The Koree application was created by a young Cameroonian entrepreneur to enable consumers to retrieve their change on their mobile phone. The app offers a solution to the coin shortage that has been affecting Central Africa for some time now.
Access to electricity remains at the forefront of daily concerns in Africa. A report by the International Energy Agency showed that several countries on the continent experienced blackouts and load shedding last year. To discuss these challenges and the continent's prospects, we spoke to NJ Ayuk, President of the African Energy Chamber, in Johannesburg.
Cultivated for a long time in the West, strawberries are attracting more and more economic interest from young agricultural entrepreneurs in Africa. Since 2019, Fraisen, a Senegalese start-up, has set itself the mission of creating and supporting an African network of strawberry producers. In Cameroon for example, the production of this red fruit in soilless cultivation is growing, as our journalist Maxime Farrel Bounya found out.
This year, we will see the official establishment of the new African Energy Bank. Its mission: to help the continent take advantage of its rich reserves of 125 billion barrels of oil and more than 60,000 billion cubic feet of gas as Western investments turn away from fossil fuels. Afreximbank, with other financial institutions, will contribute to the seed capital of the new institution which should bring together producing countries, national companies and investors from the continent, as well as international funds.
Crypto-assets are becoming an increasingly important part of financial markets worldwide. Digital currencies no longer leave investors indifferent, given the technological innovations they bring to international trade. In the Central African sub-region, crypto assets are used in the public securities market. However, the activity is not regulated, one of the risks feared by COSUMAF. The CEMAC body organised a meeting of players in the field in a number of countries in the sub-region, notably Cameroon, to raise awareness of sustainable finance and the risks associated with crypto assets.
Professor Ibrahima Diallo is a leading African civil servant at the heart of reforming the continent's extractive sector. In his country, mining is an essential part of the Emerging Senegal Plan, which is the reference framework for the policies put in place by President Macky Sall. He told us about the priorities of his Ministry of Mines and Geology.
Is it possible to break the link between mining and the financing of conflicts, as required by the European 3TG regulation? Find out what African experts think in this report by Sayon Kourouma.
Lotte Hoex, researcher at the independent institute IPIS joined us this week and explained that the lack of awareness among African governments regarding the European regulation on 3TG (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold) supply can be attributed to two main factors. Firstly, the European Union has not adequately informed producing countries about the regulation, and secondly, the low transparency levels demanded by EU companies make it challenging to trace the origin of minerals in the market.
Over the last twenty years, horticulture in Ethiopia has become the country's second-largest source of foreign currency after coffee. Every year, almost 300,000 tonnes of horticultural products are exported to the four corners of the world.
