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Rwanda social enterprise wages war on dirty floors with an alternative to cement
The floors are credited for making homes or communities healthier through eliminating health problems caused by dirt floors, such as childhood asthma, diarrhea, malnutrition, and parasitic infestations.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Safaricom launches innovation center to move beyond M-Pesa
Named Safaricom Alpha, a priority of the incubator is to identify spending patterns on mPesa and turn those insights into additional Safaricom products — according to Chief Innovation Officer, Kamal Bhattacharya.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- fintech, incubators
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Press release: ENGIE Accelerates Its Development in the Off-Grid Energy Market by Joining Forces with Fenix, a Pioneer in Africa’s Solar Home System Market
ENGIE and Fenix announce that they have agreed on a transaction in which ENGIE will acquire 100% of Fenix International, a next generation energy company, offering Solar Home Systems (SHS) in Africa. Founded in 2009, Fenix employs over 350 people and has its main activities in Uganda where it is the leading SHS player with more than 140,000 customers.
- Categories
- Energy
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Bitcoin’s rise in African markets is driven by an old Russian ponzi scheme
Cryptocurrency experts have touted the potential for their tech to transform the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations: refugees, the unbanked, those living on less than a dollar a day. Yet the story of Bitcoin’s social impact is more complicated than the headlines portray.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Even Africa’s poorest countries are too expensive to be the world’s next manufacturing hub
In a bid to find out if African countries can “break into global manufacturing in a substantial way”, the researchers found factories in Africa were almost always more expensive to start and run. Looking at overall costs, small African firms were 39% more expensive than comparative firms elsewhere while medium and large firms were around 50% more expensive.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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As Cancer Tears Through Africa, Drug Makers Draw Up a Battle Plan
Cancer now kills about 450,000 Africans a year. By 2030, it will kill almost 1 million annually, the World Health Organization predicts. The most common African cancers are the most treatable, including breast, cervical and prostate tumors.
But here they are often lethal. In the United States, 90 percent of women with breast cancer survive five years. In Uganda, only 46 percent do; in Gambia, a mere 12 percent do.- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Only modernized commercial farms will fill Africa’s plate, economists warn
A transformation from small-scale subsistence farms to mechanised, more commercially viable farms is essential, said experts at the Ghana-based African Centre for Economic Transformation, who outlined a bold plan to revolutionise agriculture and fuel economic growth in a report launched Tuesday at an African finance ministers meeting at the World Bank and backed by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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It’s about to get cheaper for over 500 million Africans to roam on their phone networks
Even as lower smartphone prices drive a digital revolution in Africa, many Africans still pay a significant amount of their income to make phone calls or surf the internet. According to the World Bank, Africans pay on average 25% of their monthly gross national income per capita in mobile cellular calls, compared to 11% in other developing nations.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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