbags from Chinwe Ezenwa and Tash women’s outfits by Tasha Goodwin.

16 Jul

New private equity fund commitments to boost growth of African companies

African companies will benefit from several new private equity fund commitments and investment partnerships announced during June 2018, according to Africa Private Equity News, an industry information service. These funds focus on a variety of sectors – including agriculture, renewable energy and technology – and will help businesses on the continent accelerate their growth.

South African private equity firm Agile Capital has launched a third fund of R1 billion (about $75 million) and is aggressively targeting fresh investments. While Agile’s existing portfolio is concentrated on the services, manufacturing, automotive and infrastructure sectors, the firm’s criteria for investment doesn’t exclude other industries. “We favour acquiring a controlling stake in any sustainable company poised for growth,” says CEO Tshego Sefolo.

Specialist forestry investor Criterion Africa Partners has announced the first close of its Africa Sustainable Forestry Fund II, with several institutional investors – including the UK’s CDC Group, Dutch development bank FMO and the European Investment Bank – making commitments of $81 million. The fund has a total target of $150 million, and invests across the forestry value chain.

Renewable energy continues to be a popular theme for investors, and Climate Fund Managers was therefore able to attract additional capital of $75 million to its blended finance facility, Climate Investor One (CIO), bringing the total third-close fund size to $535 million. The CIO, launched in partnership between FMO and South Africa’s Sanlam Infraworks, provides funding for renewable energy projects in the wind, solar and run-of-river hydro sectors in developing countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The three new investors are IMAS Foundation (a sister foundation to the INGKA Foundation – the owner of INGKA Group, which in turn owns the majority of IKEA’s department stores globally); Swedfund, the development finance institution of Sweden; and the Nordic Development Fund.

Gulf Capital, the Abu Dhabi-based alternative asset manager, revealed that Egypt is one of its target geographies for over $350 million it plans to invest in private equity over the next two years. “We are encouraged by what’s happening in Egypt. Egypt is growing above 5%, they devalued the currency, restructured the economy, introduced new investment laws, and foreign reserves are [at an] all-time high. If you look at the IPO market, it is 10 to 15 times oversubscribed,” the firm’s CEO Karim El Solh, told Gulf News.

Read more here: How We Made It in Africa

06 Jul

Africa’s Largest Data Center Firm Plans $73 Million Investment

Teraco Data Environments Pty Ltd. plans to invest about 1 billion rand ($73 million) as Africa’s largest data-center operator expands infrastructure to meet rising demand.

The closely-held business will have spent 4.5 billion rand on building data-services centers in South Africa when the current investment cycle ends in 2019, Chief Financial Officer Jan Hnizdo said in an interview Tuesday. Funding has come from a debt facility provided by Barclays Africa Group Ltd., also known as Absa, which is lending as much as 1.8 billion rand.

Teraco is investing to meet higher demand for data services in Africa as internet access improves and businesses adopt cloud-based technology. Internet giants such as Netflix Inc. and Facebook Inc. are seeking to reach more remote parts of the continent, while Amazon.com Inc.’s Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure need data storage

Teraco’s operations in Johannesburg are used by more than 200 African telecommunications providers and are able to provide 12,000 interconnections.

05 Jul

How resilient is the Kenyan economy?

The FT has a great special report on investing in Kenya. Highlights include pieces on devolution, President Uhuru Kenyatta’s “Big Four” legacy projects (including an ambitious plan to build 500,000 new homes), and the promises of the tech sector.

Meanwhile, nominal GDP growth is projected to remain respectable, despite sky-high corruption and generalized administrative failures in both the county-level and national governments.

And here is an excerpt from one of the pieces:

A 2016 report from New World Wealth, an independent South Africa-based research group, found that 8,500 of Kenya’s roughly 48m people controlled more than two-thirds of the country’s wealth.

Highly recommended.

03 Jul

Solar power strategy to fix Togo’s electricity problem might just work

In Togo, the electricity access rate is 28% , far below the West African average of 40%. Both rural and urban households struggle not only with access but with low voltage when it is available. It has to rely on Ghana, its neighbor to the west, to supply some of its power.

However, the Togolese government hopes an ambitious “electrification strategy” will bring millions of its citizens out of the dark. Its target is for electricity to reach 50% of Togo’s 7.5 million-population by 2020, 75% by 2025 and achieve universal access by 2030.

The crux of the strategy is for solar power to serve three million people in communities where the grid would not reach—even after it’s been extended to another 800,000 households.

To achieve this, the government would partner with private investors to build 300 mini solar plants across the country and distribute solar kits to 500,000 households.

The government has also scrapped the 30% tariff on solar kits. This is in keeping with the World Bank’s recommendations on how to extend electricity to millions of Africans and forms part of Togo’s own ambitions to make renewable energy 50% of the energy mix by 2030.

Despite successes at extending electricity to many, sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the lowest household electrification rate in the world (at 42%) and 600 million people live without it.

Collectively, the region has even less installed capacity when compared with India and China. According to the World Bank, sub-Saharan Africa needs $50 billion of investment every year to get close to achieving universal access by 2030 as envisioned by the UN’s SDG Goal 7.

There’s long been an expectation and hope that renewable energy—solar power in particular—will play a vital role in filling the huge deficit in Africa’s power generation capacity.

One challenge has been how to deliver a consumer proposition that would be affordable for some of the poorest people in developing countries, particularly in rural areas—though there are now more startups that specialize in delivering power at affordable prices.

To read the full article, click here.

02 Jul

Ugandans – furious with new tax for using social media and mobile money

Uganda’s government has kept its promise: Many Ugandans woke up today (July 1) to find that if they hadn’t paid the new tax on social-media use, services like WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Skype were inaccessible.

Uganda’s government has long had an issue with social media as it tries to keep tabs on its young population. Back in February 2016, the country’s telecoms regulator blocked the internet during elections, ostensibly for security purposes.

This year, the regulator proposed a tax on social-media use, designed to curb gossip online and raise billions of shillings in government revenue.

That levy came after president Yoweri Museveni complained that idle talk on social media was costing the country much-needed time and income.

Many tech-savvy Ugandans have already taken to virtual private networks to get around having to pay an extra 200 Ugandan shillings ($0.05) per day. The new fee is expected to impact usage of social media and mobile money, which now has an additional 1% tax.

Major telecoms providers MTN, Airtel, and Africell, issued a joint statement informing customers of how to pay the new tax with mobile money services of MTN and Airtel.

Internet penetration stands at just 22% in Uganda, according to the World Bank. Social networks constitute the internet for those already online, with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter being the most popular apps.

Source: https://qz.com/1319064/uganda-social-media-and-mobile-money-tax-now-in-effect/