Africa

African banks have been late to the fintech party, but after leaving huge swaths of the population to get their financial services from telcos (most famously Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Kenya), banks here are increasingly seeing the continent as a testing ground for new financial technologies like bitcoin and the blockchain.

The 2016 Innovation Competition is currently open. This competition aims to support financial service providers or institutions with innovative financial products, services or delivery platforms that can create or ease access to finance for people living in rural Africa.

Is your idea innovative?

Diamond Bank Plc has been named and awarded the Best Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Bank in West Africa by the famous Banker Magazine in the 2015 West Africa Awards. The Bank also emerged as the Best Microfinance Bank in West Africa. According to the awarding institution, the awards are in recognition of the Bank’s high value addition to the growth of micro businesses in West African and its leading role in stimulating the productive capacity of the SME as the engine that drives industrialization and sustainable economic growth and development.

This report examines the economic conditions and opportunities of women in North Africa from a comparative perspective, with an emphasis on the role that female-owned SMEs may play in women’s economic empowerment in the region. Improving women’s economic conditions is a crucial issue in North Africa because they are highly over- represented among the poor and the unemployed in the region.

International private equity has been the fast growing capital flow to the sub-Saharan Africa with a five-fold growth and a total of more than $50 billion of inflows since 2008. It now comprises approximately $12 billion annually and 20% of cross-border capital flows.
It offers an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate economic development.
However, new policy is needed from development finance institutions, national governments and bi-lateral agencies to capture their benefits. Policy priorities include;

The report provides a unique quantification of the costs in terms of lost growth opportunities and an estimate of what societies, economies, and communities would gain if the gender gap in agriculture is addressed. The findings of this report are striking, and send a strong signal to policy makers in Africa as well as development partners that closing the gender gap is smart economics. Consider this: closing the gender gap in agricultural productivity could potentially lift as many as 238,000 people out of poverty in Malawi, 80,000 people in Tanzania, and 119,000 people in Uganda.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME's) are the primary job creation engine in Africa, accounting for over 95% of firms and 60%-70% of employment. Yet, SME's on the continent report access to finance as the biggest obstacle to growth. Malaik, an impact-focused equity crowdfunding portal, test launched today, to connect investors interested in impact investment opportunities and entrepreneurs raising equity finance.