Lusaka: The African Development Bank has pumped US$30 million into the upgrading of Muplungu Harbour infrastructure in Northern Province to improve the country’s accessibility to the Great Lakes regional market. This project, which will among other priorities address regional development restrictions, was in line with the bank’s medium-term strategy.

Davos:  Africa is at last ready to shake off the shackles of poverty and strife and to play a new role in the global economy as a powerful driver of growth, leaders declared Thursday. Several members of the continent's newer generation of leaders came to the World Economic Forum in Davos, a summit of the world's business elite, to make their pitch for being taken seriously as emerging economies.

Dar es Salaam: A pragmatic racist once commented that hardly can anything good come out of Africa. He was probably right. Angola, which recently offered Portugal a bail-out package heedlessly, is now in the middle of a $32 billion accounting scandal.Before pouring more details let me zero-in on this amount from an African context. This $32 billion, not million, is slightly more than four times the current budget of the government of the United Republic of Tanzania, which is less than $8 billion.

This paper is an empirical analysis of competitiveness in the banking system of four out of the five East African Community (EAC) countries. The results show that the degree of competition is low due to a combination of structural and socio-economic factors. By way of preview, the analysis ranks the countries in terms of banking sector competitiveness in the following order: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda.

Kampala: East African companies concentrating on domestic trade are making more profits compared to their exporting counterparts, a survey has revealed. The latest Regus Global Survey on business performance conducted on over 12,000 companies globally, shows that East African companies operating within their domestic markets are realising higher annual returns in form of profits and revenue.

Luanda: A two-day mid-term review meeting of the SADC study on e-commerce opened this week in Luanda, Angola and brought together more than 40 ICT experts from Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Mauritius and South-Africa. The objectives of the meeting were to review and validate data collected in the five visited countries; identify any challenges and opportunities with regards to SADC sub-regional e-commerce strategy roadmap; and chart a roadmap and milestones for the finalization of the agreed strategy.

Nairobi: Lack of uniformity in legal frameworks is hurting the growth of cross border trade in the East Africa Community common market even as member states dither in harmonising laws that would make the integration more effective. EAC chairman President Mwai Kibaki said trade in the region increased from $2 billion in 2005 to $4 billion in 2010 but the residents of the five member states — Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi — expected more benefits from the market of 133 million people.

Johannesburg: The apartheid government’s disastrous policy of industrial decentralisation was followed by lacklustre industrial development zones and the government’s latest plan is for "special economic zones". Are these zones really going to be so "special"? The Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry think so and insist they will be very different from past experiments.

Dar es Salaam:  The government has started working on strategies to prepare Tanzania’s economy to accommodate huge investments in the natural gas sector in anticipation of major commercial discoveries in the next five years.

Dar es Salaam:  Chinese contractors are undertaking works worth $2.69 billion (Sh4.3 trillion) in Tanzania, an indication of the growing presence of Chinese companies in the country. The outgoing Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Tanzania, Mr Liu Xinsheng, said this week that Chinese companies are undertaking about 126 construction projects employing over 20,000 locals, noting that the trade volumes showed how important bilateral relations between the two sides have become.