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 »
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Kenyans will be able to send and receive money to UK through Safaricom’s M-PESA in the company’s first commercial cross-border transfer service.
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Renaissance Capital (RenCap), a leading investment bank that focuses on the emerging markets of sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, estimates that Nigeria’s GDP will be greater than South Africa’s in 2011 and rise in excess of $500 billion by 2014 and $1 trillion by 2020. Renaissance Capital (RenCap) also marked up Nigeria’s 2009 growth expectation to 6%.
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. 
