A commodities and currency exchange expected to go live in Mauritius in late March plans to offer Africa’s first currency futures and derivatives market for the Kenyan shilling and Ugandan shilling. This news comes after reports in this past November that Bourse Africa plans to set up an African commodities exchange.
Joseph Bosco, Chief Operating Officer of Global Board of Trade (GBOT) that will run the exchange, told Reuters it would allow market players to better hedge themselves in a region where political risk weighs heavily on the markets.
“We intended to start off with six currency pairs and now we are expanding to eight pairs with the dollar as the base. The two additions are the Kenyan and Ugandan shillings,” Bosco said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »
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Mauritius plans to become a financial platform for private equity providers eying investment opportunities in Africa, the Indian Ocean nation’s finance minister said on Monday. Ramakrishna Sithanen said.
African countries could boost their economies by increasing high-speed Internet access and affordability, according to a report by the World Bank. For every 10 percentage-points of increase in high speed Internet connection, the authors found that economic growth rises 1.3 percentage points. “In this report there’s a lot of evidence that where you have broadband, you have innovation, you have lower transaction costs, and you have higher trade and exports,” said the World Bank report’s editor Christine Qiang.
