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MTN Targets Nigeria’s $236 Billion Credit Gap as its $500 Billion MoMo Business Pushes into Lending
MTN Group is moving to turn its African mobile-money empire into something much bigger than a payments business, as the telecoms giant prepares to separate its fintech operations in Nigeria and Uganda, bring in strategic investors, and push into lending across some of the continent’s most underbanked markets.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology, Telecommunications
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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After Securing $260 Million in 2025, Madagascar Billionaire Lands Another €170 Million for Telecom Growth
Madagascar billionaire Hassanein Hiridjee has secured another major vote of confidence from international financiers after AXIAN Telecom landed a €170 million ($196 million) loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), extending a funding streak that has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars into the fast-growing African telecom operator.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
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First Circle Lands US $4.87 Million from Cathay United to Expand Philippine SME Loans
New financing gives First Circle fresh capacity to meet rising demand for working capital, business loans, and solar finance.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- business development, lending, MSMEs
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Uganda: African Development Bank Group Approves $140 Million Programme to Expand Irrigation, Agro-Industrialisation, Jobs and Rural Incomes
The Uganda Multipurpose Water for Climate Resilient Irrigation Development and Agro-Industrialization Programme aims to overcome constraints to agricultural production and food insecurity across rural communities which depend heavily on rain fed agriculture.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Financing the Future: How Off-Balance-Sheet Special Purpose Vehicles Could Fund Africa’s Cleantech Transition
Across Africa, founders are tackling some of the world’s most difficult development challenges with cleantech solutions that require significant capital expenditure. But according to Julia Lawson-Johns, and Amar Inamdar at KawiSafi Ventures, beneath this wave of innovation lies a capital architecture that is still too shallow to enable the scale these firms now require. They argue that off-balance-sheet financing via special-purpose vehicles could provide cleantech enterprises with an alternative means of securing upfront liquidity to finance growth, and explore how these vehicles could power Africa’s cleantech transition.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Investing, Transportation
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OPEC Fund Provides $150 Million Loan to South Africa
The loan forms part of a wider international financing package co-financed by the World Bank, the African Development Bank, KfW and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Research: Governments Falling 90 Percent Short of Climate Adaptation Finance Needs, Oxfam Warns Ahead of Bonn Climate Talks
This shortfall highlights a stark global inequality, that those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are being hit by the heaviest damage and short-changed from the funding promised to help them deal with it.
- Categories
- Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Miller Center Capital Backs Manikstu Agro to Expand Goat Farming Livelihoods in Rural India
The catalytic loan will help scale government-subsidized livestock units for smallholder farming households.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- lending, scale, smallholder farmers
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