Nigeria scored 5 big points Nigeria from UK-Africa Summit
From Economy to Infrastructure and Fintech, Nigeria has seen big wins at the UK-Africa Investment Summit in London as the largest economy in Africa secured five partnerships with the British government aimed at delivering more investment, jobs and growth.
The deals bagged by Nigeria put the most populous nation in Africa ahead of South Africa.
Economy
The UK entered a partnership with Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa (£45 million of funding) for a new Digital Access Programme aimed at increasing connectivity and digital skills of marginalised communities build cybersecurity capacity and establish Tech Hubs to grow the local digital economy, and empower start-ups with the skills needed to expand globally.
Infrastructure
The summit launched a suite of initiatives to facilitate infrastructure financing in Africa and as expected, Nigeria with one of widest infrastructure gaps in the continent got the attention of the UK. It said that it launch new facility in Nigeria that will draw on UK expertise to help improve the provision and management of government infrastructure (funding of £80m).
“What investors are talking about here at the UK-Africa summit is infrastructure challenges; energy, roads and less bureaucracy,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former minister of finance told BusinessDay.
Agencies
Also at the Summit, the UK said it was committed to increase its work to support the growth of African nations. The UK said it will therefore deliver new partnerships with Investment Promotion Agencies in Nigeria and South Africa (funding of £25mn).
“There are challenges in doing business in Nigeria, we know, but the opportunities exist because of the challenges,” Yewande Sadiku, Executive Secretary/CEO of Nigeria’s foremost investment promotion, told BusinessDay on the side-lines of the Summit.
According to her, a number of investors approached Nigeria for enquiries at the summit.
Fintech
The UK said it will be sharing its expertise through new regulatory partnerships, including to support Mauritius deliver the Africa Fintech Festival, the Bank of England to partner with Morocco’s Bank Al-Maghrib, and setting up a Nigeria Regulatory Sandbox to support Fintech firms to develop.
Clean energy
As a result of the UK-Africa Investment Summit, the UK said it would support the Energy Commission of Nigeria to update its 2050 Calculator, an energy and emissions model that supports sustainable development planning (funding of £60,000).
Meanwhile, the UK and Nigeria investors have at the just concluded UK-Africa Summit signed commercial deals worth £324 million (over N153.4bn) and the new UK government assistance to grow the UK-Nigeria trade and investment partnership.
Nigeria and the UK will be partners in a range of initiatives announced during the Summit including: Significant UK commitments to support Nigeria develop an enabling environment to turbo-charge economic growth, including helping address land issues for investment; strengthening and improving the finance sector; helping entrepreneurs secure access to finance; preparing the ground for the launch in the UK of naira-denominated bonds – “Jollof Bonds”; and developing the tech sector.
Others are substantial initiatives to accelerate the clean energy transformation in Nigeria, through enhanced technical and financial support; and strong commitments to harness private-sector support for social development, particularly supporting women and young people in business.
Here’s why you may pay more for domestic air travel in 2020
Aeronomics: Declining number of airline operators + rising passenger traffic = fare hike
BusinessDay’s checks show that five years after Air Peace commenced scheduled operations in Nigeria, no other scheduled operator has been able to set up an airline or a leasing company, rather the number of operators has kept reducing steadily.
Between 2015 and now, about five airlines operating scheduled flights have closed shop. These include Discovery Air, First Nation Airways, and more recently Medview Airline, IRS Airlines and Associated Aviation.
BusinessDay’s checks show that Nigeria’s commercial airlines, which altogether had over 80 aircraft on their fleet in 2015, are currently struggling with about 47 aircraft, thereby causing passenger glut.
Read also: Nigeria risks US travel restrictions as Trump set to expand blacklist
Nigeria risks US travel restrictions as Trump sets to expand blacklist 0n/before Monday
Nigeria might be included in a controversial list of seven countries that would face US travel restrictions when President Donald Trump makes public a final list on or before Monday.
The new restrictions, coming three years after Trump’s initial travel ban that zeroed on majority-Muslim countries, would apply to travellers and immigrants from Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania, Trump administration officials tipped US-based WSJ.
The implication might not be a total ban on all travellers or immigrants from affected countries, but could have restrictions placed on specific types of visas, such as business or visitor visas, administration officials said. Students and those who have established “significant contacts” in the US are also exempted from the restriction.
The new list said to include Nigeria is tentative as Trump is mulling adding more countries to the list, according to people familiar with the matter.
6 Days to Go! BusinessDay’s Nigerian Economic Outlook Conference (NEOC) 2020 holds Jan 28
Nigeria in the last decade experienced very contrasting periods in the first and second half.
Enormous economic optimism, following above 5% average economic growth in early 2010’s and decline in oil price from 2014, leading to the 2016 recession, have set the tone for the new decade, where several predictions have been made concerning Nigeria including World Bank’s warning about hosting a quarter of the world’s poorest.
At the BusinessDay 2020 Outlook, we look instead at “the Nigeria’s prosperity Ahead 2030: population, data, productivity.”
Keynote Speakers at the event will include BusinessDay’s Managing Director and renowned economist Dr. Ogho Okiti, as well as Dr. Andrew S Nevin, Chief Economist at PwC.
The events to hold on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 at the Africa + Asia + America Room, Eko Hotels & Suites, VI Lagos, will bring together industry experts, analysts and policymakers who would, in interactive sessions, deliberate on challenges and opportunities around data, population and technology in driving Nigeria’s new decade and where investment opportunities will lie in the coming years.
Panelists at the events will (in no particular order) include the following: Mrs. Abimbola Salu-Hundeyin, Chairman, National Population Commission; Mr. Samuel Ogbu, CEO, Old Mutual West Africa; Dr. Nonso Obiliki, Chief Economist at BusinessDay; Egie Akpata – Director, Union Capital Markets Ltd; Fola Fagbule – Senior Vice President, Africa Finance Corporation; Mohammad Sani Abubakar – Chief of Staff, Kaduna State Government; Olu Akanmu – Executive Director, FCMB Plc; Patrick Nwakogo, CEO at Dale Canergie Nigeria, and Ebehijie Momoh, Senior Vice President, Mastercard, among others.
Nigeria’s payment firm Flutterwave secures $35m funding
Flutterwave, an Africa-focused financial-technology company, said it raised $35 million and will work in partnership with WorldPay and Visa as it seeks to expand across Africa.
The startup founded in 2016 and based in San Francisco, will become the African payment provider for Worldpay’s clients worldwide, it said Tuesday in an emailed statement.
Flutterwave is the latest payments company operating in Africa’s most populous country of more than 200 million people to secure partnerships with global payments giants. Visa last year bought a 20% stake in leading Nigerian payments provider Interswitch Ltd, raising its valuation to $1 billion.
