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Nairobi Targets Creators With New Fees as County Expands Digital Tax Net
The sharpest divide is between local and external filmmakers, with foreign productions paying more than six times what local producers pay for a single shoot.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Vox, Frogfoot Raise $900 Million to Expand Broadband to 360,000 South African Homes Yearly
According to a Bloomberg report on Monday, the companies, which are units of the Johannesburg-based Vivica Group, raised R8.4 billion in equity funding and R6 billion in debt.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Missing Asset Class: How Aggregated MSMEs Could Unlock the Next Wave of Impact Investing Deal Flow
Despite years of emphasizing the need to reach underserved businesses, the impact investing sector is increasingly focusing on lower-risk opportunities. According to Adanna Chukwuma at CARE, mature companies have drawn the largest increases in impact assets over the past six years, while funding to seed-stage enterprises has contracted — despite multiple financial instruments designed to serve the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in this segment. As she explains, this trend excludes a vast band of businesses with real revenue, real demand and real growth potential: aggregated MSMEs, i.e., individual enterprises that have joined together to contract and borrow as one. She explores the investment opportunity in these MSMEs, and calls for the creation of a new asset class around them, explaining how this could unlock the flow of impact capital to enterprises that remain systemically overlooked.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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South Africa’s Unemployment Rises to 8.5 Million as Job Market Weakens
The latest figures were released by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) in its Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for the second quarter of 2026, covering labour market conditions between April and June.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- employment, mining, MSMEs, research
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Nigeria’s Federal Government Targets One Million MSMEs, 50,000 Jobs With Renewable Energy Programme
". . . the minister said the programme would deploy renewable energy solutions to one million businesses, reduce production costs for MSMEs, expand financial inclusion and promote inclusive economic growth."
- Categories
- Energy
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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IFC Supports Expansion of Financing for Kenya’s Small Businesses through the First Catalytic First Loss Guarantee Transactions in Africa
The CFLG is an innovative program delivered under IFC's $4 billion MSME Platform, enabling IFC to provide first-loss coverage to partner financial institutions by leveraging blended finance through the International Development Association's Private Sector Window (IDA PSW).
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Catch-22 in Global Health Finance: Why Medical Oxygen is the Test Case for Turning Aid into Investment
By most measures, medical oxygen in sub-Saharan Africa isn’t an investable market. As Alex Losneanu and Jason Houdek at Oxygen CoLab explain, providing medical oxygen is capital-intensive and operationally demanding. That means small- and medium-sized oxygen suppliers typically stall out or get absorbed into grant-funded programs instead of becoming commercially viable, and funders conclude that these SMEs are too fragile to justify the investment risk. They argue that this conclusion is wrong, and also self-fulfilling, reinforcing a Catch-22 that exists across global health. They share findings from a supplier mapping project that show how emerging business models are enabling oxygen SMEs to scale, and propose three shifts in how catalytic capital can be designed to support these and other businesses across the global health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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Standard Bank Lands $327.1 Million African Development Bank Investment for SMEs in South Africa
According to Standard Bank, the 2024 facility had been fully utilised by December 2025, supporting 5,425 SMEs across sectors including agriculture.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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