by The Fikiria Desk | Apr 29, 2022 | Intellectual
The usual story about African minerals is written by others: the continent supplies the input, someone else designs the system that profits from it. On 29 April 2022 the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia proposed to write their own. The two governments signed a...
by The Fikiria Desk | May 22, 2021 | Intellectual
Every closed market eventually faces the same decision: open on your own terms, or wait until the terms are set for you. On 22 May 2021, Ethiopia chose the first path, awarding a Safaricom-led consortium its first private nationwide telecommunications licence and...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Intellectual
Most regulators write the rules before a market forms. Somalia is doing it in the opposite order, and that reversal is the strategic story. On 27 February 2021, the Central Bank of Somalia issued the country’s first mobile-money licence, bringing formal...
by The Fikiria Desk | Nov 8, 2019 | Intellectual
The most seductive thing about a successful development model is the belief that it can simply be copied, and the most expensive mistake is to act on that belief without asking which parts were local all along. Kigali Innovation City — the mixed-use technology and...
by The Fikiria Desk | Aug 5, 2019 | Intellectual
It is tempting to read a mining investment as a story about rocks. The more useful reading is that it is a story about a model — a repeatable way of turning a stranded resource in a difficult jurisdiction into a financed, export-facing business. This week offers a...