Africa

China's Development Bank and Absa, a subsidiary of Barclays Africa, concluded a $100 million Special Facility Agreement to fund SME in Africa. The money will benefit Barclays Bank’s existing and prospective SME clients across the continent, according to Absa.

IFC has provided sub-Saharan African SMEs additional finance. R2.6bn has been committed through the SME Push Program to FirstRand. The program’s primary focus is enabling job creation, and encouraging the banks to provide financing to a wider section of the SME market.

Pour la troisième édition de l’étude de la BEI sur le secteur bancaire en Afrique subsaharienne, les auteurs traitant de l’évolution de ce secteur dans chaque sous-région ont été invités à se pencher de manière inédite sur les services financiers numériques et les conditions nécessaires à leur éclosion et au renforcement de l'inclusion financière.

The MasterCard Foundation’s financial inclusion partners have identified alternate delivery channels (ADCs) as having high potential to reach the “last mile” customer with relevant and accessible access to finance. As part of its multi-pronged effort to promote financial inclusion and increase economic opportunities for the underserved, the Foundation has supported testing a range of models and approaches for using ADCs to deliver financial services through a portfolio of five partners (the “ADC partners”) in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last month at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, which took place for the first time on African soil, I saw a 14-year-old girl pitch an idea for an app to alleviate the traffic light problem in South Africa, writes Perry Kamel, senior business development Manager for SMEs in Africa at Microsoft.

Traffic light outages are a huge challenge in the country and this app alerts drivers to lights that are out and calculates the time it will take for them to get through. The driver can then decide whether to continue or find an alternative route.

Merchant service provider, Kopo Kopo, announced their partnership with Mastercard today to roll out Masterpass QR across 11 markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, impacting over 250,000 micro and small businesses over the next five years. The announcement was made during the inaugural Financial Times Africa Payments Innovation Summit, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Factoring services can bridge the gap in the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Africa by addressing the challenges the SMEs face in accessing funding for business activities.

This is according to Kanayo Awani, Managing Director of the Intra-African Trade Initiative of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

Awani was speaking during a high level business discussion held in Douala, Cameroon.

Global SME lending platform Bitbond and African payment services provider BitPesa announced today that they are joining forces to improve access to financing for SMEs in Africa. Bitbond, which is based in Berlin, Germany, connects fixed-income investors with small business owners who need loans. To make global cross-border lending possible, the platform uses the bitcoin blockchain for payment processing. By working with BitPesa, borrowers who receive funding on Bitbond can now have their loan paid out directly to a mobile money or bank account.