From home made bicycle repair to stocks and bonds: African ingenuity blogwatch
Video of home made bicycle repair tools and gadgets in Nairobi.
Anupam Mishra on Traditional Water Harvesting.
Uganda stock exchange to automate by September 2010; CEO expects IPO of NIC and Kinyara Sugar. (Hat tip to @InvestInAfrica for this and some other links.)
Uganda’s stock exchange will begin automated trading around next September and plans to open an alternative investment market for small- and medium-size businesses, its chief executive said on Friday.
East Africa’s third largest economy has seen increasing investor interest mainly in its fixed income and currency markets, but the 11-company stock exchange remains underdeveloped….
Big Kenyan wind power project forges ahead.
Senegal launches first international bond sale; will yield 8.75% and finance road-building.
South Africa: Tech Leap in Copenhagen Talks.
… De Boer said there was a growing consensus to set up a consultative network for climate technologies which would support developing nations’ efforts to take action on both adaptation and mitigation.
He also stressed that the Kyoto Protocol, whose first commitment period expires in 2012, must remain in force….
On the other hand, a more pessimistic account of the negotiating efforts of African countries in Copenhagen has leaked out; Pernille Bærendtsen comments in ‘Danish Text Leak’: What does Africa say?
Chad: A Failure but the Oil Keeps Flowing [analysis].
Over a year after the World Bank formally withdrew (September 2008) from the social welfare portion of the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development Project (CCPDP), acknowledging that the goals were not going to be met,[1] the number and diversity of new analyses make now a good time to revisit the CCPDP and the lessons brought on by this ‘pioneering and collaborative effort’.[2] …
Much of this analysis of Chad talks about a kind of resource curse of oil wealth, where it tends to be tied to corrupt governments. Similarly, Africa Unchained talks about Resource Cursed-Equatorial Guinea,
… where the wealth per person is on par with that of Spain or Italy … where nearly two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant and child mortality rates are on par with those of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo …
Ghana, on the other hand, has been one of the better scoring African countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and had much praised successful democratic elections earlier this year. Can it, then, with its new found oil wealth, escape the curse that sometimes comes with oil? Abi Speaks on ensuring that Ghana’s oil wealth benefits ordinary citizens.
The former president of Ghana has a blog.
Namibia: Business Index Went Up 3.6 Basis Points in October.