After working for seven years in the UK, Tyron Whitley last year made the move back home to South Africa with some trepidation. But 18 months on, his company, the South African Car Import Agency (SA-CIA), which helps other returnees ship their vehicles back from emigre destinations – has been a success and the 34 year old now feels pretty positive about his native land.
“When we first came back, we wondered what we were doing. Crime was a concern and initially power cuts meant that we found ourselves sitting in the house with candles studying how generators worked,” he says. “But doing business here has been a breeze.”
Johannesburg, South Africa
A glance at this year’s tables measuring the ease of doing business and prepared by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – the business arm of the World Bank – highlights South Africa’s advantages. South Africa ranks 34th, only three places behind France, well ahead of other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy and substantially ahead of fashionably large emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, China and India, the so-called BRICs. Read the rest of this entry »
Helios Towers Nigeria (HTN) has secured a $100 million investment from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) as part of a $250 million capital injection that will help the company increase its network to 2,000 sites nationwide.
South African banking group Absa said on Thursday it has entered into a $150 million funding deal with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to invest in sub-Saharan African infrastructure projects. 
International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private-sector lending arm, plans to increase spending on sub-Saharan Africa’s oil and gas industry and sees “significant” opportunities in Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania.
Botswana led a record year for African reformers making it easier to do business, with 28 countries completing 58 improvements
Kosmos Energy, LLC, a closely held U.S. explorer in West Africa, raised $750 million in loans to fund a project in Ghana. The financing will fully fund Kosmos’s share of Ghana’s Jubilee field phase-one development, Chief Financial Officer Greg Dunlevy said today in a statement. Kosmos Energy, a Dallas-based company, used oil-field assets as collateral to secure the loans, $550 million of which mature in December 2015, Kosmos said. 
